Why aren’t football writers interested in football

At a press conference early last year Wenger took a gentle swipe at press interest in the side issues of football more than the game itself. ‘I am still naive enough to believe people are more interested in the ideas than about creating conflicts. But no, this is an illusion.’ Said the Arsenal manager in the wake of a media contrived dispute with Mourinho.

In an earlier press conference this season Wenger seemed to rue the lack of interest the press would generally show in informing their readers as opposed to pandering to soap opera style entertainment. This morning’s conference, in advance of the weekend’s game against ManU seemed to illustrate that media preference.

Less interested in the upcoming game one ‘football’ writer was keen to persist with this week’s examination of the decision to pick Ospina, reportedly now among the Ballon D`or goalkeeping nominees, ahead of Cech. Wenger rightly pointed out that he had already explained his reasoning in the post CL game conference.

‘But you said we ignored things. What did we ignore?’ bristled the reporter, ignoring the purpose of the press conference.

‘Like I do not know anything that you do in your job. So you make decisions (in your job) because you have more information than I have. It`s the same in my job.’ explained Wenger

‘But that`s not ignoring things is it’ continued the reporter ‘If we don’t have the information we can’t ignore it.’ totally ignoring that what was being ignored was the obvious point that the reporter can’t and won’t have all the information.

Wenger tried, with an air of diplomacy, to explain that while the press are free to make their judgements based on what they have seen there are very good reasons why they cannot have all the information any manager needs to make his decisions. But that wasn’t what the reporters questions were really about.

Struggling with an issue of accountability in the face of an insistence from Wenger that he is clearly accountable for results and the way the team plays, the reporter managed to avoid the contradiction in his questions in that in doing so he himself was holding Wenger to account. So the reporter then clumsily stumbled onto the ground that he thought he was preparing.

‘If you`re not accountable in that way does that not make Jose Mourinho right when he says there`s only one manager not under pressure?’ the ‘football’ writer hastily blustered.

Perhaps now less naive in his belief of a greater interest in ideas than the creation of artificial conflicts, as Wenger looked away in disgust at the blatant but poorly constructed elephant trap he turned back to the ‘football’ writer and replied ‘Look – stop that story or we end the press conference’.

The headlines written after the press conference were largely devoted to claims that Wenger threatened to storm out of a press conference. The media chose their headlines. Few were as interested in any of the real information the conference might have yielded.