• Australian Open

Sharapova as the strong, silent type would be blessed relief

Maria Sharapova wasn't giving much away when asked about similarities between her and Eugenie Bouchard © AP

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The greatest sports interview ever caught on camera is the Monty Python post-match analysis given by the "arch thinker, freescheming, scarcely-ever-to-be-curbed midfield cognoscento, Jimmy Buzzard". Buzzard may have been the man of the match for "a Jarrow United side thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism" but he finds the questions posed by the absurdly pretentious interviewer to be impossible.

I think quite often of this sketch when I interview sportspeople, or hear them being interviewed. Not because they are thick, as poor Jimmy Buzzard undeniably was. But because the questions often come from a place so very different from the business of hitting and kicking balls and people, or running fast or jumping high or lifting heavy things. You're trying to intellectualise something that is, if not instinctive, at least far removed from the cognitive process.

For quite a long time I interviewed actors for a living and the problem is much the same as with sport: the skills required to do the job are nothing to do with the skills required to talk interestingly about it. As with sportspeople, so with actors: the overwhelming majority lapse into cliché, because it is really difficult to explain how you go about pretending to be someone else convincingly, just as it is very hard to say something illuminating about how you strike a ball.

Footballers don't seem to say much post-match these days, which is absolutely for the best, just a bit of nodding politely to Geoff Shreeves and then handing over the bottle of Man of the Match fizz to a team-mate.

It feels like football has figured out that interviews taking place right after the heat of battle are a recipe for disaster and, as everyone knows, football fans are only really happy when they're being outraged by something or other. Phil Neville's remarks last weekend about wanting to two-foot Tomas Rosicky - so clearly, so obviously a joke - are but one recent example.

Immediately after a match, emotions and adrenalin are running high, sometimes for the interviewer as well. Taking the cue from John Inverdale, tennis seems to be doing a good line in cringey post-match chat, as evidenced recently by Eugenie Bouchard being asked to "give us a twirl" after winning her match in the Australian Open, as if she were at high school prom and not the world number seven player going about her business.

Football has figured out the dangers of flash interviews © PA Photos

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To my mind, tennis provides the most promising but ultimately futile ground for interviews. The sport itself is so gladiatorial, so reliant on the mental battle at the very top level, and featuring so many intensely driven personalities on a relentless circuit of constant interplay, it could be excellent material. But as an actual sport to write or commentate on - the nuts and bolts of shots and rallies - it's not very inspiring: there are just too many shots, too many iterations of the same thing every game, every match, every season. There's only so many ways you can write about how good Roger Federer's backhand passing shots were.

If you're a tennis journalist on, for instance, a UK newspaper or website, you're so reliant on your relationship with Andy Murray that it must feel like you're taking your professional life in your hands if you criticise him. Not that he's a mercurial or unreasonable person, it's just that the dependency is so great. Sir Alex Ferguson used to ban off-message football reporters from Old Trafford, a serious blow to their livelihood, but at least there is more than one football club in England. No Andy equals no British tennis, and that must be a very weak position to be in for the hacks.

And so tennis throws up the strange spectacle of a bunch of people, many of them middle aged, hanging off the every word of some track-suited youngster, gurgling with nervous laughter at their every 'joke', politely swallowing it down when the star treats their line of enquiry with contempt. This recent one at the Aussie Open with Maria Sharapova summed it up, for me:

Q. Do you see any of yourself in Genie [Bouchard]? Sharapova: I personally don't know Genie very well. As a tennis player she's a big competitor. She's an aggressive player as well that likes to take the ball early and dictate points. From that perspective, yeah, definitely.

Q. Is there anybody who reminds you of you out here? Sharapova: I haven't really thought about it.

Well, thanks for that, Maria. Maybe we ought to just accept that post-match interviews are rarely going to produce anything at all and let the players just get off for a shower. In an age of constant chatter and communication, we could do with a bit of the strong, silent type.

Eugenie Bouchard was asked to twirl after a match at the Australian Open © Getty Images

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