DAVIE Moyes, eh? What a lark. Cocktails with Davie – ladies don’t drink pints – and a curry with Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Every women’s fantasy date night.
Sorry, bit extreme, perhaps. And yet they seem like relics, giving credence to the old the-past-is-a-different-country theory.
As a journalist, I have Davie Moyes’ number. I have spoken to him, interviewed him sporadically over the years and found him polite, articulate, decent.
But I haven’t ever spoken to him under pressure. Which, clearly, is just as well.
Football managers operate in an odd bubble. Taking away the fact that most have spent entire working adult lives cocooned in male-only environments, they operate under fairly unique and intense parameters.
When things go badly observers can forgive a level of irascibility. You can excuse an irritation at being questioned by journalists who are often regarded at best with suspicion, at worst with contempt.
We have all found ourselves tip-toeing around the glacial aura of a manager on the precipice after another poor result. We have all seen managers, generally well-dispositioned to the press, snap at a relatively innocuous question.
And yet while none of us would refute that Moyes is a man under pressure, his defence of his comments last month at the Stadium of Light to a female BBC reporter, Vicki Sparks, simply doesn’t add up. The cameras had stopped rolling when Sparks drew them; there was a quick calculation in making the remark when Moyes assumed he was off air.
“You still might get a slap, even though you’re a woman,” was said with a deliberate smile. The audible laughing response from the reporter is toe-curlingly awkward. It is difficult to see the joke. Nor, when that was followed up with a casual “just watch yourself” is it hard, as a woman, to take anything other than a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate.
It is more than just unpleasant, more than just patronising and makes for more than just uncomfortable viewing.
Davie’s defence, frankly, doesn’t stand up. Harking back to his support campaigns for women’s football and getting behind Everton Ladies team misses the point entirely. Moyes might be happy to vocalise a public belief about women kicking a ball about but his remarks suggest something different entirely.
Having spent near-on 20 years in an industry dominated by men and observed – daily – how men speak to one another, I’d suggest that there isn’t any chance Moyes would have spoken to a male reporter the way he did to Sparks. Not. A. Chance.
The reason for that is simple: There is every danger that a man would meet aggression with aggression. It is different for a woman. How else does a woman react if not with awkwardness and uncertainty?
The whole affair is mortifying. It ages Moyes, too. Places him in a former time, marks him down as standing still while others have moved beyond. There was a widespread effort yesterday to laugh off the incident on social media, with those who took a different view written off as the uptight, hand-wringing, PC feminists. It misses the whole point.
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