Player Q & A sessions

MCFCforum talks to Neil Ashton

Tabloid journalists, huh? It’s a job that has to be done, and readers crave to know what they know, but yet at the same time, these journalists receive so much abuse from football fans the World-over, because of what they write, essentially because they disagree with it. Well, today, maybe we can learn a few things from one of the most prominent in the business, as we are very proud to bring you our conversation with Neil Ashton of the News Of The World.  Read more...

MCFCforum talks to Ricky Hatton

You name it, Ricky Hatton has won it; WBU, WBA Light Welterweight Champion and WBC, WBA, WBO Inter-Continental Light Welterweight Champion – not to mention the two-time IBF and IBO light Welterweight Champion – and today we at MCFCforum are proud to speak to him exclusively.  Read more...

MCFCforum.com talks exclusively with Gary James

What Gary James doesn't know about Manchester City, you can bet he will unearth it eventually. Penning many books on the Blues, he is always researching his next tome, but just recently, he set some time aside to talk to us ...  Read more...

Mark Ogden Q & A

Mark Ogden is well known for reporting the sports news and is the Daily Telegraph's Northern football correspondent.  MCFCForum.com caught up with him and asked him a few questions of our own.   Mark was happy to oblige with his views on the media and the premiership,  

 

MCFCforum.com: Do you understand why football fans tend to get angry at some of the 'stories' newspapers run these days?

Mark Ogden: It depends what the story is. If fans get angry at a story that is true, but simply one which paints their club in a negative light, then that just comes across as blind loyalty.
You see it with all clubs. Man Utd fans will complain about the coverage of the Ryan Giggs off-field stuff, how Fergie is portrayed when he criticises a referee and whenever Wayne Rooney steps over the line, but when they are trying to get rid of the Glazers, they are happy to court the media and the play the game.  I know many City fans still get upset by the ‘ruining football’ angle, but I don’t think anyone in the Manchester press pack subscribes to that line.

 

The reaction to Tevez stories is another classic case of fans putting club first, reason second. Great player that he has been for City, he has wanted to leave for over a year. We report that and get criticised for looking for something that isn’t there, but we don’t just make stuff up.  People presumably become sports journalists because of their passion for the game, and inevitably this means their passion has been fuelled by allegiance to one club or another.

MCFCforum.com: How difficult is it for people in your profession to put their passionate allegiance behind them and write impartially about a team they have supported / hated since they were kids? On the face of it, it seems many can't.  City fans label the Sun and others as "rag journals" because of seeming favoritism for United. Do news agencies truly have 'allegiences' to certain teams? If so, how does that happen? Does it boil down to the chief editors being fans of certain teams?  

Mark Ogden:The whole allegiance to one club thing is another issue which fans can’t get past. Obviously, every football journalist in the country grew up supporting one team or another, but the guys I know – reporters at the top of their profession with the leading papers – couldn’t care less how their boyhood team does when they are covering them at a game. They certainly don’t go out to write stories that are overtly positive in favour of their ‘team’ or go the extra mile to write negative stuff about their rivals. Fans believe the opposite, but that’s a fan thinking with a fan’s mindset. You can’t work for a national newspaper by being Fred the Fan. It’s a competitive industry, so doing the job well and being good at it very quickly becomes the priority ahead of supporting the team you followed as a kid.

The ‘rag journos’ thing is nothing unusual. I get it all the time, especially on Twitter, but I’ve also been called a ‘bitter’ and a ‘Scouse t***’ plenty of times too.
None of it bothers me one bit to be honest. We all get it. It goes with the territory.
In terms of papers having allegiances to certain teams, I’ve never been asked to write a story to either praise or slag off any club just for the sake of it.  The only allegiance in papers tends to come when England play at the World Cup and we all know how that turns out!

MCFCforum.com: Do club sources typically deal as much in misinformation as genuine rumours?

Mark Ogden: Nobody is ever right all the time, even ‘club sources’ who by their nature have an insight that us journalists are keen to tap into.  There have been a couple of instances this summer, though, whereby certain club sources have given bad steers, either through poor information or misplaced guidance from people upstairs.  Most of us are wise to it now, so can tell a dodgy tip when it is given.
 

When Mancini said at the end of last season that Tevez was staying, we all knew it was the total opposite of the actual situation. Why he said it, I don’t know, but it gives the fans false hope and doesn’t do anybody any favours.

