Busy Man Utd hit new low, snub the PFA and flaunt their injuries while ‘forgotten man’ is actually forgotten
The Premier League season is up and running and the transfer window rumbles ever onwards so there is of course no doubt what the big story of the day is: that’s right, some Manchester United players ate some food.
Show off
The Sun bring us the vital news – and you may wish to sit down for this – that after attending the PFA Awards on Tuesday night, some Manchester United players ate some food at a restaurant.
Mediawatch shares your slavering excitement at this news and completely agrees that yes, this is clearly the biggest story in all of sport on this bright Wednesday morn.
But among this vital and important and dare we say it brave and perhaps even heroic investigative journalism there is one line that caught the eye.
New boy Leny Yoro showed off his foot injury as he used crutches at the restaurant
Showed off? He has a massive great protective boot on his foot, lads. He can’t really hide it unless he quite literally never leaves his house, even if for some unexplained reason he actually wanted to hide it. Do you want him to quite literally never leave his house?
Occurs here to Mediawatch that we may at last have found an admittedly far less creepy male equivalent of ‘flaunts her curves’ to describe any woman going anywhere while wearing clothes, and this is therefore a milestone day in the quest for equality.
This is a low
Mind you, we wonder how those United stars even had the gall to eat some food in the wake of another evening of humiliation, as also revealed by the Currant Bun.
Man Utd flops set unwanted Premier League record as Arsenal and Man City fill almost entire PFA Team of the Year
Already clues that this record might have something to do with the PFA Team of the Year and therefore be of absolutely no tangible significance whatsoever but on we go.
Manchester United hit another new low as they set an unwanted Premier League record.
See, this does now sound quite serious, doesn’t it? Another new low, the worst point yet for the embattled former champions turned figures of fun. A record-breaking low, no less. What on earth has happened?
It’s the first time in the Prem era United have gone two seasons in a row without having a player in the PFA Team of the Year.
Oh that is huge. Liquidate the club, bulldoze Old Trafford and turn it into flats. Quite understandable to see The Sun so desperate to get this news out there that there quite literally wasn’t time to write ‘Premier League era’ in full. Get this scoop out there quick before anyone else catches up.
Let nobody suggest that finishing eighth in the Premier League was the actual low and this just a corollary of that. And definitely don’t point out that United actually finished third in the first of these two utterly mortifying seasons where none of their players sneaked a spot in the PFA Team of the Year.
Still, every cloud has a silver lining and it must come as a huge boost to United fans to discover that the 2018/19 and 2021/22 seasons with their previously-considered-disappointing sixth-place finishes were in fact absolutely fine because Paul Pogba and Cristiano Ronaldo found their way into the PFA teams for those seasons. Which is clearly the real quiz.
Forget me not
The Mail Online have their own take on the big story of the day, breathlessly recounting some footballers going for a Chinese under this none-more-Mail Online headline:
Man United enjoy a team bonding night out – just a three-minute walk from where Man City rivals were winning PFA Awards while they were snubbed – as forgotten star joins party at plush Chinese
It’s another losing battle no doubt, but let it never be said that Mediawatch sat idly by while the Mail Online’s headlines became so thoroughly absurd that they can now include 18-word sub-clauses. This is madness, guys, come on. That is not so much a headline as a short story.
There’s also a very weird thread throughout this version of the tale that pretends that as well as being snubbed by the PFA Awards, United players going for a meal up the road constitutes some kind of counter-snub.
Even Garnacho and Mainoo, who had been in the running for a PFA Award had appeared to snub the ceremony, instead heading out to the Chinese restaurant with their team-mates.
But we’re not really interested in that bit. No, what Mediawatch is interested in is this ‘forgotten star’ who joined the party at the ‘plush Chinese’.
Because we’ve read this story five times now and can’t actually find any mention of exactly who this forgotten star actually is. Have… have the Mail forgotten to mention the forgotten star?
Perhaps a clue lies right at the start of the story, where we’re told it was published at 8.05am and updated at 10.15. Sherlock Mediawatch has thus deduced that whoever has updated it has deleted the all-important single reference buried deep in the copy to that headline-teased player – and from studying the great many pictures accompanying the article has further deduced it is none other than Mr Tyrell Malacia.
Now none of this really matters of course. But it does kind of reveal something quite telling about how this stuff works in big 2024. The tease in the headline designed to drag you in with that tantalising ‘forgotten star’ is about something so uninteresting that when a second sub had a go at the story they removed the reference altogether, leaving only a photo with boilerplate caption and that headline as a trail of breadcrumbs that he was ever mentioned in the first place.
Lamp light
Mediawatch will never ever stop loving headlines like this one from the Express.
Frank Lampard lands new job for Premier League season 15 months after exiting Chelsea
Because while we and you and anyone who’s read any online content at all in the last decade will instantly sniff out the fact it’s bullsh*t, it’s still fun to discover which precise flavour of bullsh*t we’re dealing with.
Chelsea legend Frank Lampard is set to join Amazon Prime’s Champions League coverage this season, marking the streaming service’s first foray into broadcasting the competition.
So it’s a job for the Champions League season, really.
And you also can’t really simultaneously claim this is his ‘new job’ while also saying he has been ‘out of work since being sacked by Chelsea in May 2023’ because he’s done absolutely loads of punditry gigs since then, most notably when getting bantered right off about his bald spot by Gary Lineker during the Euros.
But of course the Express know all of this and know precisely what they’re up to, and we still after all this time can’t really decide if the fact they and their ilk also know that we all know makes it better or worse.