A wandering minstrel he...
Benny Green
The other morning at breakfast, sitting there slumped and dressing-gowned amid the alien cornflakes, I reached out for the Times and, with the unerring aim of a man who has been adept at ball games all his life, knocked the jam over. When at last I got the newspaper folded at the sports page, I noticed an item which made me sigh for the insanity of our libel laws, for the fragile sensibilities of those hothouse blooms, professional football managers, for the indignities that can get heaped on the noble heads of freelance journalists like myself. The item concerned a Mr Frank O'Farrell, who, if you remember, was one of the earliest performers in the Old Trafford will-he-won't-he Quadrille featuring Mr George Best a couple of seasons ago. Mr O'Farrell it was who thought up the idea of improving Mr Best's concentration by making him live in a smaller house. The item in the Times last week said that Mr O'Farrell had accepted the managership of the Iranian national side and would be departing thereto on May 1. Now I have to be very careful indeed what I say about Mr O'Farrell, because the last time I took the arrant liberty of mentioning his name in print he got his lawyers on me in less time than it takes to say in flagrante delicta, and it is only because the item in the Times
presents fresh evidence in my behalf that I dare to ask for a retrial. In commenting on Mr O'Farrell's instroduction of Real Estate into
the psychology of football management, I described his condition, in the Sunday Times,
as that of a man "temporarily domiciled in Manchester," which seemed to me a reasonable enough way of defining the situation of a gentleman in a necessarily itinerant profes sion. But no. Mr O'Farrell asked his solicitors to demand an apology, which the newspaper duly provided, although I thought they were wrong to do so, as I had no more libelled Mr O'Farrell than I had assaulted his grandmother.
I remember at the time seriously considering the possibility that in demanding the apology, Mr Farrell's solicitors had not known the meaning of the phrase 'temporarily domiciled.' I am not being face
tious about this: a gentleman at the Sunday Times and myself spent over an hour one afternoon trying to ,decipher the solicitor's
letter, which had been phrased so ungram matically that it was hard to know who, why or what it was trying to say. What is doubly odd is that before he went to Manchester United, Mr O'Farrell, like every other football manager in Britain, had tried his luck in other towns with other clubs, and had therefore traced the inevitable itinerant pattern of a manager in search of a team. He had been at Leicester before Manchester and somewhere else before that and somewhere else before that, I forget where, but rarely in my life had I encountered any character better fitted to be described as "temporarily domiciled." Never mind; the apology duly appeared and Mr O'Farrell's honour, although not mine, was duly assuaged. Now ag readers will have learned after all this time, I am one of nature's gentlemen, and never inclined to kick a man when he is down, or even when he is up, for that matter. So when, as I had predicted in my essay, Mr O'Farrell moved on from Manchester soon afterwards, I resisted the temptation to write asking where he thought he might next be temporarily domiciled. Instead in my own mind I wished him well. In my essay I had suggested that possibly one of the reasons why Mr O'Farrell had announced that "Manchester United were the greatest" might be connected with the fact that they were paying his salary, and that if ever they stopped doing so, Mr O'Farrell might stop saying they were the greatest. Lo and behold, Mr O'Farrell leaves Old Trafford and stops saying that United are the greatest. But not even then did I stoop to the cruelty of a note thanking Mr O'Farrell for working so zealously to make all my predictions come true.
Later Mr O'Farrell went to Cardiff, where, it seems, he was once more only temporarily
domiciled, for in the Times last week it said
that soon he would be moving to Iran, where presumably yet again he will be temporarily domiciled. And I am confident that so long as he remains in his curious profession, Mr O'Farrell will contrive to be temporarily domiciled in a great many footballing towns before he heeds the final whistle of the Great Referee in the Sky, or, to give him his pseudonym, Mr Alan Hardaker.
If you look in a dictionary, you will find that 'temporary' means "lasting only for a time," and that 'domicile' means "place of residence." So that all I had accused Mr O'Farrell of doing was to be occupying a place of residence in Manchester only for a time. I could think of better places for a man to be, and I could make out a fair case that the road to happiness has something to do with putting down roots. But what I could never make any kind of case for would be the argument that to say that a man is temporarily domiciled is to libel him. And yet the apology duly appeared, so somebody must have thought otherwise. So much for the libel laws which keep us to the journalistic straight-andnarrow. Dare I afford to say, "Bon voyage, Mr O'Farrell" without having the bogies down my neck?
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