MCFCforum.com: It seems common practice for the back pages to be filled with guesswork and speculation - as Owen Coyle has been talking about today - why do sports journos still think that we should believe what they write?

Mark Ogden: How we are perceived is up to the individual fan, to be honest, but if you go back over this year’s papers and look at the big stories about City relating to the likes of Mancini, Tevez, Balotelli, Aguero and Nasri, you’ll find that each one has been called right by one or more of the Manchester press pack before the club has confirmed it.  City fans, and United fans, should look around the Manchester press pack and realise they have some top quality people working for the nationals in this city.  In both the broadsheets and tabloids, there are some excellent operators in Manchester and that’s why you will rarely go a week without a decent story about City or United.

MCFCforum.com: Why are reporters rarely castigated (if ever) by their respective papers for articles that are simply not true? And if they are, why do we never hear about it?

Mark Ogden: If reporters get it wrong, they get a bollocking, don’t worry about that. You don’t hear about it because it’s hardly going to make back page news that their guy got it wrong!

MCFCforum.com: Why do clubs/players/managers rarely sue newspapers for falsehoods? Sure, it happens, but not often.

Mark Ogden: There have been plenty of cases where that has happened, but there have also been numerous instances of players / clubs / managers letting it pass because the story is true and they wisely decide to let the storm blow out without further damage to their reputation.

MCFCforum.com: Are sports journalists given agendas by their newspaper, as in much the same way in which it brings the news (Royalist, democratic, socialist, etc)?

Mark Ogden: The only agenda is to find something that nobody is aware of and then take it from there.

MCFCforum.com: Do you believe that today's public being hooked-up to news 24/7 has had an adverse effect on the quality of journalism?

Mark Ogden: I think the issue here is that, with 24 hour news, the most pointless and trivial story gets overblown if nothing else is happening, simply to fill the vacuum.

Twitter is also a pain in the arse, especially with false rumours being put around that develop a life of their own.  Whenever the yellow strap goes up on Sky Sports News, you half expect them to report to that all games on Saturday will kick off between 8am and 8pm or that Carlos Tevez has had a haircut today.

MCFCforum.com: Should sports journalists be completely upfront as to which team they support?

Mark Ogden: Personal choice really. I’d say yes, but then that’s working on the basis that you are dealing with sensible people who will take it at face value.  An admission of loyalty, current or lapsed, is viewed by some like George Bush telling the axis of evil that you are ‘either with us or against us.’  But as I said, that’s thinking like a fan. Stick to the fanzines if you wants fans with laptops.

MCFCforum.com: Would you agree that your readers, collectively, are stupid, but individually clever?

Mark Ogden: No, I wouldn’t go along with the ‘collectively stupid’ bit. Some fans are totally naïve and obsessed with their club, but every element of society has its extreme element. City have their fair share, especially those who check out Manchester post codes and gauge the red/blue proportion in each one, but every club has fans like that who have nothing else in their life.

MCFCforum.com: "A club source": has this phrase not become a parody of itself?

Mark Ogden: I agree that it’s sometimes a laughable phrase to use, but if somebody at a club tells you something on condition of anonymity, what else can you write? An anonymous, informed source said?!

MCFCforum.com: I think you said once you grew up an Oldham Athletic fan? Why are 80% of your "favourited" Tweets about United? Are you ashamed to admit your true allegiance for fear of being labelled a "glory hunter"?

Mark Ogden: I didn’t say I grew up an Oldham fan – I made the point that I would often be at Boundary Park as a kid, but I was a United fan as a kid.  Being from north Manchester, Oldham was a good place to go in the late-80s / early-90s because they had probably the best team in the area – certainly better to watch than United and City at the time!  My first game was Oldham-Newcastle when I was about eight. My dad took me to see Kevin Keegan play. I also saw a bit of City in 82-83 because David Cross was a family friend, so was able to get to games.  I didn’t see my first United game until about 1985, but Bryan Robson and Mark Hughes were the main men for me, hence the ‘dirty secret’ in my past!  I played most Saturdays as a kid, so often only went to games where I was given free tickets from the clubs I was with at the time, so I never had, or the saw the point of having, a season ticket anywhere. I’d rather play than watch.  I’ve just checked what a ‘favourited’ tweet is and spotted that I have five favourite tweets, most of them saved for work ideas and then forgotten about!

