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By Tony Attwood
We live in a society in which people complain. And much as I try to avoid them I do unfortunately end up hearing and reading more complaints than compliments. It is particularly bad in relation to football, although it exists everywhere. From the food served in restaurants to the latest album by Bob Dylan, someone somewhere has got a complaint to make – and will make it.
Part of the issue is that complaining about oneself – in the form of admitting one has made a mistake – makes one (generally) look quite mature – as long as you don’t do it very often. But talking about how good one is tends not to work so well. As when Jamie Carragher notoriously said, and was requoted quite regularly as saying: “I was a very good player, but I’m a great pundit.”
I am not sure how one decides on the greatness of pundits. Is it because they say something no one else has said? Or because they have said something you agree with? Or something that makes you think? Whatever it is I am not sure I’d really want to be known as a good pundit (not that I will be of course, but given the option, I would say “no”.
Carragher makes an impression by being confident and having opinions. Personally I tend not to be drawn towards people with either characteristic since they don’t open themselves up to discussion, so one can’t learn from them. They know they are right, and that’s that.
But yes it is slightly amusing when a pundit full of himself is drawn into a discussion about what Aston Villa should do about their manager. I was interested because of course Emery was Arsenal’s manager, and by and large I consider his tenure with us a disaster. Wasting a huge amount of money buying an utterly useless player who we let go for nothing, and leaving a mess that Arteta took a year and a half to sort out, is how I remember Emery.
And I thing of this as last week Carragher was talking about ManU as most people seem to these days, and the discussion turned on who ManU might want as their next manager, as they seem to bring in a new man once every month or two.
So Carragher was in that conversation and the idea came up that ManU might try and get Unai Emery with the suggestion that both ManU and Aston Villa were each big clubs and each could attract big managers and a standard swear word was used. A reply came back with the idea that Aston Villa were not a big club and so shouldn’t try to pretend they are.
Aston Villa’s man then replied by saying that they would now sue Carragher for making unacceptable insults. The statement which I believe came from Nassef Sawiris said, “Aston Villa will initiate legal action against Jamie Carragher for his unacceptable insults about the club and its fans. As custodians of this great club, we can not stand still while the F word is directed at the Villa fans in any media outlet. Having any critical opinion is different than using foul language against any fans and showing up as if nothing has happened the following week.”
[I did consider writing in to say that the correct English is “different from” not “different to” but I let it pass].
Now taking action in court is a step up from the norm (which I think has been around since the 1950s) of banning pundits from grounds. You might remember Gary Neville was banned from Nottingham Forest for things he said.
So it is something that has gone on for some time, but it generally makes the people doing the banning look stupid – especially when the next match is on TV, and the banned reporter makes a thing out of watching the match from his company’s TV van.
There was the Hearts and Hibs midfielder Michael Stewart who the Scottish FA barred from Hampden Park but then looked “petty” and “pathetic” as they stopped him going to the Scottish Cup semi-finals after he criticised the referee and linesmen in a previous game.
On that occasion Carragher did back down, and that raises the question of freedom of speech. Clubs don’t have to let pundits into the ground for nothing, but refusing to let them in at all seems a bit silly, even if many ex-players appear to be even sillier. Carragher after all did once claim that he was a great player but an even greater pundit. Personally I would have banned him from the ground for that.
The fact is that pundits are employed not because they are right, but because they have strong opinions which draws in an audience. And the response which said, ““Aston Villa will initiate legal action against Jamie Carragher for his unacceptable insults about the club and its fans. As custodians of this great club, we can not stand still while the F word is directed at the Villa fans in any media outlet. Having any critical opinion is different than using foul language against any fans and showing up as if nothing has happened the following week,” is daft. Especially given that the f word was used in relation to a football match that made Villa look much more stupid than the pundit (which when you think about it, is quite difficult.)
Banning however seems to be football’s thing – largely because football administrators haven’t quite got the hang of nuances. For surely if you run a club and you don’t like what a pundit has said, you simply remove his press pass for one game. (Personally I’ve never understood why journalists are allowed into grounds free of charge while us supporters have to pay, but that’s how it goes. Ask the press man to buy a ticket.)
This sensitivity of football clubs is odd, especially when you consider the sort of things that some fans chant. And besides, that banning order did offer the media in question the chance to have some fun. If I’d been editor I would have dropped the coverage of the next Villa match and replaced it by coverage of the next match of Sporting Khalsa Football Club (the Khalsa Kings) with a note saying what a jolly guy chairperson Raj Gill is and how much I enjoyed the game, and how entry is only one tenth of the price of going into a League game. Not least because it has a ground that is called the Warehousing Arena.
I am told that (staying in the Midlands) Coventry City have video coverage of one of their fans by waving a picture of Bradley Lowery at Sunderland fan. Bradley died of cancer aged six, and the kid who waved the picture then handed himself in to the police, quite rightly. They told him not to be silly and sent him home.
So my point is, there is humour, there is humour that really doesn’t work and shouldn’t be uttered, and there are apologies from people who get things wrong. That’s a good way to sort things out. Some clubs really haven’t got it yet.
