The Papers

I’ve covered the commentators and pundits in Part I so now I turn my attention to the papers and this is the area that I reserve most of my vituperation. Can you imagine anyone taking the player ratings seriously from any paper in England? There are certain players that consistently score high marks out of 10 from certain papers and by sheer happenstance those players invariably exclusively write for those papers! Super Fwank (in Super Goals) has never received below a 7 in The Sun and I am sure on one occasion he received a 9 without actually playing. I might have made that up but I am not ruling it out as a possibility. It is also laughable that a player can receive a 4 out of 10 from one media outlet and a 8 from another. Someone wasn’t watching the game!

Let’s get this straight, the papers have lost their way and have become enraptured with the cult of the celebrity footballer. There are reporters who are clearly intoxicated with the dizzying amount of money top players earn, their opulent lifestyles, their WAG’s and have decided they want a piece of the action.

Most of the papers have long stopped reporting on fact and in its place we have the promotion of other agenda’s due to association with select players. The convergence of footballer and celebrity has led to a very acute symbiotic relationship between players and the media. Players are cashing on their increased profile to author books and these are usually ghost written by reporters from newspapers. To further compound the situation, the exponential growth in interest in the sport and its main protagonists has led to any interview with a high profile footballer to be very valuable. We are not naive enough to believe that there are no ‘quid pro quo’ agreements where footballers give exclusive, sorry “WORLD EXCLUSIVE” interviews to select journalists to sweep under the carpet certain indiscretions. The bottom line (or as the players would say ‘at the end of the day’) is if the exclusive interview generates more interest than the indiscretion the deal works out for everyone. Of course the players or rather their advisors are shrewd as well and will rarely give away a free interview without something in return. Read the small print the next time you read an interview with a player and a lot of the time you’ll see something like “Theo Walcott was talking at the launch of his new Mercurial Vapor IV Nike football boots”.

It is the advent of the celebrity footballer that has led to WAGS and other non-football stories seeping their way into the sports pages. After the infamous Gazza “Dentist Chair” incident in the build up to Euro ’96 the players by and large tend to keep a low profile prior to major tournaments (Rugby players take note – you could learn a lot from footballers on how to behave at these tournaments!) so the media has had to invent interest as the build up to a tournament means interest in the national side is at fever pitch. The fact that a newspaper (The Sun) created the WAGS term in the first place demonstrates that far too much attention was being paid to events off the field. The same journalists of course then write articles suggesting the England management should ban WAGS from major tournaments as they cause too much of a distraction despite filling their copy with them for most of the time England are in the tournament!

Some journalists are no more than mouthpieces for select clubs. Rob Beasley and Ian McGarry fulfil this role for Chelsea so well that one wonders how they are employed by supposedly independent national newspapers.

We also have the nefarious practices of certain journalists insidiously promoting agendas on behalf of players or managers whether it’s to get Michael Owen (Mr Holt!) or David Beckham reinstated to the England team or to get Harry Redknapp installed as England Manager. Redknapp of course has always curried favour with the media knowing he can be swept into the England hot seat by a concerted media campaign. He is no doubt acutely aware that the media is never more vicious than when they set their minds on ousting the current incumbent of the managerial hot seat. As Taylor and McClaren will testify, you don’t just lose the job, you are forever derided as a ‘Turnip’ or ‘Wally with the brolly’. Forgiveness does not come easy either, McClaren won the Dutch league with FC Twente delivering the first title in their history but all the press in England talk about is the Dutch accent he took on during interviews.

There doesn’t always need to be an alternative agenda of course. Sometimes it is as simple as journalists writing in support of their favourite players, being lazy and rehashing the same old defence of said players or a combination of both. We can all name at least one journalist (Martin Samuel) who has permanently become ensconced in the nether region of Fat Frank’s alimentary canal only periodically emerging to remind us that he “scores 20 goals a season from midfield” (3 if you exclude deflections) and should keep his England place forever.

Then there are the witch hunts against certain players and managers. David De Gea has joined Fernando Torres as the latest target for having the audacity to join our biggest club while barely out of his teens. We can’t have that; of course the boy has made mistakes but the cruel and snide nature of the reporting on him is reprehensible and yet at the same time typical of the pack mentality employed by elements of the media in England. He can’t stop long range efforts, is too skinny, looks scared and Jamie Redknapp even questioned his height! The ongoing sadistic belittling of Torres is equally despicable and those mocking his transfer fee have short memories for I seem to recall fee quibbling at the size of the fee when the transfer took place. The same rules do not seem to apply to Andy Carroll who has barely looked a £3.5m player let alone coming close to justifying the rhino-choking £35m spent to secure his signature.

