You know what I mean. When a manager barges down the tunnel after a poor performance from his own team, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring, and precedes to point the finger of blame at just about anybody to the nearest man with a microphone. The ref, violent opposition, the pitch; in fact anyone but them or their own team.
In most cases they’re so wrong it’s cringe worthy. Take Southampton manger Jan Poortvliet’s embarrassing ‘performance’ this Sunday. Basically the man failed the acknowledge blatant fact. After the game he said to BBC Sport, “the first goal was offside and the red was just a normal tackle”.
Actually Jan, the first goal was perfectly legitimate and the red card couldn’t be much more deserved for a frankly disgusting tackle by Matt Paterson on Nemanja Vidic. His rant wasn’t just reserved for full time either; referee Mike Reilly received the full brunt of his fury in the tunnel in addition to sarcastic applause as the man in black left the field.
At such times managers are often just angry and Poortvliet is hardly alone (Newcastle manager Joe Kinnear referring to Sun hack Shaun Custis as a ‘c***’ in his comeback press conference is just one memorable example). Yet are these rants just public explosions of anger or do they serve some other purpose?
Take Arsene Wenger, famous for his inexplicable post match bollocks. Just last week he managed to blame a conversation between match officials and opposition staff at half time, rather than the fact that his team were just rubbish, to explain their failure to beat Aston Villa. Naturally there was a scathing reaction in forums and press around the land but one contradictory theory was rather interesting.
The argument is that the most media-savvy managers deliberately push blame away from their side and even onto themselves especially to protect younger players. So in Wenger’s case all the talk was of his rant and not on pressuring his team.
This theory is obviously flimsy, especially given the amount that all of the top managers are clearly just furious, but the benefits of their labours are evident when laid against a counter example. Roy Keane as Sunderland manager very rarely blamed anyone but himself. The buck stopped firmly with him. Of defeat by Bolton towards the end of his reign he said, “whatever the punters thought last weekend when we lost, multiply that by a thousand for what was going through my head.”
This is why Keane and his side couldn’t succeed. The intensity which made him such a great player caused him to implode as a manager and his side with him. Conversely all of the other top managers, deliberately or not, relieve the pressure all the time in the media and so can be happy in the job and so can their players.
Keane may share a barbed tongue with men like Ferguson and Mourinho, but he thoroughly failed to deal with the pressure as well. Managerial rants can be embarrassing, even amusing, but most importantly they are necessary.
