SOCCER: EMMET MALONEwas at the United press conference at Wembley where no one dared put a foot out of place
THERE WERE quite a few entirely legitimate questions that Alex Ferguson might have been asked about Ryan Giggs at last night’s packed pre-match press conference at Wembley Stadium but in the end nobody raised a single one.
So, unless you count the count the repeated paging of a “Mr Green”, that eventually prompted the Scot to good humouredly ask the man in question to “get out of here”, it was all uneventful stuff.
Whether Rob Harris of the Associated Press had made it along in the hope of getting a proper answer to the one he asked on Tuesday was unclear. Perhaps press officer Karen Shotbolt simply wouldn’t send the microphone his way.
Even as it was, though, Ferguson looked tense as he endured his latest encounter with the media in a forum he does not completely control.
There is nothing new about Ferguson’s ill-disguised hostility towards the press during the build-up to tonight’s game bar the fact that it has, inadvertently, been expressed so publicly.
As far back as 1997 he signalled a growing animosity towards those who cover the game. “There are some excellent journalists, honest journalists, and respected journalists,” he observed, “but the media has become a monster. They know all the answers, right and wrong. They want exclusive stories and confidential background. They want their cards marked. They want gossip. And, believe me, if they don’t get it, you’re in trouble.”
He may have had something of a point then but five years later when somebody asked at the end of United’s season something as innocuous as whether he would be attending the World Cup in Japan and South Korea that summer, he replied, far more outrageously: “None of your business! Do I still ask you if you’re still going to those fucking gay clubs?”
A year previously, during one of Ferguson’s particularly difficult periods with the press, his employers had hired in a new communications director, Patrick Harveson, who is said to have laid out a strategy of rebuilding bridges with the press.
Instead, the new man quickly found himself having to stand “100 per cent” behind the Scot’s decision to cancel all press conferences, observing that: “He will still communicate to the fans on MUTV, and that’s the important thing”.
Even that hasn’t always been guaranteed, however. The in-house broadcaster has alienated him on several occasions, once when a presenter politely suggested during a mini slump that perhaps the manager should be playing 4-4-2 instead of 4-5-1, once when Ferguson felt they should have edited Roy Keane’s infamous criticism of his team-mates and again, most recently, when his own criticism of the refereeing during this season’s league defeat by Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to the station, prompted a touchline ban.
A few days later, United were beaten again, at Anfield of all places, and Ferguson reckoned the tone of the follow-ups, post Chelsea, merited a total blackout.
Unusually, rights holders like Sky and Talksport radio were included and there was not even the dubious consolation of a Mike Phelan sound bite.
The BBC has been blacklisted by Ferguson for seven years as a result of the documentary Fergie and Son, reported on the extent to which his agent son Jason and his associates had benefited from his access to the club.
After an internal review of the allegations, United instructed their manager to stop dealing with his son, but even now the broadcaster, a major Premier League rights holder, continues to be cold shouldered by the father after games.
It is, of course, all in contravention of the deals between the Premier League and the various broadcasters but nobody, it seems, has ever lodged a formal complaint and while the FA has apparently considered taking action, no fines were ever confirmed.
Print journalists, meanwhile, are routinely and fairly arbitrarily banished.
In 2007, Daniel Taylor, the Guardian's Manchester football correspondent, wrote a book entitled This Is The One: Sir Alex Ferguson: the Uncut Story of a Footballing Genius,in which he chronicled two seasons at the club. He has not been allowed into a club-run Ferguson press conference since.
“He never read the book, but got a press officer to do it for him,” he says. “They said it was fine and recommended no action, but he said to ban me anyway. I must be the only person ever to get banned from anything by anyone over a book in which I called them a genius on the front cover.”
Colleagues from the Daily Mailand Sunare similarly excluded these days too – a punishment that has the potential to impact negatively upon a reporter's career at some media operations – and Taylor, who has just produced a book of the manager's quotes, Squeaky Bum Time, feels the deliberate alienation of the media has been a stock tactic of the Scot's since the departure of Roy Keane threatened to destabilise his regime.
“In 2005 when Keane left and the club got knocked of the Champions League early there was a lot of criticism and suddenly Ferguson was saying that the media hated United. It was a clever way of getting the fans back on side, to create an ‘us and them’ mentality, and he has been doing the same thing when it suits him ever since.”
When speaking at Trinity College last year he was charming as students asked him what flavour of chewing gum he preferred but serious, too, when talking about the battle he faces to keep control of the dressing room, insisting that when a player challenges his authority, either the player is “dead” or he would be.
Oddly, given his more unassailable position in relation to reporters, the philosophy seems to extend to the press pack too.
Reflecting on Tuesday’s event, Taylor observes; “I’ve seen that sort of thing from him times 100 over the years. The only difference is that he’s usually careful enough not to be seen doing it by the outside world.
"He knows he can't turn the hair dryer on in front of the television cameras, he'd be on News at Tenevery night."
