1) Sir Alex Ferguson
In a series of interviews conducted with Harvard academics in 2012, Sir Alex Ferguson alluded to the frequent volcanic dressing room eruptions for which he was so renowned. Former Manchester United players have spoken of their dread at incurring their manager’s wrath and the inevitable prospect of being subjected to “the hairdryer treatment”, the phrase coined to describe the hot blast of air they would feel on their cheeks as he got up close and personal while berating them for whatever shortcomings he had witnessed in the competitive cauldron.
“There’s nothing worse than getting the ‘hairdryer’ from Sir Alex,” wrote Wayne Rooney in his 2012 autobiography, My Decade In The Premier League. “When it happens, the manager stands in the middle of the room and loses it at me. He gets right up in my face and shouts. It feels like I’ve put my head in front of a BaByliss Turbo Power 2200. It’s horrible. I don’t like getting shouted at by anyone. It’s hard for me to take, so sometimes I shout back. I tell him he’s wrong and I’m right.”
Ironically, the dressing room speech for which Ferguson has perhaps become most renowned was only three words in length and could scarcely have been more calm in its delivery. While promoting a book of his own, his former captain Roy Keane recalled one occasion when Manchester United had a home game against decent but notoriously flaky opposition who, at the time, occasionally flattered to deceive at Old Trafford but were routinely dispatched with a minimum of fuss. “I thought I knew what the group might need, that we didn’t need a big team talk,” said Keane. They didn’t get one. Briefly sticking his head around the dressing room door, Ferguson delivered a now infamous team talk that was as short as it was withering and brutally dismissive: “Lads,” he said. “It’s Tottenham.”
2) Davy Fitzgerald
A former hurling star who won two All Ireland senior hurling championships as a goalkeeper with County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, it is no exaggeration to say that Davy Fitzgerald is not everyone’s cup of tea. An often abrasive and divisive character who went on to coach his native county to their first All Ireland success for 16 years in one of the most thrilling All Ireland finals of all time, against Cork in 2013, he attributes his occasional touchline meltdowns to an intolerance of the kind of bullies he has previously admitted made his schooldays a misery during his early teens.
“I’ve often looked at smart arses that think they know it all,” Fitzgerald told a gathering of students at a mental and physical health seminar at Limerick Institute of Technology in 2014. “I go through them for shortcut, if I see someone make fun of someone, because you’re not as smart as you let on, you’re not as tough as you let on. Did [bullies] make me stronger? They did, without any shadow of a doubt. People often ask me why I have an attitude on the sideline. I have an attitude because I won’t let anyone walk down on top of me. One hundred per cent not.”
It’s an unwritten rule of sport that what’s said in the dressing room ought to stay in the dressing room, not least in the often paranoid world of the Gaelic Athletic Association where suspicions regarding press motives regularly lead to outright media bans. Indeed, the reluctance of many unmuzzled players to issue even the blandest soundbite can sometimes make even the most tightlipped of their Premier League brethren seem positively publicity-hungry by comparison.
Not renowned as one of Irish sport’s shrinking violets, Fitzgerald is invariably happy to speak with refreshing, if not always welcome, candour and has previously dismissed his occasional touchline histrionics as the byproduct of being a massively competitive man who wears his heart on his sleeve. The caricature of the demented GAA man has long been an Irish comedy staple and long before he secured the title role in Father Ted, the late Dermot Morgan’s first foray into the priesthood was as a psychopathic hurley-wielding cleric on Irish television. Similarly, one of the popular sketches performed by the hit comedy double act D’Unbelievables featured a crazed, bloodthirsty dressing room tirade delivered by a mouth-foaming lunatic to a dressing room eventually revealed to be populated by a team of small and terrified children.
Some years ago, Fitzgerald was the unwitting victim of a stitch-up from within, when the code of dressing room omerta was violated by a player on the Limerick Institute of Technology hurling team he was coaching at the time. Hurley stick in hand, Fitzgerald ranted and raved at his players in the most colourful terms imaginable, while unbeknown to him his half-time address was surreptitiously recorded on a mobile phone with the footage subsequently finding its way on to YouTube. While the sound and production values of the clip leave much to be desired, the same cannot be said for its star’s determination to extract every last ounce of effort from his team.
3) John Sitton
As a fan of the club, when Jo Treharne was given permission to record a low-budget fly-on-the-wall documentary chronicling a season in the life of Leyton Orient, she may have had an inkling of what was likely to unfold. Entitled Leyton Orient: Club For A Fiver, a reference to remarks made by the O’s chairman, Tony Wood, Treharne’s documentary was a study of a cash-strapped football club in total meltdown on and off the pitch during the 1994-95 campaign. In the old third division at the time, abject Orient won only six games all season, eventually finishing bottom of the table and slipping into the murkiest depths of the Football League.
