Footballers fail to score when it comes to simple communication
Apparently, Manchester United are prepared to pay the £60,000 in fines which will be imposed by the Premier League against manager Alex Ferguson if he continues with his vow of silence against the BBC.
He began the sulk six years ago when the corporation had the temerity to broadcast a programme which showed his agent son, Jason, in a less-than-flattering light.
His stubbornness has come as an enormous relief to football fans, most of whom would willingly contribute to a fund to persuade him to persevere with his Old Trafford omerta.
The fact is, Ferguson, is not one of life's natural communicators and neither would he ever pretend to be.
It is an ancillary role forced upon him by the demands of a job at which he has been an outstanding success, so he's hardly to blame.
But as a consequence, his public utterances are invariably defensive, occasionally sour and rarely enlightening. Interviews, therefore, become something of an ordeal for both the speaker and the spoken to.
There have been one or two exceptions (Brian Clough, Bill Shankly and Malcolm Allison spring immediately to mind) but on the whole football club managers prefer to speak quite a lot without actually saying anything.
Footballers tend to be even less articulate, which makes it all the more remarkable that so many of them regard progression from the pitch to the television studio as almost inevitable.
They clamour for employment as pundits because it pays reasonably well and also enables them to maintain peripheral contact with the only life they have ever known.
However, there is a world of difference between recycling clichs in the heat of battle, and taking the next step towards presentation and commentary.
Gary Lineker, like him or loathe him (and I tend towards the latter) is one of the few footballers to have made the transition.
I'm still not sure whether he is particularly talented or whether he simply benefits from comparison with the studio company he keeps.
Years spent orchestrating Hansen's gruff denunciations, Shearer's clipped contributions and Lawrenson's camp brand of cynicism means Lineker has gradually evolved into a simpering mass of self-satisfaction.
But as someone once so shrewdly observed, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
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Saturday 04 February 2012
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