If Shaw feels bullied, it may say more about him than Jose
THE first interview I conducted for a national newspaper was with Jack Simmons, the Lancashire all- rounder. ‘ Flat Jack’, as he was known, was an off-break bowler of great consistency, and something of a cult figure with a penchant for fish and chips that impacted on his physique.
Reporting for pre- season training, the early conditioning work often made him physically ill. The line was that, now in his forties, this was all going to change. It would be a new ‘ Flat Jack’ this season.
Being a rookie, I thought I should set the scene around what Simmons used to be like. I dutifully filed the copy. ‘Last year…’ it began. Within five minutes my sports editor, Neville Holtham, was on the phone.
‘Listen, son,’ he started. ‘I’m not interested in what happened last year. I’m not interested in what happened last month, last week or f****** yesterday. This is a newspaper. It’s about next year, next month, next week or tomorrow. I’m throwing this in the bin, do you hear?’
He held the phone close to his hand, so I could listen to my masterpiece being crumpled and aimed into a metallic receptacle. ‘Now do it again.’
A few weeks later, I was sent to interview Alan Dickens, a promising midfield player with West Ham. Neville phoned the next day, wanting to know where the copy was. I told him he’d have it the following morning.
‘The Israelis won a f****** war in less time than it’s taken you to write this,’ he said darkly, and the line went dead.
He was right both times, and a hundred others, too. You don’t start a feature with last year’s bulletin and no interview with a middling midfielder requires 48 hours to finesse. But you know what Neville Holtham would be called now? A bully. Pretty soon, admonishment, even tough love in the workplace will be a thing of the past.
Jose Mourinho is also a bully, apparently, for his attitude towards Luke Shaw. Reports say Shaw’s team-mates are aghast at his treatment, including a half-time substitution against Brighton on Saturday.
Mourinho was later very critical of the attitude of the team, and Shaw specifically.
‘Every time they came down his corridor, the cross came in and with it a dangerous situation,’ Mourinho explained. ‘I was not happy with his performance.’
Is that bullying, or just an uncomfortable truth? Maybe, rather than the victim of a vendetta, Shaw (right) was simply poor against Brighton.
Is Mourinho no longer entitled to replace an underperforming player or to explain his decision with an honest, albeit damning, assessment. He started Shaw in an FA Cup quarter-final. He didn’t do that to trip him up. There were two paths available: Shaw could play well as his manager hoped, or he could disappoint. Professional competition isn’t school sports day. Everybody isn’t a winner. Mourinho has previously been critical of Shaw’s fitness levels and his application. He has also said he has the potential to be one of the best full backs in the world. So might these wildly differing assessments hold the key to his antagonism? Might Mourinho think very highly of Shaw — after all, he tried and failed to buy him at Chelsea — and therefore be upset with what he perceives as a lack of commitment? And while it might be thought he could have handled certain players better during his time at Manchester United and elsewhere, bullying is a different matter. It is one thing not to like Mourinho’s style, but to claim he is a tyrant is to imply irrationality, favouritism, spite, even sadism. Reports say Mourinho spent much of the first 45 minutes shouting at Shaw on