Good read that (as often the case with the Fiver). In a similar vein:
Robbie: don’t blame the messenger
Tom Humphries
Locker Room : Robbie Keane. Robbie Keane. You crazy, mixed-up kid. What were you thinking jetting across to lecture the confused peasantry on the insidious evils lurking within the media?
Lawdee. We can accept that the media’s embarrassing failure to qualify the country for next summer’s European Championship finals is something you might well take personally, Robbie. Still. That doesn’t make you Marshall McLuhan.
And we can only imagine how deeply you must resent the fourth estate’s tendency in recent years to score goals only against very poor teams. But your deconstruction of the media-celebrity-football matrix lacks clarity, Robbie.
Listen. We hacks may be the lowest form of life you can imagine, but we are at least a couple of evolutionary stages beyond being your publicists. If you ever give us a second glance you might notice how few of us actually wear cheerleaders’ skirts and tassels while we work.
Jimmy Cannon, a crusty old sportswriter who didn’t know how to pull a punch, used to say that sportswriting survives because of the guys who don’t cheer. Sportswriting just about survives in this country and a lot of the time we do actually cheer. But, Robbie, we have nothing to be cheering about.
The cheering thing was a theme Jimmy Cannon felt strongly about.
“I don’t want sportswriters being fans,” he wrote about the baseball beat. “I want them to be the guys who neither love nor hate the sport and whose life is not wrapped up in the sport and who remember they are working newspapermen and not baseball people.”
We’ve all done plenty of cheering for you, Robbie. In the good times maybe you mistook us for fans. That’s the cheering that got you boot deals and endorsement contracts and made you a very wealthy young man.
There’s been so much cheering done for you that it’s just about possible to understand how you would mistake journalists for publicists and come to resent the sudden withdrawal of fondling and fawning when times go bad.
You know well how it worked. You once - amusingly, I thought - refused to attend a press conference because your agent hadn’t been given final approval on an Evening Herald article. The article in question made you out to be a cross between Mother Teresa and Pele and was actually a puff piece arranged by your boot sponsors, whose name and logo figured prominently across the two pages.
Still, great and fearful was your sulky wrath.
You know how these things are. The same agent once responded to an interview request with you by inviting me to fly to England, where he would arrange a five-minute slot with you.
I genuinely thought he was joking, Robbie, but he said that, no, you were very busy being a footballer and all that. I could take it or leave it. So I left it.
We’ve done longer interviews since and they have been grand and whatever they provided for the newspaper those interviews gave you a chance to transmit some of your personality to the Irish soccer public; they gave the people who buy the boots and the tickets and the jerseys some idea of what kind of a fellow Robbie Keane is.
That is good for everyone when it comes to creating a bond between players and public. That sort of exposure has meant that in good times you are feted and in bad times generally, Robbie, you are forgiven. People feel they know Robbie Keane.
It’s not so long ago, for instance - just two years, in fact - that in the run-up to a huge game against France your own preparations for that match involved a night of karaoke till the small hours in the local and then a prolonged occupation of Lillies Bordello till the early hours the following night.
Good luck to you, but before you lecture us about how we are all in the same boat and all want the same thing you might stop to think about how short-changed the paying punter felt. Same boat? Some of us seem to be rowing harder than some other people in the boat, Robbie.
One of the many failures of the regime presided over by your old friend “Stan” has been the whole media-relations thing. Back in the Mansion House when “Stan” was launched by John Delaney (who, we now realise, was doing so only because his wife and children were being held at gunpoint somewhere else) there was much brave talk from “Stan” and his Uncle Bobby about how the media were going to be co-opted into the deal and we’d all be just a part of Stevo’s Army.
That was kind of off-putting right from the start - being patronised and told how we’d soon be all on the payroll working as shills in the brave new world. But we have seen regimes come and go and we shrugged and got on with it.
Of course it took one bad result for the shutters to come down and for the team and management to adopt a policy of speaking only through gritted teeth.
It’s not really of any interest to the general peasantry how the media are treated by the Irish team, but it should be. The media are merely the instrument through which players communicate with the people who pay their wages and puff their egos.
It doesn’t really matter if the team find us all to be a lowdown bunch of scurvy curs; the bigger picture is that if you want to communicate with the general public it is much easier to do it through expressing yourself reasonably in interviews than indulging in epic sulks or performing in a string of karaoke nights.
That’s why when you wanted to get your pouty message across you decided to get your face onto the Late Late Show on Friday night.
Ah, Robbie. When you ban the media from setting foot in the team hotel, when your manager gets everybody to drive to Malahide and then gives 20-second press conferences the bulk of which are composed of silences, when players are pulled from one-on-one interviews at the last minute, when the team and officials sit at the front of the plane eating hot food while the common hackery look on starving - when all these things happen it’s best that the team perform with a passion and an excellence that bowls us all over because there isn’t going to be much goodwill left in the media.
And funny enough, there is going to be less goodwill left among a general public who feel not only that they don’t know the current team but also that the side offer very little that can be identified with.
In that regard it was nothing short of hilarious to hear Steve Staunton respond to a question about the team’s isolation from the public by stating that ye go for walks on the beach, and sometimes go to Malahide. Brilliant!
The media are not perfect. Sometimes criticisms are excessive. On the other hand, the rewards at your end are always excessive so it balances out.
All the media ask and the general public ask is that the team prepares as well as is humanly possible and gives the green jersey as much as is humanly possible.
Not speaking to the media is petulant and childish. Not because we are so charming that you are missing out on the chance to become better people just by mixing with us, but because you leave a vacuum to be filled.
On the day before the Germany match, for instance, the FAI nixed an interview this paper had arranged with Stephen Hunt, who was ineligible to play against Germany but was perfectly happy to be interviewed. So the space had to be filled with a critical piece about the current regime.
That’s not ideal for anyone, but the space unfilled by the meagre harvest from sulky press conferences and nixed interviews always gets filled by analysis pieces and critiques, and without the need on the part of the media to maintain the lifeline of access the pieces get more and more robust.
Robbie, it wasn’t actually the media who were booing you in Croke Park last week. It was the people who pay your wages. They felt they had been short-changed. And they were right.
And seeing you on the Late Late asserting that people booed because of what they read in the paper overestimates the power of the media and underestimates the intelligence of the fan.
We, fans and hacks, all have jobs to do, real worries and mortgages and pressures. You are our distraction. You live the life, you score the goals, you wear the green. We’re sorry if you think that we have all let you down, but now you know how we’ve been feeling.
