Abstract
Football writers scored few points at the World Cup and now need to impress at Euro 2012, says a sports journalism academic
“The moment England scrapes into any tournament it's the same old story,” writes Lynne Truss in her engaging critique of British sports journalism, Get Her Off the Pitch. “‘There's nothing to stop us winning this, you know,’ they [the sports writers] start saying. ‘We've got six or seven world class players in there’.” That may well have been embarrassingly true in the past, but this time, as sports writers and footballers alike prepare for the impending European Championships in Poland and Ukraine, there has been a distinctly realistic air about the build-up.
One reason has been the premature departure of coach Fabio Capello, who resigned in February this year when he disagreed with the Football Association's removal of the captain, John Terry, pending Terry's trial on charges of racially abusing an opponent. As weeks passed with no successor in place, there was little to justify supercharged optimism. The writers may also have reflected on the last time they, and the footballers, set off for a big tournament. The 2010 World Cup in South Africa was supposedly the last hurrah of a team dubbed the Golden Generation, guided by a man widely held to be among the leading coaches in the world. But England fell in the “round of 16”, humiliated 4-1 by Germany. It was not in the script, either for Capello or the majority of the writers, for whom the tournament proved to be an exercise in confusion.
Big football tournaments give us the chance to assess the performance of the country's elite sports journalists as well as the players. These are the events which see the best reporters, feature writers, columnists and quotecollectors following the same story over several weeks. Powers of observation, interpretation and prediction come into play more during a tournament like this than any other time in the calendar. Despatches from Donetsk and Kiev and the training camp in Krakow, and from Ireland's matches in Poznan and Gdansk, will show whether writers who are employed for their expert knowledge of football and their contacts within the sport do indeed possess that expertise, and use it for the benefit of their readers.
This matters for two reasons. Firstly, because sports journalism has been rising in importance and relevance. Raymond Boyle, in his 2006 Sports Journalism, Context and Issues, states that “the profile and status of top sportswriters has never been higher within the print media sector”. Boyle cites escalating salaries among top writers, and the extent to which newspapers use their star writers in promotional content such as front page puffs, all as a consequence of the way “the political and economic profile of sports and its elite stars has increased”.
Surrounded: Capello, centre, almost submerged by the press pack
How the press fares also matters, because advances in digital technology make it easy for anyone to exercise many of the functions of the journalist from their own PC. Blogs are easily created and can be accessed worldwide. An amateur football writer can present reports and opinions before the public just as the well-remunerated newspaper writers can. Much of the information from which sports journalists work is available instantly to all, whether from official websites or live televising of press conferences and other events. The rising generation of consumers is often content to accept football news from aggregated sites such as Google News, from football sites which are compiled largely by unpaid contributors such as the Daily Prem or Soccerlens, or sites operated by football clubs themselves.
“Access to the internet… has done away entirely with the silly notion that journalists have access to a higher knowledge,” wrote Kevin McCarra, himself a football correspondent with The Guardian, in a leader column during the 2010 World Cup. “The press fool themselves if they suppose for an instant that they can be a priesthood who own a sacred knowledge.” If that is true then the high status and high salaries of some football journalists must be on borrowed time. Indeed, there have already been some high profile casualties of cost-cutting in sports departments. So the performance of the established writers at Euro 2012 matters because it could reinforce McCarra's assertions — or disprove them. Last time out, when England were the only team from the British Isles to qualify for the World Cup finals, many writers showed a complete lack of any “sacred knowledge” when it came to assessing the most important person in the set-up, Fabio Capello. By the end of England's involvement, the reporters were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of Capello. His tactics, planning, personality and even his command of English were all found to be at fault. Embarrassingly, most journalists avoided facing up to the fact that a mere two weeks earlier they had portrayed Capello, with his experience and, yes, his personality, as one of the main reasons for optimism. Worse, a handful attempted to rewrite history by suggesting they had known all along that Capello was not up to it.
Most put the blame on Capello
Examination of reports filed after the Germany defeat reveals that most of the writers (65 per cent) placed most of the blame on Capello. Analysis of the critical points made by each writer shows that 18 journalists criticised his tactics, 14 said Capello had been too strict in his handling of the players throughout the tournament, nine criticised his team selection, seven criticised his selection of the squad to take part in the tournament and six thought that his poor command of English was a factor. It is worth dwelling on these critics, most of whom will again be filing on England this summer. Those who wanted Capello to be sacked or to resign after the World Cup exit were Danny Fullbrook and Brian Woolnough in the Daily Star, Jeff Powell and Leo McKinstry in the Daily Mail, Shaun Custis in The Sun, Henry Winter and Kevin Garside in The Daily Telegraph, ex-footballer Tony Cascarino in The Times, and Oliver Holt in the Daily Mirror. Some of these claimed that Capello was guilty of failings which they, the writers, had been wise to all along. Strange, then, that they did not mark their readers' cards in advance.
