Silence is golden

Every Monday morning, some prick who never ever goes to football matches, who gets his entire knowledge of the game from the back page of The Sun, and who only ever wants to talk to me about football when Arsenal have dropped points, will come up to my desk and say: “Suppose that Wenger didn’t see it.”

The whole thing is the result of Wenger refusing to criticise or judge his players in public. But what do the press expect him to do? Come out and slate his players for a bad performance? Say they should be banned for a bad tackle? Say they’re not good enough to win the league? It’s his job to protect them and he chooses to do so by saying he didn’t see the occasional incident.

So Wenger may not always say something insightful. He may not always be totally honest. And he will never come out and say: “My player has missed an absolute sitter, my missus could have scored it,” like Redknapp did of Bent. But at least he comes out. Win, lose or draw, Wenger fronts the media – all of the media. Sometimes he is ‘disgusted’ or ‘frustrated’. Sometimes he is ‘disappointed’. But he’s always there. He is responsible for the team and he is prepared to be held to account.

It’s well documented that one man who doesn’t adhere to this is Alex Ferguson. Ferguson regularly refuses to face the cameras after a defeat. He failed to do any media at all this weekend, after the Mancs lost to Liverpool and after he was caught slating the referee on TV the week before. More than that though, Ferguson hasn’t spoken to the BBC at all since 2004, because they dared to run a programme suggesting his son, an agent at the time, had been involved with some dodgy dealings. He’s also known to have once had Jonathan Pearce up against the Old Trafford tunnel wall and Geoff Shreeves by the throat because they asked questions he didn’t want to hear. And he has banned many a journalist from his pre-match press conferences because they have written negative stories about his team in the past.

That’s pretty bad behaviour from the man who is the country’s longest-serving manager and supposed to be setting an example to the rest.

But what’s worse is that, despite Ferguson being obliged (under the Premier League’s rights agreement) to speak after every game to the BBC and SKY as the leading TV carriers and to TalkSport as the leading radio carrier – no media organisation has ever once made a complaint to the Premier League about this.

Not once. In seven years of Ferguson refusing to speak to them, the BBC hasn’t bothered to do anything about it.

Who says standing up for your rights and quality journalism are dead?