Speaking of mind games: look what happened at the Liverpool press conference this morning. Asked about Alex Ferguson’s mind-gamesy claim that Liverpool’s players might not be able to handle the pressure of leading the league, Liverpool manager Rafa Benítez calmly produced a sheet of paper containing a list of previous Alex Ferguson statements and began to read from it, initiating a several-minutes-long attack on Ferguson’s integrity during which he accused the ruby knight of everything from ruining the Respect campaign to masterminding Fox’s 2002 cancellation of beloved Joss Whedon sci-fi vehicle Firefly. This could get ugly fast. People loved that show. Fox never gave it a chance.
Read More: Liverpool, Manchester United
by Brian Phillips · January 9, 2009
Slightly more pertinently: This doesn’t look good for Rafa, does it? Fans and the media will portray this as a triumph because his criticisms are substantively plausible and say what a lot of people think. But the original question was whether Liverpool would crack under the stress of leading the league, and once the original cheer fades away, a six-minute rant starts to look like a sign of cracking. I think Daniel Taylor has this one right—not in terms of morals, but in terms of the overall effect of the gesture on the Premier League season.
A lot of people seem to remember the Kevin Keegan “love it” rant as some sort of inspirational battle cry, but all that really happened is that he snapped under the pressure of being goaded by Alex Ferguson while leading the league, and wound up losing the league title to Manchester United.
To me this is only a slight variant on the old Mourinho/Wenger/Ferguson round table. A six minute ‘dossier’ on what any one with two eyes and a brain stem could say about Manchester United’s relationship with the Premier League does not mean Liverpool or Benitez has ‘cracked.’ The only reason the media has pounced on this is because Benitez usually seems fairly level-headed.
The idea (and I’m not deliberately attempting to be controversial here, I just happen to think it’s true) that Kevin Keegan’s rant had anything to do with Newcastle’s Premier League loss in 1996 is a popular one; it’s also probably false. Clubs don’t win fixtures based on how the media portrays their manager, and Keegan didn’t lose the league title to Manchester United, Newcastle United did.
They likely lost the title for the same reasons they led toward the season — goals goals going forward, leaky at the back. That had always been Keegan’s managerial style, which works especially well when you have Les Ferdinand and David Ginola going forward. Man United overhauled them because their inexperienced younger talents took awhile to gel, just in time for the Spring. Newcastle’s vulnerability at the back showed, especially in the 4-3 Liverpool thriller in April.
If Liverpool cough up the title, it will because they have Robbie Keane as a starting striker.
Richard — I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the media would have pounced on any six-minute Alex Ferguson rant from a Premier League manager, level-headed or not.
I definitely agree that the media’s portrayal of a manager doesn’t provide any kind of overarching explanation of how they perform in the league. I do think it can be a minor factor, in the same way that any distraction can be—mindset does contribute to a player’s performance, after all, which is why good managers are motivators in addition to being tacticians.
But mostly, I think that the way a manager deals with the media can reveal something about his mental state and about the climate around the team. It would be a mistake to read too much into that, obviously. But Keegan’s rant seemed to reveal a man who was mentally frayed and who sensed the season slipping away from him, and I would guess that that was also the feeling in the locker room at the time. It didn’t cause Newcastle’s collapse, but it helped to broadcast the reasons for it and, at the very least, did nothing to calm the panic that was already in the team.
EDIT: Another example would be Avram Grant’s bewildering silent press conference last season. It’s not like that’s why Chelsea lost the league title and the Champions League final. But it wasn’t the act of a man whose team was confident, united, and happy playing for him. That’s what was interesting about it—it was a small, weird window into Chelsea. And for a player running up to take a penalty kick in a driving rain, who knows whether the vague itch that tells you you’re playing for an unhappy team couldn’t hurt you? Interesting questions, anyway.
The fact that Ferguson’s rants are always put down to mind games or us-against-the-world-spirit while everyone else ‘cracks’ seems like a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. People look at the final league table and attribute rant or psyche-out status in hindsight.
I agree with Richard and ell-ess. This will only be considered ‘clever mind games’ if Liverpool now go and blow the league, which I don’t think they will anyway. And even if they do, how can you look back at some off-hand comments from Ferguson in January and attribute them to psychologically damaging a football club, its manager and players between now and May?
The whole Keegan thing was blown up out of proportion for me, in that instance he might have bottled it but from then on anything Ferguson ever says is considered ‘mind games’ as though he’s some sort of omniscient wizard who can read into the soul of other managers and make them mentally crumble. He’s extremely media-savvy and clever, but it does get overcooked by the press if you ask me.
I think that what really set Rafa off was the announced cancellation of the “I’m on Setanta Sports” puppet show.
He’s just trying to fill the void.
I think it’s a nice change of pace from Rafa. Usually he doesn’t get involved in these reindeer games but his ‘just the facts’ jag is a very good way to play mind games while claiming not to play mind games. Rafa’s rant was nice dismissive ‘I don’t sweat Sir Alex’ with a hint of ‘there’s a new sheriff in town’ to boot.
I would permit the dissolution of a randomly selected top-three European soccer league to get another season of Firefly (but would secretly hope it ended up being Serie A).
“anything Ferguson ever says is considered ‘mind games’ as though he’s some sort of omniscient wizard who can read into the soul of other managers and make them mentally crumble.”
Wait. He isnt????
Damn I’ve just read about the Ferg’s nonchalant shrugging off of Rafa’s rant.
Omniscient wizard indeed.