Evans trials revolutionary new media team-talk
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Evans instructs players: ‘You all checked the newspaper? Right?’
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United’s pointless trip to Field Mill

Boston United’s highly-rated gaffer Steve Evans’ new team-talk system ended in catastrophe yesterday after a 5-0 mauling at the hands of promotion-chasing Mansfield Town.

The Pilgrims were torn apart in the second-half, with little sign of the free-flowing, attacking football the Scot had promised in the local press prior to the fixture. Indeed, the majority of fans who had travelled the Field Mill sat cringing with embarrassment, with several donning fluorescent jackets and pretending to be home stewards to avoid the shame.

“What in God’s name has he told them to do?” important Boston fan Bob Mugfret-Fishhead demanded as he watched Lee Canoville ran backwards in circles flapping his arms like a chicken. “Why is Julian Joachim doing squat-thrusts on the touchline? Is that Andrew Stanhope about to come on as substitute goalie? Jesus Christ.”

With the Pilgrims in a state of bewildered disarray many fans questioned whether Evans had actually given a pre-match briefing. However impsTALK has subsequently learned that Evans had intended a news story that ran on bufc.co.uk and in the local newspaper to be the team-talk before the game.

The story featured in the Boston Standard, ‘Away-day United in Attack Mode’ was supposed to have been required reading by all the players. “We have to take chances and we’d rather lose late …. It’s all or nothing,” Evans told the paper. But, much like the average university student, none of the United players ever got around to reading the paper and were found wanting, choosing instead to go for the ‘nothing’ approach and lose the game much earlier on.

United stalwart Stewart Talbot told impsTALK: “Evans strolled into the dressing room much later than normal and simply said now that we’d read the newspaper we’d know what to do. Asa Hall asked what the hell he was going on about, and there were a few baffled faces. We all just shrugged and Evans then said we must have checked the website and just go out there and do the business.

“Again, none of us bother with all that shit – we didn’t have a clue what he was going on about. David [Galbraith] reckoned he overhead someone saying Jon Sotnick had called something ‘pointless’ on the official site, so we figured that’s how Evans wanted us to go out there and play: like the idiots he keeps going on about on the radio, basically make sure we came away from the game quite literally pointless.”

A disappointed Evans said he would take full responsibility for the disgraceful performance. “I’ve tried talking to them, shouting at them, I’ve thrown tea-cups, sandwiches, I’ve kicked boots at them, flung water-bottles – nothing works,” he said on BBC Radio Lincolnshire after the game. “So this time I thought they could just read the newspaper and see for themselves exactly what I wanted them to do. It didn’t work, and I take my share of the blame for that. Although it’s mainly Jon Sotnick’s fault.”