MCFCforum.com: Journalists often write balanced articles, only for the entire thing to be ruined by somebody sticking an entirely inappropriate headline above the piece. e.g. Balotelli says he misses his family in Brescia, and it becomes "Balotelli Wants To Move to Milan". These sensationalist headlines certainly wind up the fans who then attack you on social networking sites. Journalists insist they have no input into the headlines. Why not? Who writes them? Do you get embarrassed by them sometimes?

Mark Ogden: Headlines are done by the sub-editors in the office and we don’t see them or know about them until we pick up the paper, when it’s too late to do anything about it.

You can ask what the headline is, but you have to trust the guys you work with, so I don’t tend to bother about it.  The biggest issue is website headlines, which I’ve had to ask to be toned down a few times. Simply, website headlines tend to be more sensationalised in order to attract readers to click onto them and sometimes they go wildly over the top.  I did a 200 word story about Oliver Gill leaving United to go to university during the summer and the website headline was ‘Gill to quit Old Trafford role’ – to most fans that would suggest that David Gill was leaving.  I found it funny and annoying in equal measure, but it was an example of how headlines are revved up online in an effort to hook readers into the story.

MCFCforum.com: Do you think a sports journalist is better at his job when he is:
1. Getting more readers by submitting ridiculous rumour based articles? Targetted at the 2 minute sheep that tend to read tabloid articles, or,
2. By posting fewer articles but submitting 'accurate' articles? That respected sports people and the more astute readers tend to lean towards.

Mark Ogden: 2, obviously. And despite the perception of some fans / readers, that is the view of every journalist and sports editor.

Although I work for the Telegraph, I previously freelanced for every national paper in the country, and the guys on the sports desks at the Sun and Mirror are as sharp and slick as they come. They expect to be right and expect to be first, so there is no value to them in writing flyers every day.

MCFCforum.com: Mark, who do you fancy for the Golden Boot this season?

Mark Ogden: Fernando Torres. He can’t be crap forever. He’s a world class striker and he will get his form back.

MCFCforum.com: How does it feel working for a decent, respectable news agency? Have you ever worked for another company that wasn't?

Mark Ogden: Answered above re:freelancing for Sun and Mirror.

MCFCforum.com: Which team do you support? How do you think they are going to do this season?

Mark Ogden: As I said, I grew up as United fan, but I don’t support them. That might not make sense to a fan who has supported his team from birth, but my job is to cover United and City, so I want them both to do well.  I have plenty of banter with reds and blues, both among my mates and on Twitter, and I admit that I enjoy winding people up from both sides.  But last season was perfect from a Manchester football reporter’s point of view because City and United pretty much cleaned up and turned the city into the biggest patch in the country.  I think the little issue of Barcelona will scupper this, but a Manchester derby in the Champions League final in Munich next May would be incredible.  And City winning the FA Cup was terrific for the club and the city last season. The 35 years thing had become tiresome, but the City fans turned it into a badge of honour, which was great  Covering United and City is probably like baby-sitting for the Kray twins – something is always likely to happen and it will usually get messy,  But how do I think they will do this season? United still aren’t in Barcelona’s class, but I think they will win the league.  City? I’ve always felt that Mancini is too much like Rafa Benitez in terms of being stubborn and negative to win the league and I stand by that. But then I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a change of manager at Eastlands this season, so from that point on, who knows?  United and Chelsea are my top two, with City third. But Chelsea will be too old next season and Fergie might be gone then too, so I don’t think City will be waiting too long for some major success.

MCFCforum.com: Does Piers Morgan have any idea what he's talking about when it comes to football?

Mark Ogden: He’s an Arsenal fan, so he probably thinks the game is about passing the ball nicely for half an hour, going up a few blind alleys and ending up with nothing to show for it.

MCFCforum.com: Do you have any personal rivalries or arch enemies in the sports writing world?

Mark Ogden: We are all competitive, but I don’t have enemies. I respect the guys I work with in Manchester because, as I said earlier, many of them are at the top of their game.

MCFCforum.com: What's you're honest opinion of Mario Balotelli ? Do you feel people need to get off his back and let him play as we know he can or do you think he is headline news and people want to read what hes been upto ?

