A player, managers, FA officials, players’ wives – all part of the malaise of people who find themselves regularly under the spotlight. Whether it before the match, the post-match interview, surrounding an exciting announcement following the announcement of the World Cup squad or after JT has just been caught peering under Petr Cech’s wife’s skirt, these people are constantly subject to the men with the microphone, on their desperate hunt to get a news story to bring back to their editor. But what is the purpose of these interviews now? Is anything ever said that goes beyond what we expect?
Indeed, the post-match interview has almost developed its own language. Taught by the PR officers’ rolling language school that travels between clubs, teaching the young and the foreign to speak to the press without saying anything interesting, “interviewish” has been created as a form of English demonstrating the full range of clichés and formulaic responses that we have to offer.
“At the end of the day”. “Keep working hard in training”. “Focusing on the next game”. All typical idioms of the crap that the spectator has to endure on a regular basis following the game or the highlights on MOTD, before Sky Sports News or some sort of pointlessly biased blog places it in its sensationalism machine to churn out a story that makes this seem like it’s a revelation.
Examples of this are numerous. The one that springs to mind for me is over the last summer and Manchester United’s transfer saga with Wesley Sneijder. Ashley Young was asked on his opinion of Sneijder, to which he replied, “he’s a great player” – a response to which you ask 99% of people in the world who have watched the Dutchman play would repeat to some similar degree.
Yet, as the fact that Young is about to don United’s shirt for the following season, this was somehow taken as proof that Sneijder would join the club, based upon the formulaic response that, one avoid offending Sneijder under the laws of basic politeness even if he didn’t rate him, and two, the fact that it’s just true.