‘Well well well’: The three words that could lead to Club World Cup fisticuffs

Editor F365
A Telegraph post on X featuring a link to a piece by Jason Burt next to an image of PSG celebrating their Champions League triumph.
Well, well, well...

The Chief Football Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph found the words ‘well’, ‘well’ and ‘well’ to be so triggering that he wants a word…

 

Beef anyone?
Those of you not clinging onto the final embers of X (former known as…) will have missed the Chief Football Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph making the Club World Cup a whole lot more interesting by offering to ‘have a chat’ with The Athletic‘s Sam Lee after Burt accused Lee of dragging him into his ‘silly world’.

It’s slightly self-indulgent of Mediawatch to recount this tale, but frankly it’s more fun than writing about dream shirt numbers as we are all dragged, sobbing, into the sea.

It began on Saturday with Burt writing one of many pieces praising PSG (his 2017 piece headlined ‘Exclusive: Nasser Al-Khelaifi reveals how Neymar and Mbappe can help PSG take on the world’ may in hindsight have been a tad premature).

The headline and resulting social media post are a bit of a stitch-up; Burt never wrote that a PSG win was ‘good for football’ or indeed that ‘they may be funded by a nation state but there is much to like about Luis Enrique’s side now the galacticos era is over’.

But he re-tweeted the piece so we’re taking that as tacit approval of the ‘big opinions’ strategy increasingly adopted by the Telegraph. No mention of the twin evils of trans folk and Gary Lineker, but you can’t have all of the things all of the time.

Unsurprisingly, this rather angered Manchester City fans who are consistently told that their club’s success means nothing because of all the sportswashing and sh*t.

Burt should have known this. Burt should have ignored this.

But all it took was the Athletic’s Manchester City correspondent retweeting his piece with ‘well well well’ to set off Burt…

Had Burt a) replied to Lee or b) enabled replies to his own tweet, he might have had an answer to a question he should never have asked. It’s all pretty obvious. And absolutely beneath the Chief Football Correspondent of a national newspaper.

But Burt does not have replies enabled on his tweets so he then had to actively seek out City fans calling him a ‘c***’. Everybody needs a hobby.

Somebody younger then presumably told Burt that his settings meant he had to @ Lee to allow him to reply…

A reminder that Lee’s ‘pretty poor behaviour’ amounts to a tweet saying ‘well well well’. That is all. Three words. Or one word.

And he goes on, apparently unaware he could just reply to Lee. Or DM. Or just not engage at all.

‘Feel emboldened’? Please grant me the self-belief and sense of entitlement of a middle-aged white man.

Lee literally wrote ‘well well well’ in response to a tweet from the Telegraph and this is apparently a) ‘completely out of order’ and b) deserving of some sort of ‘offering out’.

It seems unlikely but can it possibly be true that a man with a relatively high profile in the media has never been called a c*** before?

You may note that there are no replies.

 

Bruno Fernandes: An update
Astonishingly, Bruno Fernandes has opted not to push for a lucrative move to Al-Hilal despite attending the birthday party of a Portugal teammate and friend this weekend.

 

Gunner get rejected…
There’s no suggestion that Arsenal have made any kind of approach to Brentford or any kind of approach to Bryan Mbeumo, merely a suggestion that he has ‘attracted interest’ from the Gunners.

He scored 20 Premier League goals last season; damn right he ‘attracted interest’.

And yet…

‘Bryan Mbeumo ‘chooses Man Utd over Arsenal with transfer talks with Brentford to begin in huge boost to Ruben Amorim’ – The Sun.

‘Premier League ace Bryan Mbeumo chooses to ‘join Manchester United over Arsenal’ – Daily Star.

‘Bryan Mbeumo wants Man Utd! Brentford star ready to turn down Arsenal, Newcastle and Spurs to secure Red Devils transfer’ – Goal.

Can you ‘turn down’ three clubs who have not made an offer? Or are we just kicking Arsenal while they’re down? If it’s the latter, count us in. Can’t believe they got turned down by Matheus Cunha, Dean Huijsen, Pulp, the bass guitarist from HAIM, Mrs Mediawatch…

 

Oozing desperate confidence
We’re not sure we have ever seen such stark disparity between the drama of a headline and the actual story. From MailOnline:

Crystal Palace in desperate bid to avoid being KICKED OUT of European football at UEFA emergency summit – and major rivals could replace them

They’re desperate; there’s an ’emergency summit’; they could get KICKED OUT. And yet…

Palace declined to comment. However, it is understood they are confident that they will be able to participate in the Europa League.

Oh. Anybody else feel deflated?

Mediawatch