Post by QPR Report on Jan 18, 2009 8:32:48 GMT
The Observer's Will Buckley on falling out of love with Chelsea
This retiring type finally has the chance to reveal his inner fanAny affection I once had for Chelsea dissipated after dealing with infantile club staff and interminable press conferences
One of the many benefits of retiring from writing football match reports after a scarcely credible (for reader perhaps even more so than writer) two decades is that I can return to being a fan again. That's not to say that football writers are not supporters of particular clubs, nearly every one of them is, although the people who graffiti anonymous comments below the line at the end of articles (the online community?) nearly always fail to match writer with club. It's just that writing about football tends to discolour the simple business of fandom.
They say you should never meet your heroes and you can double that for your heroes' agent, triple it for their PR, and quadruple it for "their eyes and ears in the dressing room". Any lingering affection I may have felt for Chelsea dissipated as quickly as it takes to empty an early bath when Gwyn Williams puffed himself up to his full height (around about 5ft 6in) and announced to a motley representation of working journalists hanging around Cobham on the off chance they might be granted a few minutes with Mario Melchiot (the glamour! the glamour!!) that: "Whatever you say the answer is 'no.'" There had been a small dispute about whether Claudio Ranieri could be asked about whether he was "concerned" that the fans were not singing his name (Ranieri happy to talk; Williams incandescent) and now we were facing the Wall of No. Infantile is one word for it.
But then no sensible person goes to a football club in the hope of hearing anyone say something interesting. I must have attended more than 500 post-match press conferences and nothing remains in the mind. There's just a blurred vision of one grown man looking at a group of grown men and saying: "Clive's done a bit of a groin, but we're hoping he'll be all right for Tuesday," and the group of men religiously writing this wisdom down so other grown men can read it.
That's not to say there was no entertainment to be derived from these "meetings of minds". There were the earnest journalists whose knowledge of the club bordered on the pathological. There were the time-efficient who would start a question "Ron, would you say..." then read out their own opening paragraphs. And there was always fun to be had when Brian Glanville was in the house. Brian is not only the country's pre-eminent football writer, he's also the game's top linguist. It was always a pleasure when he would raise the tone with a flurry of Italian/Spanish/Esperanto. The only time he came unstuck was when he confuddled his Matt with his Di Matteo and reeled off a question in Italian only to elicit the response: "Why's this fella speaking Welsh to me?"
So, Brian aside, I won't miss the press conferences and I won't miss overhearing people giving marks out of 10 down the phone and I certainly won't miss formation dialogue (the technical term for a conversation revolving around whether a team is playing 4-3-3, 4-5-1, or ... could this be 4-1-2-1-2). And having made my escape I will relish being able to start a chorus of "Scolari (or whoever) out", something which, when done from the press seats, used to drive the PRs bananas.
All I hope is that the standard of chants has improved. In the moralising about the Spurs XII, one of the more depressing aspects was writers trying to find examples of genuine crowd wit. They struggled. "He's big, he's Red, his feet hang out the bed – Peter Crouch" was, at best, nearly funny. And, if that's as good as it has got in the last two decades, you begin to suspect the game gets the press it deserves.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/jan/17/will-buckley-football-writers-cant-be-proper-fans