Blinded by the Lights

Today is the 27th May. Yesterday was the EFL Championship Play-off Final. The final week of the regular season was just 23 days ago. Very little actual time has passed since we all cavorted around the Portman Road pitch, delirious in the sunshine. Yet, that afternoon already feels like it was a 1000 years ago. The last week (it might be more, I’ve lost track of time) has been a maelstrom of breathless rumours, sources “close” to McKenna, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge insiders, loudmouth pundits and social media maestros.

In the lower leagues, keeping track of what was true and what wasn’t was easy enough. Outside of Suffolk most people weren’t interested enough in Ipswich Town to start speculating too much about what was going on in the club. You got used to the small number of disreputable outlets that circulated rumours about our players and staff. You simply noted which ones were vaguely trustworthy and which ones not, then cross-tabulated their rumours with the EADT and TWTD, the only two local news sources with real contacts in the club.

Our hangovers from the promotion party had barely had time to clear before the reality of the modern Premier League made itself known to us. Like Hugh Grant’s humble bookshop owner William Thacker in Notting Hill we stumbled outside after the night of our lives to find ourselves blinded by camera flash from a hoard of paparazzi on our doorstep. THIS… is the Premier League. All bellowed hype, all frantic attention, all piles and piles of money dangled temptingly in front of everything you hold dear.

The story, as told by the back pages of national newspapers we barely appeared in for years, is that Kieran McKenna is wanted by three teams (or maybe four, one social media account had Feyenoord making an enquiry) – Brighton, Chelsea and Manchester United. The detail beyond that is daily, constant, never-ending, relentless, every single day. You get confident declarations that McKenna is set to reject a new contract and leave the club. You get well-connected insiders at some of the biggest clubs in the land declaring that McKenna is at the top of their shortlist. You get Brighton sources telling the press just how confident the club are that they’ll get their man. This is supercharger stuff for our own In The Know (ITK) crowd, which has its own inglorious history of invention (I often wonder how Mrs. James Coppinger is getting on with her nursing career).

I’m a historian by profession, so reading sources critically is my bread and butter, but my God working out truth from fiction in the media world of the Premier League is tough. Before this month, Ipswich-related media only really had two tiers – the cautious and extremely well-informed locals and the extremely low-information, low-stakes, speculative EFL media who just wrote stuff seemingly off the tops of their heads.

To me, the national press enters somewhere in the middle. Big club rumours drive a huge amount of traffic, so whilst they are professional enough to feel the need to stand up a story, they also don’t seem to be too worried if a claim doesn’t pan out. Multiple journalists went big on McKenna being favourite for the Chelsea and Manchester United jobs but now it seems increasingly unlikely he’s a very serious prospect for either. Nobody will get in any trouble for recklessly cranking the rumour mill and ruining my week.  

At various points he was also almost certain to leave for Brighton but was then less and less interested in that job too. I found myself resigned to the saddest of endings only twice, first when the exceptionally reliable Phil Ham of TWTD commented it was “increasingly likely to happen” and second when I saw the BBC headline “Ipswich manager likely to reject new contract”. The first I knew well enough to trust, the second, well, it was the BBC!

The latter one pained me most, with the article outlining the “ambitious” McKenna’s determination to reject a new contract and move on. In general, the people-churn up and down the pyramid is so great that holding too fast to “loyalty” as an idea is obviously a mistake. But one of the things I’d come to love most about McKenna was the quiet dignity he’d brought to the role. Football is full of ranters and ravers, people who speak before they think. McKenna was always measured and discrete. Even when we lost and lost badly, even when we went through bad patches of form, he retained his composure, his poise, and his calming way with words.

After reading that article, it briefly felt like he was trying to scratch and claw his way out of the club, issuing via a proxy a general “come-and-get-me” plea to any established Premier League club. The idea he’d do that whilst still under contract and before he’d broken the news to players and staff, let alone fans, ran so counter to everything I’d learnt about the man (even if back-to-back promotions earned him more or less total impunity to do what he wanted).

Is it cynical or naïve to start picking holes in these stories? No source was mentioned for that one, but you like to think national journalists - BBC journalists even! - aren’t directly pulling this stuff out of nowhere. That sort of job comes with a degree of credibility that you’d think was guarded with a modicum of pride. But what counts as a source “close to McKenna” in these circumstances? His agent? A member of this staff? A known acquaintance with an opinion? Critiquing the journalist (A NORWICH FAN!) felt like a feeble attempt to live in denial at the time, but you wonder how strong a connection you’d actually need to justify that kind of story.

In truth, I ended up with similar questions about every article I read. I wonder just how important a role you need to have to count as an “Old Trafford insider” or “well-connected at Chelsea” for the purposes of a national newspaper article. These clubs are such huge entities with so many decision-making parts, there must dozens of people who would qualify. The way the papers reported different factions lining up behind different approaches to the hypothetical Man U managerial vacancy was more like Kremlinology than football journalism.

By the end of last week we seemed to learn via briefings to the press what Brighton’s owners thought, what various people inside Chelsea and Manchester United thought and what some of the people around Kieran McKenna evidently thought (although some of those opinions dried up at some point last week, perhaps after gently being told to knock it off). Never, crucially, did we get a solid indication of where the man himself was at.

Credit to the people in charge of Ipswich Town, by the way, whose sole contribution to this discourse was letting the club’s CEO be photographed in a hotel window with the main investor’s CEO. That silence paid off, because it seems like eventually we might have arrived at the whole circus being a bit of fuss over nothing.

Perhaps this was the crash course in big league media literacy that we all needed. Up on the big stage with the brightest lights, it’s all just content and comment, clicks and SEO, a constant media spin cycle. At moments this week, McKenna must have sat quietly in his own home on an ordinary afternoon, whilst whatever one of his mates (or perhaps an over-zealous representative) imagined him to be thinking was recounted to eager journalists, becoming lead story on the back pages the following morning. Maybe the lesson here was to embrace my naivety, to trust that my ability to read public personas is not so terrible and I should try harder to shut out all the external noise, at least until the evidence is something more than just “a man has talked to a journalist”.

I’m sure there will come a day when Kieran McKenna leaves us. They all do eventually. Being the first to start grieving or the first to get bitter won’t make it any easier. So we should all plan to stay the course and keep the faith. Take nothing at face value until he’s practically holding a scarf up in front of the Stretford End. MCKENNA AND MORSY FOREVER AND FOREVER A HUNDRED YEARS.