Mark Ogden: I just don’t understand Mancini’s treatment of him. The decision to take him off for a backheel in LA was way over the top and backfired spectacularly because it led to two days of negative Balotelli headlines.  Mancini had to persuade senior figures at City that Balotelli was worth signing 12 months ago, despite the baggage, but he’s handling him in a strange way.  If you look at how Terry Venables handled Gazza or the way Fergie has dealt with the likes of Eric Cantona, surely Mancini would be better served giving Balotelli the softly-softly treatment because the hardline stuff clearly isn’t working.  Balotelli is just 20. He’s a kid in a foreign country and a strange city, without any family to help him adjust. I can’t imagine how I’d cope in Milan as a 20-year-old, so I’m not surprised that Balotelli has struggled to settle, particularly with his troubled upbringing as a factor.  But he is a real talent. He seems to ghost into scoring positions with a natural instinct and his record last season was good considering.  He should never have been sent off at West Brom and the one against Dynamo Kiev was harsh considering he was just clumsy rather than malicious.  But he’s now in a situation where everything he does gets magnified and that won’t change until he changes, so it’s a vicious circle.

MCFCforum.com: Where do you see Manchester City in the next 5 years and why ?

Mark Ogden: They will be challenging for all the major honours, but I don’t expect them to dominate by winning everything all the time.  Even clubs like Real Madrid, AC Milan, Barcelona, Man Utd, Liverpool and Bayern Munich have failed to dominate forever, but they are still around and they always will be.  Money can take clubs so far, but look at Chelsea – they still haven’t won the Champions League, despite Abramovich’s money and Mourinho as coach.  City’s next hurdle to overcome is about beating the likes of Barca, Real etc to players. At the moment, they don’t have the pedigree to win races for the likes of Alexis Sanchez.

MCFCforum.com: You seem like one of the good guys the way you reply to people on twitter and seem to take a lot of abuse so why dont you just block the idiotic ones ?

Mark Ogden: I block a few. Somebody once said that you can’t win an argument with an idiot, so I use that as my rule of thumb.  It’s funny, but it’s the out of town fans that lack the sense of humour and fail to get the banter. Maybe it’s a Mancunian thing, but I’ve always found reds and blues to mix pretty well, certainly among my mates and the reds and blues that I know. Once you get outside the M60, there is a sense of humour failure, though.  Then again, maybe it’s just my warped sense of humour.  But I can guarantee that all clubs have idiotic fans on Twitter. The most difficult ones are Arsenal fans. I think many of them have bought into some kind of Wenger / Fabregas cult worship and they just cannot see any argument beyond their own.

MCFCforum.com: When a journo has his contacts do you know when what they are telling you sometimes isnt true but still go along with it and get it published ?

Mark Ogden: If it’s bullshit, then you just ignore it. Otherwise, you look stupid when the true story comes out, which it always does, in the end.

MCFCforum.com: Do you feel that there's a new breed of City fans since the new owners have come in that dont understand City as much as the older city fans ?

Mark Ogden: I’ve not seen that, but what I have noticed is that many City fans who have grown up accustomed to the club being everyone’s favourite other club or the acceptable face of Manchester football, now can’t handle the fact that people want City to fail.  Enjoy the resentment. It means you are on the right track and upsetting people who used to treat you as an irrelevance.  One thing I wonder is how many long-term City fans fear that the club is not the club they used to know and love?

MCFCforum.com: How can City or indeed City fans stop this Munich chanting that seems to be creeping back into the game ?

Mark Ogden: The club have put a lot of effort into this and it’s gone right to the top, with Khaldoon making it clear to the senior figures that it’s an issue that Abu Dhabi want stamping out. I don’t think the club can do much more.  In terms of the fans, from growing up and living in the area, I know that ‘Munichs’ has been used as a term for United fans for years and used by City fans who really don’t deliver it as an insult directly intended to dredge up the memory of what happened at Munich.  A lot of people outside of Manchester don’t see that, but regardless of the motivation for using it, it’s a term which is based on the loss of life in a plane crash, so that should say it all.  I’ve not heard the Munich song for a while – I do hear it at the Reebok at Bolton games – but City are a club that is going places and do they or their fans really want the stigma that the likes of Rangers and Celtic have add in terms of sectarian chanting in Glasgow?  I was at Ewood Park last season when the ‘Who put the ball in the Munichs’ net chant went around the City end. It was loud and it wasn’t a minority, but I just don’t understand why they didn’t chant who put the ball in United’s net or something like that instead.  Rivalry is great and something that is healthy, but the Munich stuff is an embarrassment to the club and the vast majority of City fans and, if anyone is chanting it, just have a word.

 

MCFCForum would like to say a big thank you to Mark for taking the time to talk to us and recommend following him at @MOgdenTelegraph .