FSG ‘sack manager’ and Steven Gerrard ‘set for job’ in shock ‘Liverpool news’
A busy old morning of football nonsense.
All the tabloids and assorted Man United fans are using their precious time on this earth to pretend not to know what pulling someone’s hair looks like, while the Daily Star’s Monday crew have shown their half-hearted weekenders how to properly sh*thouse a headline.
We are also asking once more whether we really need to fire up the ol’ supercomputer after every single result. We’re really not sure it’s telling us much right now.
Hair today
Sometimes you just instantly know. From the moment Dominic Calvert-Lewin got his hands caught up in Marc Cucurella’s curls during the FA Cup semi-final, we knew.
VAR had a look, but he wasn’t sent off because he didn’t actually pull Cucurella’s hair. Which feels like quite a significant detail. Calvert-Lewin, who knows more than most about this issue, even made a grand show when extracting his hand from his opponent’s barnet to do so with an extravagantly open palm. There was no hair-pull.
This was, very obviously, nothing at all like Lisandro Martinez yanking at DCL’s hair bobble in the recent Man United-Leeds game like a kid on a playground telling a girl in the only way he knows how that he fancies her.
In that Wembley moment we knew three things. One, this non-event was nothing like the red-card offence. Two, some Man United-adjacent accounts on X-formerly-Twitter would make a great performative show of pretending it was. Three, the tabloids would then fall over each other to hoover up those comments and make a great performative show of pretending that constitutes news.
And lo.
‘Disgraceful’ – Man Utd fans furious after Dominic Calvert-Lewin escapes red card for ‘hair pull’ on Marc Cucurella
The Sun, there, deciding that you can just make up stuff if you put some sky commas around it.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin avoids punishment for hair pull on Marc Cucurella – as fans ask why he wasn’t sent off just weeks after Lisandro Martinez incident
The Daily Mail at least brave enough to decisively call it a hair pull even though it wasn’t. Don’t know whether that’s better or worse, really. Absolutely lovely ‘just weeks’ there, though.
Man Utd fans furious as Dominic Calvert-Lewin escapes red card for hair pull
The Daily Star follow The Sun’s lead by highlighting the fury and going with the same connotation-loaded term ‘escapes’ about the lack of a red card for the trifling yet we do feel quite significant reason of not committing the necessary offence.
Must we really all pretend we don’t know or can’t see the difference between visibly yanking at someone’s hair and getting your hand caught up in someone’s hair? Sure, both incidents involve hair and Calvert-Lewin, and we can see why that was irresistible. But come now.
This really is no more valid than ‘Our player did a tackle and got sent off, now I see another team’s player has done a tackle yet did not get sent off??!!!!?’ The fact both incidents involve hair doesn’t make them identical any more than any two tackles are identical.
And, to labour this very obvious point, the maddening part is that every single person cobbling these stories together knows it’s a bollocks non-story compiled from opinions we don’t even think the furious Man United fans really believe in themselves, if they’re honest.
So under headlines about fury and escape and a heavy sense of both injustice and inconsistency, you get copy that starts off full of blood and thunder and confidence before eventually losing its way with a mealy-mouthed concession.
In the Star:
Calvert-Lewin appeared to put his hand in the Spaniard’s hair.
So, not a hair-pull then and thus not the same thing? Grand.
The Mail:
Some would argue that the severity of the offence was different to Martinez’s antics – indeed TNT Sports’ commentary team took it that way – but many viewers did not see it that way.
Such weasel words, these. ‘Some’ here meaning absolutely everyone viewing the incident with two eyes rather than one.
Grudging respect, then, to The Sun who, despite being the least cocksure in their headline thanks to those scare quotes, are the ones who stick most steadfastly to their absurd guns in the copy itself, including this delightful second-mention effort:
The Leeds striker appeared to get a good handful of Marc Cucurella‘s nest during the FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea, but no action was taken.
Red Sax
One of the classic bits of tabloid headline misdirection in recent years has been to take whatever antics American owners of proper football clubs are currently up to with the assorted funny little yankball outfits, and make it look like they’re actually doing it in a sport that matters.
But sometimes the timing isn’t quite right. You can almost sense the Daily Star’s disappointment in their initial story that they couldn’t deploy this headline when the pressure on Arne Slot was more intense.
Liverpool owners FSG fire coach and staff as John W. Henry releases statement
Just feels like they’re going through the motions, doesn’t it? Sure, all the elements of the classic bait and switch are there. All the misleading yet not actually inaccurate elements to make you think a Boston Red Sox baseball story might in fact be a Liverpool football story are in place.
But you can just feel that their heart isn’t in it somehow. There’s just not the necessary commitment to the bit.
Luckily, by Monday morning the full Reach squad was back in harness to ensure proper levels of housery were restored, and balls to the fact Slot isn’t actually getting sacked right now.
Liverpool news: FSG sack manager and coaches as Steven Gerrard is ‘set for job’
That’s how you sh*thouse a baseball story into a Liverpool one, lads. The weekend warriors have been put firmly in their place here. The sheer brazen falsehood of the ‘Liverpool news’ kicker. The technically correct mischief of ‘FSG sack manager’. And then the crowning turd in the bowl of Steven Gerrard being ‘set for job’.
But what job? Surely not the Liverpool one? Even more surely not the Boston Red Sox one?
Obviously it’s neither of those.
It’s the Burnley job. Possibly. If Scott Parker leaves. According to the Burnley Express. Which we assume is in fact a newspaper and not James Anderson. Although we wouldn’t put it past those Reach mischief-makers to be forming ‘football’ headlines from the opinions of former England cricketers. They’ve used worse sources for headline chicanery.
But back to the actual FSG sacking that has occurred. While it would seem impossibly harsh to bin Slot after a 2-1 win over Crystal Palace, consider the fact what Fenway have actually done is sack Red Sox manager Alex Cora and his coaching team after a 17-1 win over the Baltimore Orioles.
Did Liverpool score 17 against Palace? They did not. Nervous times for Slot, we reckon.
Computer says oh
Mediawatch is slightly wary – and incredibly weary – of repeating itself, but we remain irritated and increasingly uneasy about the sheer weight afforded to the musings of assorted supercomputers. A lot of the time what they are saying is really very obvious indeed and does not require planet-killing quantities of computer power to deduce.
The Sun today bring us up to speed with the latest shock predictions from the boffins and brainiacs.
Tottenham’s chances of Premier League survival revealed as supercomputer shares latest relegation prediction
Guys, we really, really, really don’t think we need a supercomputer for this ‘reveal’. Spurs have won one Premier League game all year, against an already-relegated bottom-of-the-table team, and are in the relegation zone with four difficult fixtures left.
The supercomputer has no more ‘revealed’ that they are probably going down than it’s revealed the title race is between Arsenal and Manchester City.
Talking of which…
The bad news gets even worse for Tottenham fans, too.
Because the supercomputer also now reckons Arsenal will win the league. We’re going to just go right ahead and speak for Spurs fans here and say that there is no bad news or worse news here. It’s irrelevant news. It isn’t even news.
Spurs fans don’t need supercomputer predictions to tell them the news is bad when the actual, real-life, non-forest-destroying league table already makes that entirely clear.
And even if they did, we reckon most Spurs fans at this time would regard the apparent 41.6 per cent chance of survival spat out by Bertha this weekend to represent quite the positive spin on a situation that, to Mediawatch’s foolish and non-supercomputery eyes, looks a great deal bleaker.
