February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“It’s a different era now, there’s a game on almost every night, but I would never have missed ‘Match of the Day’ on BBC when I was a kid,” he said. “Not alone as a kid but as professional also. But now if I call a team meeting in our hotel at 7 p.m. and Real Madrid and Barcelona were playing at 7.30 p.m. there would be nobody asking for the meeting to be rescheduled so that they could watch the game. But they will speak up when they want to watch soaps like ‘Coronation Street’ or ‘Eastenders.’ I don’t understand it because the incentive to be a better player is greater now than it ever was.”
Watching television won’t make you a better player, but Givens believes young players should be able to learn from watching great players in action. But then life has changed dramatically and we are not in awe of television as much as we were in say the 1960s and ’70s.