I don’t know if its my age, my medication, the weather, the number of years I have been watching professional football or something else but I’m getting more and more fed up with manager speak.
Today, we have had the Andy Thorn in Portugal article on Sky Blue Player and no disrespect to Nick Connell as you can only run what copy you get, but the boys are buzzing article told us nothing new.
It’s pre-season and we are in the first few days of the players being back for training and everyone is up to try and get a place in the team, so it is very, very obvious that the boys would certainly be buzzing.
Andy Thorn is not to blame either. Thorn as a manager, is governed by what he can and cannot say by a strange ruling enforced by the Football Association and Football League and brought in back in the 1980’s to try and get the middle classes to go to football matches after the Hillsborough disaster.
This ruling is basically a prevention of free speech and means that rather than a manager being able to convey to the media and then us the fans, exactly how he thinks or feels about a subject, he is duty bound to trot out ‘the boys are buzzing’ line or “everything is great” spiel or risk being liable to fines etc.
Fair play to Ian Holloway for going as near as he dared last season in speaking his mind but for me it is high time that the freedom of speech that every one of us enjoys also applies to managers.