Sky hammed this up as some sort of massive story taking pride of place on the top of their website of tripe and bore, filled with similar stories made up of over-emphasised quotes. The fact that they seem amazed that Steve Kean has not admitted defeat to relegation yet or that Arsene Wenger thinks they can still finish in the top four never fails to astound me, as they force stories into the sensationalism machine into something which they’re told to say anyway.
Which begs the question: Do news sources over-sensationalise stuff, or are they forced to because the interview no longer means anything?
The overreliance on quotes to make a news story always seems a bit excitable to me. As previously mentioned, the fact that footballers simply repeat the same things every week to the cameras makes it seem utterly pointless to ever try and gain anything from what they say other than to fill space on their sites.
The fact that managers such as Ian Holloway and Jose Mourinho are so favoured by the press due to their tendency to go against the grain and actually say what they think just seems a bit sad: that its got to the stage where someone a bit quirky is suddenly newsworthy because he says stuff in a funny way. And besides, anything you do say to the press before or after the same that isn’t what the PR officer tell you to say is generally cast off as no more than the myth of “mind games”. Whether Roberto Mancini actually thought that City wouldn’t win the title is irrelevant, because its dressed up as “mind games” anyway because that’s slightly more exciting that him saying that they would win the title, which probably would be a story in itself if he had said it anyway.
Not only this, but the rise of blogs with no links to any actual sources and desperateness of reporters to make up a story in the tabloids means that quotes tend to be wrong anyway. All this recent business about Shinji Kagawa saying he wants to go to United has proved to be false, simply made up by someone so some people would look at his blog and all his hits would go up. Spanish radio has proven to be a bit of a rumour mill too in the past.
So my point in amidst the angry ranting? Interviews are pointless. They rarely introduce a subject matter or story that we as the public did not expect anyway, through a series of causal relationships between the desperation for stories by the tabloids and blogs and the formulaic structure of every interview ever given, all intermingling together to create a large reservoir of mundanity and disinterest.
Follow me on Twitter @sb_crocker.
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