The furor of the past week or so has to have been the non-gesture gesture that Sam Allardyce and Alex Ferguson have raised in regards to a seemingly innocuous hand gesture Liverpool boss made in their recent win over Blackburn. The level of seemingly co-ordinated vitriol from Ferguson and Allardyce coupled with the complete lack of accountability from the press for Fergie’s thinly veiled act made me wonder why it is that the notoriously bloodthirsty English media could not or would not address this issue at least a fraction of how they covered Rafa’s “FACTs” monologue earlier in the season. That was until I saw this:
Sam Wallace: Ferguson’s law states there’s one rule for him and another for those he hates – News & Comment, Football – The IndependentAs a student of American politics, and an interviewee of David Frost, Sir Alex Ferguson will be aware of the killer line in the recent Frost/Nixon movie. Pressed on his role in Watergate, Richard Nixon utters his self-serving justification that reveals his megalomania: “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
Let’s take that theory and apply it to modern English football. How do we know when a Premier League manager is acting with arrogance and contempt? When Ferguson says he is, of course. Or, when Ferguson spots an innocuous gesture from Rafael Benitez, whom he happens to despise, towards Sam Allardyce, who has proved his unwavering acolyte. That is Ferguson’s Nixon principle: it is because I say it is. And how could we be so stupid as to argue with him?
In applying the Ferguson/Nixon principle on arrogant behaviour between managers, suddenly things become a lot clearer. For instance, there was no arrogance involved when Ferguson picked Paul Scholes for a Premier League game against Middlesbrough in September 2002, having first withdrawn him from Sven Goran Eriksson’s England squad. It was by no means humiliating for Eriksson to be sat in the Old Trafford stand when this took place.
Anyway, Ferguson was never contemptuous of Eriksson, especially not when he mimicked his Swedish accent and stock answers in a magazine interview in 2003. “He sails along, nobody falls out with him,” Ferguson said of Eriksson at the time. “He comes out and he says: ‘The first half we were good, second half we were not so good. I am very pleased with the result.’”
Arrogant and contemptuous attitudes were right off the menu when Ferguson’s players and staff were aggressive, hostile, abusive and provocative in a confrontation with Chelsea’s groundsmen last April. That was not my description but that of the Football Association independent commission that found overwhelmingly in Chelsea’s favour in December over that incident. Presumably the QC in question, Nicholas Stewart, had not applied the Ferguson/Nixon principle. What the hell was he thinking?
Arrogant and contemptuous is no way to go through life. While listening to the show Football Matters this week, the discussion of this came up and one of the suggestions from the entertaining media member on the panel (forgot all their names, sorry) was that the reason they go easy on Alex is that they would lose access otherwise. So when the media cease to be objective at the expense of access, it’s no wonder people turn away from these mouthpieces and towards the new class-leveling and speaking-truth-to-power world of online media (read: blogs) – who saw right through this. Here’s one of my go-to sites’ parody of the whole thing:
Benitez goes “beyond the pale” again at GunnerblogSadly, I can’t. Instead, I find myself fixating on a gesture made by Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez after Arshavin’s second goal, which drew the game level at 2-2. Benitez clearly raised his hands in the air and clapped them together, as I hope the technology at my disposal (Sky , an iPhone, and MS Paint) will demonstrate:
Now it could be argued that Benitez was clapping his hands in frustration at his own side’s poor defending. However, I believe it is in fact clear that the Liverpool manager is figuratively suggesting that the diminuitive Arshavin is a fly, whilst the ‘clap’ is instead a poorly concealed mime of squashing the tiny forward between his fat Spanish palms.
Old media is under fire. Several newspapers in America have shut down, are shutting down, or are in serious financial trouble – exacerbated by the recent financial crisis. The blogs, of course, bring a lot of noise because the quality of journalism isn’t as high and the rules of sources aren’t as followed (if at all). But when the newspapers have just become mouthpieces for the organizations they’ve got access to, will we really miss them? Sam Wallace from the Independent didn’t care about access – but surely he’s the only one. What happens when the topic is war and politics instead of Fergie and football?
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Perhaps SAF and the others who are upset at the quality of English football would do well to look at the quality of their current head coach. Instead of looking at some of the players coming off injuries or otherwise playing in England like Lampard, Wright Phillips and Hargraves, he decided to fly to LA to check out David Beckham practicing with the Galaxy and playing in a charity game against Hollywood United – a team made up of, among other wannabe athletes, Drew Carey and a guy from Def Leppard. 
