Potty-mouth Kinnear gave me an earful

1:49pm Friday 10th October 2008

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hat Joe Kinnear press conference last week made me laugh.

Glad to see the old fella has clearly mellowed since his days as the volcanic head of the much-loved Wimbledon.

Kinnear, or ’Kinell as he should really be known, swore 52 times in five minutes. There were more F’s than Ronnie Barker’s old Arkwright greengrocer trying to say festive felicitations.

As the bleep machine started smoking through overuse, the memories came flooding back.

As the guy from the Mirror got it both barrels from Newcastle’s boss for now, I recalled being in exactly the same firing line a decade ago.

My Kinnear savaging wasn’t at anything as grand as a Premier League press briefing. It was the second round, second leg of the League Cup.

Kinnear should have been happy. Wimbledon had just come from behind to clinch the tie in extra-time but he was spoiling for a fight.

Unfortunately for me, the programme had carried a match report from my local paper from the first game. Apparently Wimbledon did that all the time; obviously another way of engendering that “them and us” mentality that the club thrived on.

The colleague who’d written it was pretty damning, slamming their style of hoof ball, all heads, elbows and very little football.

It was my bad luck – or his perfect timing – that the author was on a week’s holiday when the return tie came around at Selhurst Park.

I was therefore braced for the worst but hoped, given Wimbledon’s two-goal salvo in the added 30 minutes, that Kinnear would let it pass. No such luck.

“Which one of you is ******* John Smith?” he bellowed as soon as the door swung open. (I’ll protect his true identity here because the reporter concerned is quite high- flying these days).

No answer.

“I’ll repeat the question again then, you slow *****s. Where is John Smith?”

At this stage, I knew what was coming. And there was no escaping it.

Putting on my best “please don’t hurt me” voice, I gave a mealy-mouthed reply along the lines of Mr Smith being away on holiday and I was covering in his absence. But I’d not seen the first leg at all, honestly, and thought that his team had played jolly well this evening.

Kinnear looked miffed that his intended target was nowhere to be seen. But his stand-in was still better than nothing.

So the blast began.

I’d like to repeat what he said for the next two or three minutes. But there are very few words that could be repeated in a family newspaper.

It was caught on tape – which became one of the hottest commodities around the southern media circus for the next week or two.

Censoring it very heavily, I can reveal the phrase “fan with a typewriter” kept cropping up. Usually in sentences twice that long and padded out with the same adjective.

Even when other reporters tried to get him discussing parts of the game, each quote would be followed with another sarcastic obscenity tossed in my direction.

I was taking one for the team all right.

The whirlwind over, he turned on his heel with one last pop and then disappeared into the bowels of the deserted stadium.

The press room was left stunned in silence. It felt like a town that had just been ravaged by a tornado.

“So that went pretty well then,” laughed a radio guy. “Imagine Joe’s mood if they’d lost…”