Ekitike ‘breaks silence’ as Liverpool ‘cracks’ deepen for crisis-riddled table-toppers
It would be easy to forget that Liverpool are still top of the actual Premier League table, given the state of all-consuming panic that has followed a narrow Champions League defeat at Galatasaray on the back of a narrow Premier League defeat at Crystal Palace.
There are silences being broken, cracks exposed, quotes mangled and painstakingly precise weather-based analogies being invoked.
Mediawatch is very, very tired.
The sound of silence
Long-time readers will know Mediawatch is an absolute sucker for various sh*thouse modern headline staples. We had a slight breakdown yesterday, one that had clearly been coming for a long time, about the speaking of volumes. Buckle up, because unfortunately we’re going to have to go in again on another of its ilk.
Sitting up there along with your volume-speakings and true-colour-showings on the Mt Rushmore of 2025 Headline Housery is ‘breaks silence’.
It is nearly always used with absurd haste, describing a situation where the silence has either been broken at the very first available opportunity, or sometimes even literally immediately, or in rare extreme cases before said silence has even in fact begun via that old tabloid staple of digging out some helpfully germane quotes from weeks/months/years/decades ago and packaging them up as box-fresh content.
But we’re not sure we’ve ever seen ‘breaks silence’ deployed when the silence (the existence of which is itself dubious given we’re talking about events that took place literally last night) has not in fact been broken anyway.
Hugo Ekitike breaks silence on Liverpool injury in message ahead of Chelsea clash
That Mirror headline – aptly repeated across the Reach network in the increasingly nominatively-determined Liverpool Echo – sits atop a story that contains not one single word from Hugo Ekitike.
Mediawatch has developed quite the callous over the years; it takes quite a bit to surprise us in the worlds of tabloid tomfoolery and headline housery. But we truly, honestly thought we were heading into this story to laugh at the idea that anything Ekitike had said so swiftly after his injury setback could be construed as breaking a silence.
We never dreamt there wouldn’t actually be any words at all from football’s pre-eminent palindrome. Surely you can’t, even in 2025, deploy a ‘breaks silence’ headline without at least one word from the silence breaker? The bar is so, so low and yet the media constantly squirms and wriggles under it.
We’ve tracked down the source, nevertheless. The ‘breaks silence’ and, presumably, ‘message’ in that headline both come from a tweet by The Athletic’s James Pearce. It says: ‘Hugo Ekitike confident he only had cramp in his hamstring rather than anything more serious.’
We’re not sure if it’s better or worse that the Mirror had just enough shame not to actually include in their story the tweet that shows the working.
Crack team
It is undeniably great news for the great collective that is the UK football media that Liverpool lost, though. Not because there’s any bias against Liverpool – please god let’s nip that in the bud before it gets anywhere – but because there’s nothing better in this game (for any of us) than being able to wheel out the ol’ crisis narrative. And there really is no upper limit on how many crisis clubs the media can juggle at any one time.
Try to keep in mind when reading the following Daily Star sentence that Arne Slot and Liverpool are the defending Premier League champions and currently sit top of the league this season.
Arne Slot’s laughable decision has seen Liverpool’s cracks turn into fissures as the Reds were stunned in Europe by Galatasaray on Tuesday evening
Now we’re not going to pretend the last couple of games have gone well for Liverpool. But they’ve lost narrowly away from home to the fourth best team in England this year and a Galatasaray side whose competitive record this season now reads P9 W8 L1.
It really is less than a week ago we were all struggling beneath a mountain of breathless reports about Liverpool being near certain of winning absolutely everything from the Premier League to the Champions League as well as probably the Ashes and the Ryder Cup too due to all their work bearing as it did the Hallmark of Champions™.
Could Mediawatch humbly contend that a middleground exists between that and this latest fissure-based crisis chat? Maybe somewhere within that fissure.
And also, is a fissure not literally… a crack? Unless the Star are talking specifically here about anal fissures, in which case fair play because arse fissures are definitely worse than arse cracks.
A Winter’s Tale
You know who we don’t hear so much from these days? Henry Winter. And that’s a shame, because the great man has absolutely still got it. Like this world-class intro to his contribution to the discourse after Liverpool Lost A Football Match.
As Florian Wirtz walks through a squall – not a storm – he can take comfort from the temporary travails of a past Liverpool No 7. It’s impossible to watch Wirtz’s struggle to impose his wonderful skills and not scroll back to the first half of Peter Beardsley’s debut season for Liverpool, 1987/88.
He’s right, it is literally impossible. Think it safe to say we’ve all been thinking of little else recently apart from the first half of Peter Beardsley’s debut season for Liverpool, 1987/88.
Mediawatch contends that what is in fact impossible is to hear the name Peter Beardsley without immediately thinking of puffa jackets and a nice lumpy chicken wrap, but that might just be us.
Our favourite bit, though, is just what a details man Winter remains. An absolute slave to correctness. Not for him the modern way of bending reality to fit the words you’ve already decided you’re going to write.
No, Winter is a man of principle, and if that means writing a far woollier opening just to ensure the correct levels of analogous weather-based distress currently befalling Wirtz are maintained then that is what he shall do.
While others are out here insisting people have broken silences that don’t exist and without actually saying a word, or pretending Liverpool are now beset with cracks and indeed fissures, Winter is agonising over the most correct possible degree of bad weather to describe the specific current woes of a big-money summer signing.
And, to be fair, ‘squall’ is an A-tier word.
Top Deck
Entry 38274814032 in Mediawatch’s long-doomed quest to preserve the idea that things put inside quote marks should be things people have actually said.
In a trademark display of Daily Mail headline pith, we get this:
Jamie Carragher insists Liverpool are ‘NOT a top team’ in withering takedown after Galatasaray defeat, as club legend urges Arne Slot to take star out of the firing line: ‘Right now it is a mess’
And while we might cut some slack for paraphrasing a quote for reasons of headline space – not so much with the Mail, admittedly – as long as the original meaning is carefully preserved, the same mischief has then been performed in the copy itself.
In a damning verdict on the Reds, Carragher warned they were ‘not a top team’, claimed they were a ‘mess’ and said one star needed to be axed from the side because he was ‘not at the races at all’.
Except… it’s just not quite what he actually said, which was this.
‘I don’t feel like I am watching a top team.’
Not as unequivocal, is it? It’s about feels and vibes rather than clear denouncing of Liverpool’s ‘top’ status.
Mediawatch is aware we’re being quite petty with this one, but also we’d argue that’s kind of the point. Carragher really did go in two-footed on Liverpool. He was damning and critical. He absolutely was, as the headline entirely fairly describes it, ‘withering’.
There’s more than enough here to carry the story. So why the need to exaggerate? Why over-egg what is already without any nonsense at all a deliciously eggy pudding?
Even if you leave everything else as it is and just take those quote marks out you land quite squarely in cheeky-but-fair territory.
We also really need to stop caring about this stuff.