What about the shoddy nature of the articles? What credibility does a paper have when they write a story about Wesley Sneijder accompanied by a picture of Esteban Cambiasso? Or the often repeated Nani/Valencia picture switch? (or is it a caption switch?) Minor grumbles possibly but if these people can’t recognise a world star do you really hold any trust in anything they write? F365 recently printed an example of a writer describing a goalscorer from a lower league game as “latching onto a loose ball in the area to fire home” – the goal in question was the conversion of a penalty kick!

How much research is actually performed by journalists? a worrying recent trend is for journalists to shamelessly report comments made by footballers on Twitter without mentioning the source. The report is then presented to the reader as if the player was interviewed by the paper. If that is not bad enough, what is even worse is the disturbing trend for reporters to quote posters from message boards and fan forums to back up their stories! Now there is a case to be made for message boards as a useful barometer for the feelings of a particular clubs fans but randomly quoting a couple of posters is extremely lazy journalism – does that even count as journalism?

Steven Howard mocked Arsenal’s signing of Park Chu-Young arrogantly dismissing him as “someone who’ll sell a few shirts” – the subtext being that he has never seen or heard of the player. Similarly the sneering over the Spanish rating De Gea as a future world star should be put into context with the fact that Spain are World Champions at virtually every level, European Champions and boast one of the greatest club sides the world has ever seen. They seem to know what they are doing so if they see the youngster fit to represent their national team I dare say he can play a bit. Should the youngster fail over a season or two then by all means criticise him but writing him off after a handful of games and doing it in such a supercilious manner represents the worst of traits in our journalism.

The guest writers are often extremely poor and it is difficult to identify who is the worst of them. Tony Cascarino is terrible often saying things for effect to provoke a reaction and sound controversial. Harry Redknapp should stop writing as his comments lead one to wonder how he is employed in football let alone a candidate for the England job. Terry Venables has rehashed the same article for about 8 years now and each time it essentially says he thinks Chelsea will win the league. It’s invariably accompanied by the headline “Sorry Fergie, I’m going for Chelsea”. This has become somewhat of a milestone for the season for me now, the article arrives in late December where headmaster El Tel gives us a half season report on all the 20 Premiership Clubs and tells us who (Chelsea) will win the title. 3 times out of 8 he has been right, an appalling record given that even a broken clock is right twice a day!

Stan Collymore is another like Cascarino who goes for big outspoken opinions but goes too far with my personal highlight being his assertion that a team languishing in 12th place in the J-League would be “too strong” for then European Champions Manchester United in 2008! Even so, none of the above come close to the worst column in British media – Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Ian Wright. Wrighty’s column is hilariously schizophrenic, often lambasting anyone daring to question Wenger or his beloved Arsenal but on other occasions lambasting Wenger and his beloved Arsenal. Last season he said United would end up with nothing and pay the price for going for everything…right up to United beating Chelsea home and away in the Champions League. At which point Wright was confident they would be too good for Barcelona!

But it is the match reports cause me most consternation as most barely qualify as such with 75% of the report taken up by a theme and any form of account on the game tagged on in the last 25% of the article – we know deadlines are tight but surely they are not writing most of this stuff in advance? One newspaper’s match report of the recent United-Chelsea game at Old Trafford spent so long mocking Torres that no mention was made of the officials failure to spot the offside players for both of United’s first two goals. In addition the fact the game was largely even did not fit with the en vogue theme of Manchester dominance so instead we read about how Chelsea were “torn apart” or “dismantled with ease by rampant United”.  The final score may have suggested that but the story of the game certainly did not.

On a similar vein a Liverpool win will inevitably be accompanied with chapter and verse on the impact of ‘King’ Kenny (a Henry Winter article comes with a guarantee of this) with a paragraph wrapping up the minor details of what actually happened in the game. I have been thinking about this and have developed a theory so if you don’t want to hear the result look away now. Could it be that the accessibility of football coverage means that the print media is now catering for a market where most of the readership has already seen the game one way or another? Extend that further with the cornucopia of electronic media that has a time to market advantage over the printing press and most people that missed the game may have already read the match review online, seen the goals on their mobile, highlights on the internet and/or debated the impact via online forums.

It still doesn’t excuse our match reports consisting of opinionated; agenda driven nonsense with a smattering of fact and exiguous if any analysis. It still doesn’t mean they have to spend so much time reporting on frivolous bagatelle. Do we really want to see any more drivel about Rooney’s hair transplant in the sports section? Is it too much to ask for WAG’s to be banished to the gossip pages? Can we drop the focus on the same old big names and focus on the real stories.

Come on football journalists, give the great Premier League reporting commensurate with it’s brilliance. Give us the facts, spare us the frivolity. Now that really would be an exclusive worth reading.

 @Us_Monster