It sounds like the game has broken/disabled support for classic menus (used by default and for sm_tsay).
The standard cvar for it is cl_showpluginmessages, which Valve recently changed to default to 0, as there are security issues with it they're unwilling to fix.
Try enabling radio menus for the game, edit gamedata/core.games/common.games.txt and add a line for it to the "Which games support ShowMenu?" and "Which games need a radio menu timeout?" sections.
Just like
https://github.com/alliedmodders/sou...b0f279548f270f
The value for "game" should be the name of the gamedir, the folder at the root that contains the addons directory and is used with the "-game" command line param.
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