In 1991 players gave you nothing, in 2010 they give you even less
Writing in his Guardian Unlimited blog, Eddie Butler laments the media managed nature of player interaction in the modern game.
"In 1991, nobody spoke to anyone. It was the age of England supremacy in Europe and the best players also happened to be a fairly militant lot, largely because they had no say in the shaping of their future. The game was beginning its voyage into professionalism, but only in the sense that rumblings about the inequalities of the amateur game were being heard, grumblings that manifested themselves as a refusal by the England players that year to speak to the media after their first victory over Wales in Cardiff since 1963.
"I was thinking the other day, having been stuck in a hotel in Bagshot, huddled around an England player on media duty in a group of a dozen reporters, sharing our exclusive on him, that there was more fun in being completely shunned by those players. The deliberate silence of Brian Moore back then said a lot more than the carefully delivered nothings from the latest graduate of the media training course."
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