The undisputed star of Treharne’s film was John Sitton, a well regarded and popular former Orient player who, along with Chris Turner, had been appointed joint caretaker manager of the club towards the end of the previous season. The duo got the job on a permanent basis after helping the club avoid relegation. There would be no fairytale ending next time around, with Sitton effectively committing career suicide courtesy of a foul-mouthed dressing-room tirade at half-time during a match against Blackpool. With his team losing 1-0, Sitton sacked his friend and former team-mate Terry Howard, a club veteran, before turning his ire on the remaining players and offering to fight two of them.
“You, you little cunt, when I tell you to do something, and you, you fucking big cunt, when I tell you to do something ... do it,” he snarled. “And if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here. All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner. Cos by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.”
It was an astonishing outburst that worked up to a point: Orient failed to equalise but at least didn’t concede again. Only one win in their next 15 matches resulted in the dismissal of the management team from Brisbane Road, while the subsequent broadcast of Treharne’s documentary on Channel 4 made an unwitting and reluctant cult hero of Sitton, who described it as “sensationalist and at worst totally inaccurate and unbalanced”. As entertaining as it was, it certainly had an adverse effect on his management career. Despite having plied his trade in the top five divisions in England as a player, he has not managed another league club since the broadcast of Club For A Fiver.
4) Sir Ian McGeechan
Having seen his British and Irish Lions lose the opening two Tests of their tour to South Africa in 2009 by a combined total of only eight points, Ian McGeechan had the unenviable task of rallying his players for a final push at Ellis Park in a series that had already been lost. He went about it in typically understated fashion, assembling his players for a team meeting in their Johannesburg hotel on the day of the match to let them know that, despite talk suggesting the Lions had nothing left to play for, nothing could be further from the truth. “Today will determine what we are,” he said. “It will say everything about us.”
Prowling the room he spoke quietly and calmly before a rapt audience, never once raising his voice as he stressed the importance of “respect” and “reputation”, while extolling the benefits of leaving “a legacy in this last game, in this jersey for the players to pick up in four years time”. From the moment he first opened his mouth to wishing his players “all the best, boys”, McGeechan spoke with calm authority for little more than 90 seconds but it is what happened once those “boys” had filed out of the meeting room that is truly fascinating.
As he moved to follow them out the door, McGeechan began to weep, before breaking down into a fit of uncontrollable sobbing upon receiving a hug from his forwards coach Graham Rowntree. Apparently drained at the end of a gruelling tour in which relations between the Lions and their hosts were often acrimonious, McGeechan looked stricken with grief as he clung to his lieutenant, before taking a moment to compose himself. We can only guess how much influence his calm words had on the players he rendered spellbound, but the legacy they left for those who followed them four years later was one of thrilling, emphatic victory.
5) Peter Reid
“At 41, Peter Reid has done it all. He’s played in FA Cup finals, the World Cup and before Sunderland, he was manager at Manchester City … but even he couldn’t have predicted how tough this season was going to be” – Premier Passions, 1998.
6) Tony D’Amato
We can only guess what Roy Hodgson said to England’s befuddled and discombobulated players in his half-time address during England’s Euro 2016 defeat at the hands of Iceland, but the sheer haplessness of their play throughout the subsequent 45 minutes suggests it almost certainly wasn’t from the Tony D’Amato school of inspirational rhetoric. Played by Al Pacino in the Oliver Stone-directed American football movie Any Given Sunday, the fictional D’Amato is widely credited with delivering the most powerful locker room clarion call in sports drama history as he rallied his divided and disaffected Miami Sharks before their play-off game against the Dallas Knights by stressing the importance of unity if they are to successfully “climb out of hell” and fight their way “back into the light”.
Any Given Sunday is far from the exception in a genre that can often descend into cloying sentimentality, with its depictions of football as war and Pacino cast as the embattled general tasked with rallying troops whose selfishness, venality and lack of morality have led to potentially catastrophic divisions on the battlefield. But for all its cliched hokum in a movie that excellently portrays the squalor and brutality that continues to bedevil top class professional football and other sports, it is difficult to listen to D’Amato’s speech about the importance of uniting to fight for those inches that “are in every break of the game, every minute, every second” without feeling the urge to pull on a helmet and charge head-first for the nearest brick wall.
