People who know Kenny Dalglish say that, in private, he is a warm and witty man. This is surely true, though anybody who knew him only through his press conferences during his spell as manager of Newcastle would struggle to believe it. When Dalglish entered the press room it felt like you had been sucked into a haunted Romanian cave.
Watching him I was reminded not of the great forward I admired as a teenager but of the Groke from Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, a creature so chilly and mournful the ground freezes wherever she sits down. Dalglish did not like journalists. And who can blame him? They are always likely to twist your answers, quote you out of context, or compare you to a female beast from Scandinavian children’s fiction.
On one occasion Dalglish was in an even more glacial mood than usual. His Newcastle side had just drawn with a newly promoted Charlton team that had been reduced to 10 men for most of the match. Sitting on the podium afterwards the Scot wore an expression so sour any Frenchman present would have been tempted to squeeze it on his crêpes.
A reporter from Durham asked the first question. "How disappointed are you with that result, Kenny?" Dalglish offered no response, staring ahead like a man driving down a long tunnel. "How disappointed are you with that result, Kenny?" the reporter asked again. Still Dalglish sat in silence. "Are you going to answer my question?" the reporter shouted. Dalglish cleared his throat, "I didn’t hear a question," he said quietly. "I heard a statement."
The man from Durham – who was not noted for taking things lying down – rose slightly in his chair. "I have been a journalist for nearly 40 years," he bellowed. "I know the difference between a statement and a question and that is a bloody question. How disappointed are you with that result?" Dalglish responded: "You’re trying to trip me up. How disappointed am I? What if I’m not disappointed at all?" "Then," the reporter roared, "begin your carefully considered response to my question with the words ‘Actually, I am not fucking disappointed’… "
To the outside world this may not seem like much, but I can assure you that when you have heard the Japan manager answer a question about his team’s failure to beat Argentina with the words "We did not score a goal and in football if you do not score a goal you cannot win the game", it’s the kind of excitement that lodges in your mind.
It popped up again at the weekend while watching Match of the Day, because the statement/question is currently all the rage with commentators and pundits. "How good a finish was that?" they yelp. "How good a leap was that?" "How good a cross/trap/long, cross-field ball that ended up missing its intended target by 15 yards was that?"
"Footballers ask too many questions," Roy Keane said after his team’s defeat at Anfield on Saturday, momentarily casting himself as an unlikely Dr Samuel Johnson to a load of inquisitive Armani-clad James Boswells: "Sir, I will not be baited with ‘what’ and ‘why’. What is this? What is that? Why is the cow’s tail long? Why is the fox’s tail feckin’ bushy?" But if the Irishman thinks footballers ask too many questions when they are playing, he should hear them when they retire to the comforts of the pastel sofa. Sitting at home watching is like being interrogated by an agitated Jack Bauer.
Frankly, if the BBC sports department is going to keep asking viewers how good things are then eventually we the viewers are going to come up with an answer. This will not be easy, but I think I may have the solution.
Shortly after Dalglish’s departure from Newcastle (which came around 10 days after the question/statement business) I went to Stockholm and there, in the breakfast room of the hotel, I met a retired English sales rep who spent several months every year driving round mainland Europe for the fun of it. As we talked about the various places he’d visited it became clear to me that he rated every city by a simple formula that might be expressed as: Attractiveness of local women multiplied by quality of local beer divided by cost of beer over percentage of local population who refuse to speak English (even though you can tell they understand every bloody word you’re saying to them).
Under this system Copenhagen was rated the best the continent had to offer with Brussels in silver medal slot and Paris trailing far behind in 73rd place.
To judge how good a bicycle kick/tackle/save is we might adopt a similar policy. There will be many ideas of how to go about this but I would favor: Difficulty times effectiveness divided by the number of times the pundit asking the question played for the same club as the player performing the task over the amount of money per game the TV station is paying to cover Premier League football. This may not give a precise answer, but it will certainly be nearer a statement than a question.
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