Readers of Football365′s Mediawatch section will be aware of just how much stuff on the back pages of newspapers is utter fiction, but one example struck me recently as pretty breathtaking: ‘Carlos Tevez in Euro taunt at Manchester United‘. The opening line of the article claims that:
CARLOS TEVEZ says winning the Europa League with Manchester City would match his Champions League triumph with United.
Except he doesn’t say anything even vaguely similar to this. The article quotes Tevez talking about the possibility of winning the Europa League and claims that ‘Tevez insists a Euro success with City will rank alongside that famous night in Moscow’, but what he actually says is:
My hope is that I win something with Manchester City.
I want to win here just as I did with Manchester United.
That is what we are here for. I would love to do it.
All the games are important and all competitions are very important.
But the manager has made it clear how important the Europa League is.
So the headline, the introduction and the repetition that Tevez ‘insists’ that winning the Europa League would match winning the Champion’s League is a complete fabrication – Tevez does not even mention the Champion’s League.
This is fairly typical of back-page journalism, headlines stating that one manager has ‘blasted’ another, that one player wants to move somewhere and so forth are almost entirely fictional. I guess when you get used to the deception and lies that newspapers think they can get away with on the front page, you can imagine just how bad the back page is.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Email]](http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
4 Comments
Ah, a couple of classic sports verbs in there. He’s ‘insisting’ that winning something will be like winning something else, because I’m pretty sure he was challenged quite heavily. And a ‘taunt’ that is ‘well, I’d quite like to win something’. Beautiful.
Well spotted, but isn’t this fairly common, to the point of being pretty much accepted practice, in tabloid football journalism? It’s part and parcel of the game, in an oddly unique way.
I dunno, as a fan of football and the football pages of papers, I almost *enjoy* the manufactured hype and grossly extrapolated quotes in the Sun, Mirror, etc. I don’t buy these papers, but if I spot a stray copy on the train I’ll generally have a browse through the back pages, and I’m not really sure it’s apt to hold them to the same standards as somebody reporting on the G8, for example.
As long as the basic facts in the article are accurate and a player/manager isn’t explicitly misquoted, I for one don’t mind a bit of flavour-enhanced headline on the back pages.
The back pages are beyond saving now. They’ve just been allowed to deteriorate for so long that they’ve become a stagnant wasteland of tittle-tattle, misquotations and out-and-out b***s**t. You simply can’t tackle it all, it’s relentless.
The transfer window is the worst time of all They’ll link absolutely any player to absolutely any club and back up each story with convenient quotes from a ‘source inside the club’ or a ‘source close to the player’. I don’t believe any transfer story until it appears on the BBC Sport site, thank god they still prefer accurate stories to sensationalist claptrap.
Timely expose of the drivel written on back pages of tabloid newspapers.
Gullible fans are duped by a blizzard of bilge on fictional transfer rumours, particulalrly during the summer months.
One Trackback / Tweetback