To Jose Mourinho goes the award Interview of the Year for his perfect gem given to the BT Sports interviewer following Chelsea’s latest fall from grace.
His reply to a whole barrage of questions from a breathless hack, was simply that he had nothing to say.
What a deep inner truth resonates in those words! What pearls of wisdom in that humble sentence!
We have become accustomed over the years to a seemingly endless line of players and managers standing in front of the sponsors’ logos to trot out a few well-worn clichés carefully selected beforehand by their agents or PRs, to ensure that not one person has anything whatsoever to say! This state of affairs suits both the teams and the broadcasting authorities and ensures that the viewers are maintained in a soporofic stupor and never during the course of any interview called upon to exercise their mental faculties.
Were the average fan at any time be given mental stimulation via such interviews they (the fans) would rapidly wake up to the disgraceful way they are abused manipulated and exploited by an avaricious heartless morally bankrupt industry gorging itself on its obscene financial excesses.
Take one moment, settle yourself with a cup of tea, then ask yourself just how many post-match football interviews you can call to mind; how many live vividly in the memory? Why exactly do we need interviews? Football is a simple game about kicking a lump of leather towards two sets of goalposts. All the rest is PR tosh.
But before I instigate my master-plan to abolish all post-match football interviews and unchain us all from this absurd ritual, I freely offer you the final definitive football interview between hack and player. Exact identities have been kept secret to protect the game’s multi-millionaires.
INTER: Well David, a one-all draw. How do you feel?
PLAY: (WEARING A SPONSOR’S HAT, SECOND SPONSOR’S LOGO ON HIS TRACK SUIT AND A THIRD SPONSOR’S WRIST-BAND, REGULARLY ON VIEW BY HIS ACTION OF SCRATCHING HIS NOSE) The boys dun good
INTER: Would you call that a titanic struggle with defences mainly on top?
PLAY: It’s a game of two halves
INTER: How do you feel about your goalkeeper being decapitated?
PLAY: We take every game as it comes
INTER: It seemed to me that your new wing backs liaised perfectly with the wide players creating a special kind of creative energy transmuting itself into a potentially lethal goal-scoring machine. Would you agree?
PLAY: Yeah, that’s right
INTER: There is talk of your transfer to Inter Milan. Would you care to comment?
PLAY: I take every game as it comes
INTER: Some people say the manager has lost the dressing room after the incident in which he took a flame thrower to the players following a recent debacle. Would you prefer to say that the players are behind the gaffer every inch of the way and that morale is at an all-time high both on and off the pitch and that, come the run-in, you will be there or thereabouts?
PLAY: Yeah that’s right
INTER: Your new owner from the Far East has changed the club’s colours, the club’s name and moved to ground to Dubai. Would you say that improves your own chances of getting twenty goals this season?
PLAY: Yeah, that’s right
INTER: Your new contract offers you £100,000 a week and a new Maserati every fortnight. You live in a twenty eight bedroom mansion in fourteen acres of rolling woodland while many of your fans have just had their benefits cut. I wonder if you think that affects the balance of the mid-field engine room and your chances against Spurs next week?
PLAY: The boys dun good
INTER: A big European game coming up in a fortnight. Results have been disappointing in Europe of late and there are those who say English football has sold its soul and is now simply a collection of hucksters, opportunists and cynical bastards devoid of any true morality whatsoever. With this in mind, would you agree that playing a flat back four against Borussia Munchengladbach would give your keeper a greater sense of security?
PLAY: Yeah, that’s right
INTER: Thank you very much And with that it’s back to the studio
(END OF INTERVIEW. FOLLOWING EXCHANGE IS OFF SCREEN)
PLAY: It’s worth a grand, that interview
INTER: £500. Agreed with your agent
PLAY: Yer, well. The boys dun good
INTER: You can stop saying that now
