Re: Fergie fury at schedule
FERGIE'S VOTE OF NO DOCTOR CONFIDENCE
Lord Ferg keeps opening his mouth, and closing it again. Kind of like you, reader, only with more people clustered around it holding microphones. Lord Ferg is contractually obliged to open and close his mouth while in the company of people holding microphones, frequently as often as four or five days a week.
Lord Ferg is unhappy about this obligation and frequently attempts to get around it by arbitrarily boycotting individual microphone-holders and sometimes entire microphone-holding organisations. But every time Lord Ferg freezes out a microphone-holder, he finds five or six new microphone-holders in its place, eagerly thrusting their new microphones facewards. It's like Medusa's beserpented bonce, only more painful, less picturesque and more likely to report directly to a major international media organisation.
Lord Ferg has been addressing Mancunian microphone-holders for more than a quarter of a century. Imagine, reader, how many years have passed since he was last asked a question that, in some broad sense, perhaps phrased slightly differently, and with one player's name replaced by another's, he has never been asked before. Imagine the rage this situation must cause. Imagine the frustration. Imagine how many times each week Lord Ferg must ask himself: "Couldn't I be doing something more useful right now, like coaching players, or mulling over tactics, or phoning the manager of another club to say something mildly encouraging to them, or sowing radish seeds, digging them up again, and resowing them, repeatedly? Couldn't I?"
In the circumstances, it is a miracle that Lord Ferg can still stand near a microphone without his conversation becoming littered with curses and suicide threats. And if the FA, which we'll imagine for the purposes of this Fiver is a single being capable of sitting down and thinking and stuff, sat down and thought about this for even five minutes, it would surely realise that Lord Ferg deserves to be rewarded each time he endures a press conference without offending it or anyone else they care about. This would be positive reinforcement. Instead it fines him whenever he does offend it or someone it cares about. This is negative reinforcement, and negative reinforcement, as any fule no, don't work so well as the other kind.
And so to today, when Lord Ferg found himself contractually obliged to sit in front of an audience of microphone-holders. When the subject of the FA came up – in the context of Stuart Pearce having told the media a few days back that Phil Jones had shingles – he slipped straight into rage factor nine. "We're disappointed in Stuart Pearce" he fumed. "We thought that was doctor confidence. You hope these things don't happen, but we're dealing with a big unit at the FA now. News can leak out. They should have made sure it didn't go any further…" And so on and so forth.
Almost exactly an hour later, the FA announced it had just fined Lord Ferg £12k for being mean about a referee last month.
End this madness now! Free Lord Ferg!
From todays Guardian,