Further to my remarks about media football reporting the other day, I found myself perusing the Daily Telegraph pages this morning (they're free and I am not so violently left wing that the DT bothers me in any way), and I noticed that they had "pictures of this week's Premiership action" available. In fact I discovered that, on my computer at any rate, the pop-up utility that the DT employs for this only shows the first picture (Newcastle-Arsenal, shock horror), then half the second one (ditto), but thereafter nothing more than the captions. The Charlton-Everton pics (2) are therefore unseen by me, but the captions certainly bear out my argument.
The first one is: Duncan Ferguson was sent off ten minutes of the second half, which signalled the beginning of the end for Everton. Charlton went on to win through goals from Talal El Karkouri and Hermann Hreidarsson
Note that it doesn't in fact make sense according to the rules of English, but the impression it gives is that Ferguson was sent off after 55 minutes, not 83, and that this was the only reason that Charlton won. In fact the beginning of the end for Everton was TEK's 82nd-minute goal; the continuation of the end was the ex-con belting HH and being sent off, and the culmination of the beginning of the end was HH scoring. The actual end came when Mike Riley blew for full-time eight minutes later. But also note that this is not an unbiased account of what happened. The whole thing reads as if the caption were accompanying a report being published in the Liverpool Echo, rather than in a national newspaper.
The second caption is Everton missed their chance to go second in the Premiership after they were beaten 2-0 by Charlton at the Valley
This one isn't actually wrong, but it still reads as though it is from the Liverpool Echo; the tone is one of "how dare Charlton, lying 8th, defeat Everton, lying 3rd, when Everton could have gone 2nd and made a better story for everyone?" There is no reflection on Charlton's play at all, and here the implication is that Everton could easily have won, if they hadn't missed some putative 'chance', and that Charlton only won because Everton somehow allowed them to. As I say, there is an awful lot of this around in football reporting, and although I wasn't going to make any New Year's Resolutions, I might make it my business to take the argument to the British press this year and do some serious complaining about media bias against clubs which weren't successful when the writers or broadcasters were little boys (I don't think it is the same with girls, someone will doubtless put me straight on that one), for that is what seems to me to be the cause of all this.
As I mentioned in a posting a few months back; to me, a little boy in the mid-to-late fifties, and to many people of my age, the clubs that were in Division One at the time are the only 'proper' top-flight clubs, and they include Luton Town, Cardiff City and Preston North End. Clubs like Liverpool, West Ham, Southampton, Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Norwich or Crystal Palace, some of which weren't even in Division Two at the time, still, to me, have the air of the interloper about them. It is, I suspect, a very common syndrome, but professional sports writers should be aware of it, and try not to let it influence what they say.
A Happy New Year to Rory; David; Gitte, Luis; my cousin Elizabeth; Annie, and my other readers, albeit unknown to me, and don't bother making resolutions you know you won't keep.