“Hell is other people.”
It’s not known how many Premier League managers are fans of mid-20th century French philosophy, but few phrases seem to sum up their seemingly perpetual state of paranoia than Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous existential musing.
Injuries, bad luck and fixture lists are all to blame. But above all, those pesky referees. Defeats, for Premier League managers, are other people’s fault.
These days, hardly a match day passes without a manager slamming a referee in the morning newspapers. (And referees are always slammed, not merely criticised.)
On Wednesday night, Tottenham Hotspur pulled off an excellent, though hardly shocking, win at Old Trafford, but the losing manager’s reaction was depressingly familiar.
“Scandalous,” was how David Moyes described Howard Webb’s refusal to award Manchester United a penalty.
Contentious, perhaps. But scandalous? Moyes, enduring a predictably unforgiving first season as Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor, might have a point. But his own fans would also tell him that fortune – and refereeing decisions – favours the brave, and the former Everton manager has so far failed to recreate the boldness that characterised Fergie’s teams.
Moyes is by no means the worst offender. Compared to other managers, he can come across positively restrained, and certainly deserves credit for chastising Ashley Young for his persistent diving. He seems a man struggling to come to terms with the enormity of an impossible task; he wears the mystified expression of someone who has been asked to recite the square root of pi.
For a real persecution complex you should turn, ironically, to the manager of the Premier League leaders, Sartre’s countryman, Arsene Wenger.
Despite enjoying a wonderful season with Arsenal, Wenger remains incapable of taking the occasional setback with any measure of good grace and continues to display a stunning lack of ability to give credit to other teams or managers, no matter how comprehensively they have outplayed Arsenal.
Arsenal’s 6-3 loss to Manchester City may have been littered with questionable refereeing decisions, but for Wenger to blame it on the officials, and then claim that City were no better than Everton or Southampton, was at best petulant, at worst delusional.
Liverpool’s Brendan Rodgers, on the other hand, had every right to be aggrieved at some dismal officiating in the Boxing Day defeat at Manchester City. Strangely, though, he chose to highlight the proximity of referee Lee Mason’s home city of Bolton to Manchester as a factor in the 2-1 defeat. Just like that, he surrendered the moral high ground.
Some managers just can’t help bringing it on themselves. On the final day of last season, Andre Villas-Boas, an intelligent and arguably misunderstood manager, blamed Tottenham’s failure to grab a Champions League spot on two penalty decisions. He recently departed the Premier League a lonely and persecuted figure.
Premier League referees can be shockingly inconsistent, or just shocking, and managers have found the perfect scapegoats for their own failings. But where exactly do those tiresome mind games end and genuine lack of self-awareness begin?
One man who continues to blur the line between the two is Chelsea’s Jose Mourinho.
One minute he is accusing Luis Suarez of performing “an acrobatic swimming pool jump”, and a few days later he was applauding a booking for his own midfielder Oscar for diving against Southampton. In both cases, the referees were praised.
It seems a long time since Mourinho stormed into English football calling himself the Special One. Now, he often appears a caricature of his former self. Still, no one plays the manipulation game quite like he does.
“Jose Mourinho is Mr Charming with referees. He is most effective in domestic leagues when he knows each referee personally,” the former referee Graham Poll wrote in the Daily Mail last February. “He works with such a charm that you don’t think you’re being worked.”
Mourinho is the master of deflecting pressure away from his players, spouting nonsense in the knowledge that his fawning army of admirers in the media will happily take the bait.
It is understandable that other managers are more susceptible to pressure. It was only last season that some Arsenal fans were calling for Wenger to resign, and #MoyesOut has become a Twitter fixture every time United lose a match, and sometimes even when they win.
“Tell your mate he’s just cost me my job,” Graham Taylor infamously told a Fifa linesman as his England team stumbled to defeat in a 1993 World Cup qualifier in the Netherlands. In a way, he was right.
Then again, others might say that the team with Dennis Bergkamp and Frank Rijkaard was just better than the one with Tony Dorigo and Carlton Palmer.
Sometimes it’s wise to look at your own failings before simply shouting: “J’accuse!”
akhaled@thenational.ae
