There was something about Marcus Evans’s recent video interview on the ITFC website which was reminiscent of a previously recalcitrant infant finally becoming toilet-trained. The owner was all eager smiles, looking coyly across at the camera and clearly expecting to receive huge plaudits for finally delivering a very basic function which he should have achieved years ago.
Not that there was anything but beaming adulation from those around him, because of course Marcus chose to poop his thoughts into the potty of the club’s in-house media team, who clearly saw it as an immense privilege to receive.
Still, we learned some things. We learned that Ian Milne’s gift for talking a lot while saying very little was clearly a skill that he acquired at the feet of his master. Evans’s interview went on for nearly half an hour, during which time he used many words to convey nothing of interest or revelation. It was basically an extended remix of his programme notes – the familiar “I’m in charge and I’m going to do things exactly how I want and you’ll just have to trust me” refrain, rendered in video form.
Any budding journalists will have learned that it’s difficult to carry out a searching interrogation of the man who pays your wages and controls your employment. Anyone expecting a re-enactment of Jeremy Paxman grilling the Director-General of the BBC on Newsnight would have been very disappointed. You had to feel sorry for the club's media manager Steve Pearce, who was given the unenviable job of finding vaguely subtle ways of asking “Marcus, why are you so brilliant?”, repeatedly.
The tone was set early on when Pearce asked a question about the appointment of the next manager. In a manner which would have shamed even the smuggest of politicians, Marcus went off on a five-minute non-sequitur about the Mick McCarthy era: if he’d started his reply with the words “That’s a very interesting question, but I’m going to answer a completely different one that you haven’t actually asked”, it would barely have been less subtle.
There was a rather sweet bit when Pearce prefaced a question about transfer budgets with “I’m going to push you on this”, then once again allowed his subject to swerve any attempts at a meaningful response. If that was the owner being “pushed”, then it may reveal something about how career-limiting it would be for any of Evans’s staff to actually challenge him on any aspect of how he runs the club.
Supporters have been saying that they want the owner to be more visible, and he appears to have taken this very literally indeed. “Look! I have physical form, and can form sentences using my vocal chords”. Any expectation that we, the masses, will fawn and genuflect at the owner’s generosity in allowing himself to go in front of a camera, is unlikely to be met. This was tokenism at its worst: a glib, patronising gesture which continued Evans’s habit of giving supporters what he believes they want and deserve, rather than what they actually asked for. Supporters don’t just want to see a moving picture of Evans: they want him to be accountable to supporters, and to be asked more difficult questions than he was ever likely to face from his own staff.
If there was any doubt about Evans’s determination to take the path of least resistance to video stardom, it was surely quashed by the news that BBC Suffolk had asked to interview him, and had been turned down. The streets of Ipswich are not exactly littered with the corpses of those who found the intensity of a BBC Suffolk grilling too much to bear: it would have been a very mild questioning, but even that was apparently more than the owner could countenance. Better for him, it seems, to restrict his inquisitors to those who rely on him to pay their mortgages. And it left him in ultimate control of the editing, too.
If Evans truly wants to connect with fans, then he has to acknowledge that his decade-long Invisible Man act, and his refusal to engage directly with supporters, have been wrong, and have been damaging. A political leader wouldn’t score many points with the public for refusing to talk to anyone except their own media manager (not outside North Korea, anyway), and Evans underestimates the intelligence of Town fans if he thinks that 26 minutes of carefully-controlled newspeak are going to fool us into thinking that everything has changed. When Evans faces supporters directly, and answers at least some of the questions that he’s spent the last 10 years avoiding, we will be making some progress. For now, any hope that the owner’s first video interview would bring revelation or accountability, has been well and truly flushed away.
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