Pressure can lead even the coolest of customers to a McLean moment
HOW wonderful it was. The terse answers, the nervous tics, the emotional leakage and, eventually, the inability to carry on biting his tongue. Pep Guardiola’s interview with Damian Johnson of the BBC in the wake of Manchester City’s win over Burnley was a thing of quite excruciating beauty. It seems he told Johnson afterwards that it was ‘nothing personal’, but there was really no need.
Awkward interviews are all part of the game. And they are to be cherished. As football becomes more polished and every club from the biggest to the smallest tries to manipulate the message, they offer insights into the real characters of the men we wonder over and the truth of what is going on behind the curtain.
Guardiola has never, even when all was well at Barcelona, been one to make life easy for reporters. Some who dealt with him at the Nou Camp feel he would gladly have as little to do with the media as possible.
His 90 seconds or so on camera after that controversial match at the Etihad last Sunday, however, sparked an interest that raged all week and added to an overall understanding and appreciation of events.
Sure, it was great theatre. Let’s be honest, we all love it when the mask slips.
There was value in it, too, though. It proved Guardiola was unhappy with decisions, angry with the referee, possibly aggrieved with elements of the English game. It showed he is emotionally invested in all this.
Professional football is a game of passions played by supremely competitive people. To understand the sport, we need to see that side of their characters. There is nothing more off-putting than a player media-trained to within an inch of his life, talking about issues important to so many with all the enthusiasm of a lobotomised chimp.
Clubs and national associations, of course, are also keen to retain more and more interview content for their own websites and mobile apps. Such words are a commodity, a means of selling subscriptions.
Keeping everything in-house also allows more careful management of ‘the brand’.
However, supporters ought to be wary of that eventually becoming their sole source of information. Take the case of Malky Mackay, for example.
To brand the news conference which marked his appointment as SFA performance director as awkward would be an understatement. Yet, it couldn’t be any other way. He had to be asked about those ghastly text messages.
The same day, the SFA put a sit-down with Mackay on their own website.
The scandal wasn’t mentioned once. Naturally, there is nothing to be gained for the SFA in highlighting the uncomfortable past of a new employee, but what if that was the only medium by which you could hear Mackay discuss his suitability for his new role?
Awkward or difficult interviews are more common than you may think.
Held in public or otherwise, they often produce some of the more interesting material.
Just recently, for example, Rob Kiernan spoke to Sunday newspaper reporters at Rangers’ training ground. The bloke has copped a fair amount of stick and it is easy to see why he is a little defensive about it.
There were clipped answers — a little friction at times, perhaps — but it was because the guy cares. He really does. In the end, he spoke extremely well on the lot of the modern centre-half and how he feels for John Stones and the criticism he has faced with Manchester City.
Thierry Henry, of all people, once ended up nose-to-nose with yours truly in a Hampden corridor in the wake of Scotland’s 1-0 win over France in 2006. He did not take kindly to a question I had asked.
It was settled outside with harsh words, a handshake and a promise to meet after the return in Paris. James McFadden put paid to that, mind you.
Pretty much every journalist will have a similar tale to tell. Of course, awkwardness in interviews comes in different forms, too. It can be created by a manager’s attempts to test or intimidate.
The first time I went to see Jim McLean at Dundee United, aged 16 and starting my apprenticeship, a ten-minute wait in his office ended with him bustling in with nothing but a towel around his waist and sitting down to ask what I had come all the way from Glasgow for. Always perfectly kind to me, it would, of course, be a rather more fiery TV interview which would end his time at Tannadice.
His one-time assistant Walter Smith possessed the kind of stare when confronted with an unwelcome question which Medusa would have given her eye teeth for. Kenny Dalglish, meanwhile, went through a phase during his return to Celtic of staging conferences in hostelries where many of the clients had no teeth left to trade.
To reporters at the time, it was simply a welcome opportunity to have a pint during your shift. If the conference was held at the supporters’ association, you could squeeze in a game of snooker, too.
All good colour in the end. And something to be valued.
Let us, then, grant these managers and players, these men under such scrutiny, the right to be chippy and appreciate the need for their interviewers to be persistent and maybe even a little irritating.
The awkward interview is part of our footballing heritage. We should be proud of it.