What on Earth is going on at Manchester United? For a second successive week, following a fairly dismal Champions League defeat, a senior player has taken to the post-match media round to eschew the usual platitudes about how “we switched off at crucial moments” but “we'll dust ourselves off and go again” in favour of lashing out at the club’s hierarchy.
Speaking to TNT Sports after United’s 4-1 drubbing by Como, captain Bruno Fernandes turned on his head coach, appearing to suggest that Michael Carrick had got the tactics wrong. When offered the chance to dispel such an interpretation, Fernandes replied: “That’s on the manager and staff.”
Even for a club that has turned underperformance into something of an art form, this is unusual.
And, in my best Carrie Bradshaw, it got me thinking about something I suspect we all grapple with in our personal and professional lives: how — and more importantly, when — to give feedback.
A time and a place
The question isn’t whether Fernandes or Carrick was right when it came to United’s inability to press. Who cares? Nor even whether the extremely public venue the player chose was the most appropriate forum for communicating his frustration with the boss. My hunch is, probably not. Rather, it is about timing.
Say the manager’s tactics were wrong, a proposition not obviously unsupportable, given the final score. Surely the most effective time for a player of Fernandes’ experience and stature to air his concerns would be before the match, followed closely by during the match itself. If the objective is to alter an outcome, feedback needs to arrive while there’s still the opportunity to do so. Once the final whistle is blown, it’s little more than punditry.
And while my sense is that anyone who subscribes to a daily newsletter is, statistically speaking, on the ‘can’t kick a ball straight’ side of the bell curve, few of us will be strangers to the frustrating experience of receiving or giving feedback only after it might have been useful.
Of course, there are plenty of occasions when discretion is the better part of valour. Perhaps it really is too late, the person in question isn’t in a position to hear it yet, or the stakes are simply too trivial to justify a confrontation. Being right doesn’t automatically make everything worth relitigating.
But all too often, people either say nothing, or wait until it is too late.
“A chance to serve — that is all we ask”
The most egregious case comes on holiday. Say you’ve walked into your hotel room for the first time and, despite the punchy price and glossy online photos, it’s all a bit sad: tired carpets, harsh lighting, a television bearing the logo of an electronics brand that went bust during the Mitterrand presidency. Or you’re out for dinner at the sort of place that charges £8.50 for bread and by the time the main course arrives, it has clearly been sitting under the heat lamp on the pass for a good few minutes.
You could email the hotel or restaurant after the fact and, best-case scenario, get an apologetic reply with a discount on your next visit. But that’s not really best-case: you already had the crap holiday or the congealing hollandaise sauce. The time to speak up, politely but firmly, is when the problem arises.