Fullbrook listed a number of factors that were wrong, before and during the tournament: “From the moment we qualified for South Africa his decision-making has been a disaster.” And yet, before England played the USA in their first game of the tournament, Fullbrook had described the Italian as “a born winner”. Winter told Daily Telegraph readers: “Things have not been right with Capello for almost two months now.” But before the USA game Winter was an enthusiastic supporter, advising the players to “listen to Capello, feed off his confidence”. Hugh McIlvanney almost owned up in his column in The Sunday Times a week after tipping England to beat Germany — almost, but not quite. “The lesson, which should scarcely need reabsorbing at my age, is that we should never forget how persistently and extravagantly England's players are overrated by their fans and by themselves.” And, he might have added, by some journalists. If many football writers need to raise their game in Poland and Ukraine, the same is even more true of the many big-name managers and ex-players who will accompany them in the role of expert columnists.
Despite having some responsibility for England's inability to win anything for 44 years by the time South Africa 2010 came around, these insiders consistently projected a degree of optimism that was hopelessly out of tune with reality. Predicting the result of the Germany game in the wake of three unimpressive displays thus far, 10 out of 12 (83 per cent) expressed great optimism. These included Terry Butcher who, in the Sunday Mirror, dismissed Franz Beckenbauer — the former manager and captain of Germany who had criticised England — as “an ancient and bitter windbag”. The professional journalists were much more reserved in their judgments. Of 11 journalists filing before the Germany game, six (55 per cent) did not commit themselves to a prediction that England would win.
For 83 per cent of the ex-pros to predict, wrongly, that England would beat Germany when only 45 per cent of the full-time journalists voted the same way is revealing. A punter, assessing betting options ahead of the game against Germany, could have been forgiven for investing in an England victory on the strength of the expertise of the ex-pros. The punter would have been out of pocket. Two pundits stood out as delivering what their sports editors were paying for. Graham Taylor for the BBC and Daily Express was the first to recognise during the tournament that there was a serious problem within the England camp. Similarly, Jimmy Greaves in The People, compared Capello with Nereo Rocco, the coach of AC Milan where Greaves had played in the 1960s. The former England striker wrote: “Rocco was like a dictator and Capello seems a similar animal” and accused the England coach of “rank bad management”. And among the journalists there were some, albeit small in number, who did get it right about Capello all along. Patrick Barclay in The Times suggested before the first game that Capello had lost control of his squad. Michael Calvin in the Sunday Mirror was consistently on the money throughout the tournament, describing Capello as a “£6million per year museum piece” at a time when most of his colleagues were lavishing praise on the Italian. Not all the writers performed badly in South Africa.
There is of course much more to covering a tournament than compiling match reports. Filling the non-match day editions is even more important. Here the reporters scored well, using contacts to find out what was going on behind the scenes. In Euro 2012 the England squad will be based in the city of Krakow, but in South Africa they were billeted in a remote resort, the Royal Bafokeng Sports Complex in Rustenburg, widely deemed to be unpopular with the squad. Reports filed after the Germany debacle made it clear that reporters had been receiving useful information from players or other contacts within the camp. Matt Law in the Daily Express disclosed: “One source close to the England team claimed the players were happy with Capello's strict rules in short bursts, but found them demoralising and stifling over a long period. He said: ‘It's like when you meet a girl and you go on a few dates, and everything is going great. Then you go on holiday together and after a few days you realise you can't stand each other’.”
Players texted reporters to find out the team
Matt Dickinson and Oliver Kay dissected the campaign in a detailed piece in The Times. They revealed how bad the mood in the camp was after England were held 1-1 by the USA: “It is, say a succession of text messages from within the perimeter fence of the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus, ‘really tense’.” Their stablemates at The Sunday Times, Jonathan Northcroft, David Walsh and Duncan Castles, assembled a similarly detailed analysis which included: “Capello was paranoid about not letting the press know his team, to such an extent that he only told those he had chosen two hours before kick-off (which led to the ridiculous situation of players texting reporters to see if they knew the team).” Clearly there was plenty of communication taking place between journalists and participants, or representatives of participants, producing good old-fashioned journalism which had informed much of the reporting outside the matches themselves.
So as the press corps of 2012 heads off on its next big football assignment, it would be wrong to agree completely with Kevin McCarra. Accurate insights, compelling criticism and pertinent warnings were all to be found in the coverage of England's last campaign. But when the press got it wrong, as they did with Capello, they got it wrong big-time, and the way they reacted to their misjudgements did little for their integrity. At Euro 2012 the writers can't afford such lapses. At a time of cost-cutting by proprietors on the one hand and encroachment by football websites on the other, their grip on that sacred knowledge is more important than ever.