Jason headed over to collect the Man of the Match award and took pictures while holding it in a pose after which he was surrounded by reporters who wanted to interview him.
As usual, Jason told them to ask away and one of the reporters around him immediately began the interview session with a question,
“It’s your first start for the club and you managed to help your team score two goals, impressing just about everyone. How do you feel about that and can we expect more of such performances from you?” the reporter from RTP(Radio e Televisao de Portugal) asked.
“Naturally, I’m happy with my performance and the team got the win so everything went well, I guess. As for whether I can keep up churning out performances , I hope so, but one thing that is for sure is that I’ll always put myself out there and do my best to help the team,” Jason answered with a small smile on his face.
“Let’s talk about your goals in this match, the first one especially. You single-handedly ripped apart the Santa Clara team before unleashing a screamer from 22 yards away and smashing the net open.”
“What did you feel at that moment?” Another reporter from SIC(Sociedade Independente de Communicacao) asked Jason, holding the mic that had the name of his channel boldly printed on it.
“Ahh… about that goal, well I firstly just wanted to escape from the players around me, but after escaping the only thing in my view was the goal and I just decided to let the ball fly. I didn’t really expect it to go in either,” Jason replied with a little laugh as he rubbed the side of his head with his index finger.
“What about your second goal? Some people think it was a controversial goal, seeing as how close you were to being offside. What do you feel?” the reporter questioned again.
“As for whether it was offside or not, the referee already decided so my opinion at this moment doesn’t matter much. If anyone still thinks that I was offside at that moment, they can take it up with the referee,” Jason replied matter-of-factly as he didn’t really care.
He was simply the scorer of the goal and not a match official and so the question was a bit annoying to him.
Even if the goal happened to be offside, apart from feeling a little sting that he hadn’t scored a second goal, he wouldn’t have felt much else as they would still have won the game.
“After scoring two goals, some fans thought you would have gone on to make it a hat-trick, but they were surprised when the manager decided to take you off effectively cutting off your chances for a hat-trick in your first start for the club. How do you feel about the matter?”
“Do you think the manager shouldn’t have taken you off?” another reporter asked. He was from a channel called TVI.
“Okay, hold up for a second there,” Jason first took his time to think as the question was not something he could answer hastily as relations between him and his manager could become strenuous quickly if his answer offended the manager.
“Firstly, I’m a player, my job is to get on the field and help my team win, while our manager is the one that combines me and my teammates in the best way that would help us achieve victory,”
“Literally, what I’m trying to say is, the manager always has the best interests of the team at heart and every decision he makes is for the benefit of the team, so when he called for me to come off, I’m sure the manager had thought the situation thoroughly and had considered my interests as well as that of the team so I have nothing against his decision…”
“Or better to say, I can’t go against his decision, after all, I’m not bigger than the team,” Jason said with a little laugh and began rounding up the interview, telling the reporters that he wasn’t going to be answering any other questions.
He was already scared of the questions they were asking and wanted to escape before they asked him any more annoying questions.
He didn’t know why some of these reporters were so annoying, it was like they were trying to make him slip up and say something he shouldn’t that would blow up into a controversy or drive a wedge between him and the team, which was even worse.
Well, he actually already knew that a lot of reporters were as it was kind of in their job description.
He had seen many such examples in Los Angeles which was where he had lived the longest in all his life and if there was one thing LA wasn’t short of, it was entertainment stars, and the only thing that was more than entertainment stars was the controversy surrounding each and every one of these stars.
It was to the point that you could never tell the actual character of any of these entertainment stars and the controversial news had even become a form of media promotion instead of a career-threatening matter like it used to be in the old days.
Jason was definitely not going to let anyone shit on his reputation with some fake a** news and it was not because he cared about what people thought of him as he wasn’t a media entertainment star, but rather because if someone established that he had a difficult character, it would affect his career greatly.
Clubs wouldn’t want to sign a troublemaker who caused more damage to their finances than he added to their trophy room.
It was too early in Jason’s career for any such bullsh*t, so his only option was to run from the media whenever any tricky questions popped up.
Maybe one day in the future, he would have the right to say what he actually wanted to a reporter without fearing for anything… Like Zlatan Ibrahimovic, or Cristiano Ronaldo.