Premier League Moments: Kevin Keegan succumbs to the pressure in 1996.

It’s that time of the year again when you need to be inventive to create content. Our contribution to the various means of wasting time until the season begins is this; a run-down of the seminal moments in Premier League history – a poor man’s version of Sky Sports’ Premier League Years if you will.

1995/1996 remains one of our favourite seasons, Newcastle’s scintillating football, their collapse, Man United’s pursuit, Robbie Fowler scoring for fun – it had a little bit of everything, and of course it had Kevin Keegan’s infamous rant in front of the Sky cameras.

Sky have obviously played the footage ad nauseam now, but outside of the simple slapstick entertainment value it retains, it marks the beginning of something – the era of ‘managerial mind-games’. Or, more accurately, the tabloid invention of managerial mind-games.

To believe in the emotional manipulation of one manager by another, is to believe that managers possess the mental fragility of a ten-year-old girl. It’s a complete myth. In the final third of each season, any time Alex Ferguson says anything to the press that relates to another team, they just can’t help themselves. We’re led to believe that generic press-conference quotations can have significantly impact a trophy’s destination, and that ultimately his fellow professionals’ grip on their own self-belief is so tenuous that it’s in serious danger if ever questioned in public.

Football clubs have spent millions of pounds on the infrastructure that provides physical and emotional conditioning to their employees, but all that is supposedly rendered useless by some well-aimed media-peddled rhetoric. Sorry, but it’s nonsense – it’s another press phenomenon that’s been kept alive to sell newspapers.

If i’m a player in a team within touching distance of the league title, and an opposing manager doubts our collective credentials, am I more likely to dismiss the comments because their agenda is so transparent, or is my confidence going to evaporate into thin air. Natural, non-artificial pressures exist in sport at all times – a tennis player serving for the Wimbledon title tightens-up because of internal doubts, not because of anything his opponent may have said to him at the change of ends.

In the Spring of 1996, had the burdens of a club nearing their first significant trophy in 41 years, a disintegrating lead, and his own level of expectation weighing down on him – that’s where the mental frailty came from. That Alex Ferguson said what he did ‘about a man like Stuart Pearce’ was neither here nor there, because in truth, Richard Keys could probably have elicited the same response with an appropriately awkward question. But that’s why the Keegan moment is so important, because it’s the seed of every half-arsed ‘mind-games’ story that gets published in March and April.