The maths isn’t mathsing for TNT Sports, while The Sun are now quoting the voices in their heads and the Daily Express suffers death by thesaurus.
Route 66
Genuinely quite an impressive effort to make Tottenham and Man United’s Premier League seasons look even worse than they actually are, so hats off to TNT Sports‘ social team for managing it with this post on hate-fillled cesspit X.com – formerly hate-filled cesspit twitter.com – which somehow stayed defiantly, wrongly alive for very nearly an hour before grudgingly accepting its inevitable ‘Hmm…this page doesn’t exist’ fate and the heartbreaking loss of all that sweet, sweet engagement.
Arsenal (66) currently have more league points than Tottenham and Man United combined this season (65).
As all the many, many replies and quotes that weren’t ignoring the maths and going straight for ‘Worra trophy’ pointed out: high-flying superclubs Spurs and Man United actually have a whopping great 75 points between them this season, meaning it is in fact only Liverpool who can boast more points than the pair of them combined.
And thus Spurs and Man United win, in the most minor way possible.
Sway of The Sun
No great shock that Manchester United would quite like to sign Matheus Cunha, and we’re not even going to get too cross about everyone gleefully drawing their own conclusions from his little tunnel chat with Ruben Amorim at Old Trafford at the weekend.
But one fight we refuse to give up despite having long been lost is the quaint idea that quote marks mean someone somewhere is being quoted. And so to The Sun and this headline.
Man Utd close in on Matheus Cunha transfer with £62.5m Wolves star ‘swayed’ after Ruben Amorim tunnel chat
The word swayed appears absolutely nowhere else at any point in the story. Not even in a picture caption. They are not even quoting themselves this time. Just a complete and utter cheat to hint at some statement or other indicator of authority that simply does not exist.
Killer instinct
Overwrought headline of the day honours go to the Express for this entirely calm and rational assessment of a manager serving a one-match touchline ban.
Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca hit with killer setback as top five twist emerges
Truly, if Chelsea do miss out on the Champions League we will all remember where we were when the news broke of Maresca’s killer one-match touchline ban. Mediawatch is also drawn uncomfortably to the following paragraph early in the story, because we simply refuse to believe it was written by a human.
‘The moment turned tumultuous when referee Anthony Taylor booked Maresca as the Chelsea coach and his team celebrated on the pitch post-Neto’s goal, which sealed a thrilling comeback at Craven Cottage. Tyrique George had equalised with his first Premier League goal 10 minutes before Neto secured the victory in the 93rd minute.’
‘The moment turned tumultuous’? And ‘celebrated on the pitch post-Neto’s goal’? Mediawatch has long enjoyed the sheer absurdity of tabloidese and the fact no actual real people ever talk anything like the way football journalists write, but this feels like a significant step beyond even the usual shite like ‘the Madrid-based schemer’ or ‘wantaway 18-goal frontman’.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Yet, with the pandemonium in southwest London, Chelsea now eye the possibility of ascending to third place when they tackle Everton, should other results swing their way, in what has become the latest twist in the race for the top 5 positions.
It could, we suppose, be nothing more than a chronically insecure writer armed with a thesaurus and just changing every fifth word to something that sounds grander. But our queasy gut tells us this just has to be lazy AI slop, doesn’t it? And with that Mediawatch once again feels the icy breath and long, bony fingers of death upon its shoulder.
Axe throwing
Plenty of the usual suspects having slightly mischievous fun with the brief VAR outage during Tottenham v Nottingham Forest last night, which amounted to eight minutes and zero incidents before it was back up and running.
But with any chance to have a pop at VAR a potential click-mine of hefty proportions, there will always be those keen to push their luck just a bit too far.
And today that prize goes to talkSPORT. Like so many of the decisions VAR likes to make hard and fast judgment on, it is really entirely subjective just how much artistic licence you allow in these situations.
Mediawatch would contend, though, that this headline is more than a Chris Wood nipple offside.
VAR axed midway through Tottenham’s clash with Nottingham Forest due to bizarre mix-up
It wasn’t ‘axed’, it was temporarily out of use. And it wasn’t a bizarre mix-up, it was a fire alarm.
At the risk of going full tinfoil hat, Mediawatch would contend that there wouldn’t be this kind of headline about this had there not been a borderline VAR call earlier in the match, one that inevitably imbues ‘axed’ and ‘bizarre mix-up’ with weight the actual story simply cannot carry alone.