Liverpool v Man City sparked ‘orgy of admiration’ says balls-deep Mail man

If you read Monday’s Mediawatch, you’re going to absolutely love the identity of the man decrying ‘the orgy of admiration that greeted the performances of Liverpool and City in the aftermath of their breath-taking 1-1 draw at Anfield’.

And if you didn’t read Monday’s Mediawatch, what the hell do you think you’re playing at?

Holt end
Mediawatch finds itself nodding and agreeing with vast amounts of Oliver Holt’s Mail Plus column this morning about Arsenal’s place in the title race.

That the result at Anfield was a fine one for the Gunners is inarguable, that Arsenal look better placed this season than last to sustain their challenge to the end absolutely fair. The assertion that much of the pessimism among Arsenal’s own supporters is chiefly self-preservation against further pain due to last season’s ‘scar tissue’ also seems astute.

The main point of the piece – that Arsenal absolutely cannot be forgotten in this title race – is absolutely true, although if we were nit-picking, we’d say nobody is doing so and that everyone is currently treating this as a three-way fight, because anything different would be mental.

But what made Mediawatch double-take so hard that we’ve torn three muscles we didn’t even know we possessed was this line.

In fact, amid the orgy of admiration that greeted the performances of Liverpool and City in the aftermath of their breath-taking 1-1 draw at Anfield on Sunday afternoon, you could be forgiven for thinking that there are only two runners in the three-horse race that this season’s struggle for the title has become.

Again, nobody is thinking there are only two runners. Everyone thinks there are three runners. Because there are three runners.

But, wait, go back a bit. A what of what now? We absolutely cannot let Holt get away with sniffily decrying the ‘orgy of admiration that greeted the performances of Liverpool and City’.

Not unless it was a different Oliver Holt who literally a day earlier wrote:

When people talk about the many times that Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola faced each other in English league football, they will talk about the last meeting most rapturously of all. They will talk about a squally day on Merseyside, with a bitterly cold wind blowing in off the River Mersey and they will say that this was their masterpiece.

And then:

The best 1-1 draw you will ever witness left Arsenal top of the Premier League with ten games to go but as Klopp wrapped Guardiola in a hug at the final whistle and the two men smiled at the spectacle they had just witnessed, the spectacle they had created, we smiled with them.

And also:

‘Whatever the result,’ Klopp had said before the match, ‘I don’t think anybody should open the bottles of champagne.’

The result vindicated him. Let’s leave the champagne for those who were fortunate enough to have seen what we saw on Sunday and hold it as a cherished memory.

Mediawatch is now really quite viscerally troubled by what, specifically, Holt saw and cherished on Sunday.

The Aldo files
Sometimes, Mediawatch sees something and stores it away for future reference rather than steaming straight in. Hard as it may be to believe there is ever thought and planning behind this column, it very occasionally is the case.

One such was John Aldridge’s Liverpool Echo column last week in the wake of Liverpool’s last-gasp and highly controversial winner against Nottingham Forest.

Now the interesting thing with the thrust of Aldridge’s comments last week is that Mediawatch 100 per cent agreed with them.

He was right to call out the shameful, nauseating poverty-chanting from some Forest fans, because it’s a genuinely abysmal thing that always merits calling out.

But what really interested us were his comments about Liverpool’s winning goal, and Forest’s (utterly absurd) over-reaction to the decision around drop-ball that preceded it.

If it were me, I’d probably be aggrieved. But he did it to us in the first half. If their defence can’t see it out and panic, that’s not our fault. We just took advantage of it.

And that sits under a very correct headline.

Nottingham Forest supporters need a wake-up call – it’s not Paul Tierney’s fault they lost to Liverpool

Mediawatch is entirely on board with everyone agreeing that very, very few results are settled by a specific officiating error, and that it would be greatly beneficial to all in the long term if more clubs and more pundits were more willing to indulge in some introspection instead of lashing out at officials every time a decision or result doesn’t go your way.

But the one problem with all this was that it was coming from John Aldridge, a man who complains about referees every time a decision or result doesn’t go Liverpool’s way.

He kicked off his column on a thoroughly entertaining 2-2 draw with Brighton in October like this, for instance.

Another Premier League weekend, another decision that has gone against us.

That decision was the failure to send off Pascal Gross after he gave away a penalty (note, Liverpool did get the penalty).

Aldridge goes on to concede a draw was a fair result anyway – making his decision to focus almost entirely on the officials a curious leaping-off point if we are to take his Forest arguments in good faith – before listing various other grievances.

We’ve had the Mac Allister red card against Bournemouth, Van Dijk’s dismissal at Newcastle, the absolute shambles of the Tottenham game, and now this.

Fair enough with the Spurs one (he also led his column that week on that particular ‘disgrace’ but yeah, probably fair enough on that specific occasion) but eight games into the season is quite early to be this deep into a conspiracy.

And then there was this after the 1-1 draw with Arsenal, again ignoring everything else that happened at Anfield or anything else Liverpool could themselves have done to alter that result, preferring instead to pluck at the low-hanging fruit.

I am seriously concerned by the standard of officiating we are seeing in the Premier League on a weekly basis.

Quite how Martin Odegaard’s handball against Liverpool on Saturday evening was missed is an absolute mystery.

Sounds like somebody needs a wake-up call about blaming entire results on one single refereeing decision. But there’s more; on this occasion, it wasn’t just a result that hinged on that one specific decision, but the entire season.

This wrong call could be the difference between us winning the league and finishing second.

It could, if one is willing to ignore absolutely everything else that happened in that game and indeed the ENTIRE SEASON.

Now, Mediawatch was, very charitably, willing to let this all go last week because we were willing to accept the slim yet real possibility that maybe Aldridge had seen the error of his referee-blaming ways.

Maybe he truly had experienced an epiphany and realised that actually the players and managers have far more impact on results than the officials, and that such knee-jerk instant and automatic focus on refs or VAR helps nobody. Maybe it really was just a complete coincidence that this Damascene conversion happened to occur after a controversial decision that went Liverpool’s way.

Even with the Odegaard one, there was a hint of sadness as he lamented that the handball decision ‘shouldn’t be overshadowing what was a great game’ while devoting almost his entire column to that handball decision. Maybe he really was changing his mind.

Mainly, though, if we’re honest, we held it back because we knew it would be no time at all before he decided something else had gone against Liverpool and would instantly be back to his old self.

Sure enough, after the late penalty incident against Manchester City, we get this.

I am a bit bitter about Man City – VAR have bottled another huge Liverpool decision

Come on, Aldo, it’s not the officials’ fault Luis Diaz couldn’t locate a bovine backside with a stringed instrument, is it? That was the thrust of the argument last week, and rightly so. Too easy to just lazily blame the officials yet again when players make mistakes all the time.

Now, though, we’re straight back to the Aldo of old.

But I have to say VAR should have stepped in to tell [Michael Oliver] there should be a penalty and Stuart Attwell at Stockley Park has bottled it, unfortunately.

It’s the 98th minute, it’s the biggest game of the season, the world is watching and I reckon they just didn’t want the controversy and the fallout from awarding the penalty so late in the game. Attwell has all the tools in front of him to see it in slow motion, time and time again and come to the correct decision. Again, he has bottled it.

Then comes the familiar recounting of previous injustices.

Look at the Luis Diaz ‘goal’ against Tottenham and the Martin Odegaard handball for Arsenal at Anfield and file this one alongside those. It was another shocking decision.

We’re sure it’s just a complete accident that he’s forgotten to file last week’s error alongside those.

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda
The word ‘could’ straining under vast, unsustainable weight in this Mirror headline.

Xabi Alonso could block Liverpool transfer as first act after replacing Jurgen Klopp

It’s a textbook bit of Mirror mischief, really, in which no story at all is spun from the ether and then given a headline that doesn’t even really fit that concocted tale anyway.

First of all, most obviously, Alonso doing anything at all as his ‘first act after replacing Jurgen Klopp’ will require Alonso to actually be the one who replaces Jurgen Klopp.

But let’s just pretend that’s happening. Fine.

So what’s this transfer that he’s going to block? As his ‘first act’ remember; this is the most important thing in the Alonso in-tray. First thing he’ll sort out. We’ll give you 10 guesses before revealing the intro which, in fairness, does at least get to its (albeit curious) point without further delay.

Liverpool have yet to make a decision on the successor to manager Jurgen Klopp, but if they move for Xabi Alonso then it could be good news for youngster Luke Chambers.

Long story short, Chambers is playing quite well on loan at Wigan, they or someone else might want to do another loan move for him, while ‘it has been claimed’ Alonso tried to sign him on loan for Bayer Leverkusen (not, importantly, for Liverpool) and might therefore want to have him in his Liverpool squad. With this series of probables and possibles and claims stitched together, an entirely hypothetical transfer is thus entirely hypothetically blocked.

There’s literally nothing here. This is all just conjecture, all just plucked from the air. There are no quotes. Even the absolute key building block – Alonso’s own apparent interest in the player – is nothing more than a claim.

There is no story. Just a thing that might conceivably happen if another thing also happens after another thing also happens. And absolutely nothing whatsoever to justify that ‘first act’ flourish in the headline.

Has it always been like this? Mediawatch is sure it hasn’t always been like this. We’re sure you used to at least make some pretence that a news story contained actual news.

Is it better now that the pretence has just been dropped altogether? That ‘this might happen and then that might and then this could’ is now an acceptable story structure?

Is it better than when stories like this would have to be at least nominally stood up by those convenient unnamed sources who exist at every major club and are apparently the only humans on earth who when they speak do so in 200-word gobbets of fluent tabloidese? We really don’t know any more.