Trent 'not welcome' as left-wing firebrand Rodri counts cost of ...
Alarming levels of absolute guff in Mediawatch today, which really is saying something. Suffice to say that ’36-year-old human has different appearance to 13-year-old human’ isn’t the daftest part.
Talk Tonight
Our job here at Mediawatch Towers is to point an angrily wagging finger at the assorted misdemeanours/atrocities committed by the football media and shine a light on shoddy practice, deceptive reporting, clickbait and nonsense.
But our dirty little secret is that the worse this stuff gets the more, quite often, we grudgingly like it.
Sometimes the levels of absolute f*ckery that the British football media is willing to deploy, the lengths to which they are willing to sink just to get your click, are so craven, so utterly devoid of guile, so wilfully and unashamedly brazen that we simply cannot help but admire it.
One such example reaches us today, and it damn near has Mediawatch standing and applauding at its desk. Hats off, genuinely, to the Liverpool Echo here, because they have surpassed themselves. And regular Mediawatch readers will know that is f*cking saying something.
Here’s the headline.
Trent makes ‘not welcome’ admission over summer 2025 plans
This is so good precisely because of what it doesn’t say. Because to give away anything of just how trivial a throwaway comment they’ve actually built that headline from would be to entirely ruin the magic. The vagueness of ‘summer 2025 plans’ is so important there, but so too is the absence of any other context in the headline at all.
Summer 2025 is vital, because Trent Alexander-Arnold’s current Liverpool contract runs out in summer 2025. What the Echo have done cleverly here is make no specific mention of that whatsoever. They don’t need to – the Liverpool fans they’re targeting with this headline will all be very aware of that fact and can be relied on to make that leap themselves; not mentioning it directly gives the Echo the very tiniest veneer of plausible deniability. It’s genius, in a way.
Because, very obviously, Trent’s ‘not welcome’ ‘admission’ has absolutely nothing to do with his future at Liverpool, as you’ve likely already guessed. It only tangentially has anything to do with Liverpool. It certainly isn’t about him not being welcome there, at any rate.
No, where Trent is ‘not welcome’ with regard to his ‘summer 2025 plans’ is… at an Oasis reunion concert. Because he plays for Liverpool, you see? He was just doing what was very obviously intended and received as a little joke in a chat with Jamie Carragher and co on CBS after Liverpool’s win in Milan.
You don’t have to like it, but you do have to grudgingly concede its devious brilliance.
Rodri, you plonker
To the Telegraph, where the never-knowingly-reasonable Oliver Brown has had a lot to say about Rodri’s workload complaints.
What’s good here is that even Brown knows deep down that the key thrust of Rodri’s argument – one, very importantly, which he is far from alone in making – is absolutely, obviously and undeniably correct: that if you keep asking the best players to play more and more games then the overall quality of The Product is going to go down, either through those players getting injured, being unable to perform at their best, or simply having to sit out more games to try vainly to remain in optimum shape.
Even Brown can’t dispute this.
Rodri is right in one sense: that if the demands are too unrelenting, his body will break down and the quality of the product will suffer.
We do like that ‘in one sense’ given that what he’s accepted there is really the entire actual point.
But what Brown is not about to do is let Rodri get away with that. No, not when he has such an easy chance to take wild pot-shots at one of these modern overpaid footballers they have now – and a foreign one, at that – going around having an opinion when all that money means they should just shut up, thank you very much.
So while Rodri might be right, Brown quickly gets into why he is in fact wrong. Because, you see, this is actually Rodri’s fault after all. And for some important but not particularly clear reason, absolutely definitely not UEFA’s for deciding to expand the Champions League.
But whose fault is that? Is it Uefa’s? Or is it City’s, after their acquiescence in a revamped Champions League, a month-long Club World Cup next summer, not to mention a post-Euros pre-season tour extending from New York to Orlando, Charlotte to Columbus?
You hear all the time from top Premier League clubs about fixture congestion, about the non-stop hamster wheel that their players must suffer. They can also, however, be their own worst enemies. No sooner did Tottenham finish a gruelling campaign in May than they embarked, the very next day, on a 21,000-mile round trip for a friendly against Newcastle in Melbourne.
Yeah, Rodri. Got you there, hasn’t he? Didn’t hear you complaining about your workload when you personally arranged a post-season friendly between two Premier League clubs you’ve never played for, did we?
The Spain midfielder duly exposed as nothing more than a wealthy hypocrite, Brown gets to his main thrust. That Rodri’s suggestion players might go on strike is beyond the pale.
It is not so much the money – although a North Sea oil rig worker could reasonably object to a man earning £180,000 a week fretting about heightened injury risk – as the principle. Never mind a first-world problem, the grievance expressed by the Manchester City midfielder affects such a tiny proportion of players that the very notion of industrial action is preposterous.
Does seem like it is quite a bit about the money, Oliver, because you’ve immediately mentioned what he earns there, while making a comparison that makes absolutely no sense because Rodri isn’t comparing footballers to oil-rig workers because that would be a mad comparison that couldn’t possibly be made in good faith. Could it, Oliver?
It’s just a mad rhetorical device to deploy, this one, the only logical conclusion being that in the eyes of those making such a comparison it is poor form to complain about anything at all unless it is as arduous and dangerous as working on a North Sea oil rig.
Brown goes on to explain why a strike is a terrible idea because actually only a relative few players are affected by Rodri-level burnout. And while you may be as surprised as Mediawatch to learn that a Telegraph journalist is so sickened by the very thought of a group of workers taking collective action for the greater good, it’s also interesting that he doesn’t feel the need to actually include a single quote from Rodri himself in his riposte.
Perhaps because Rodri goes no further than saying players are ‘close’ to perhaps possibly considering strike action, rather than already being in the process of whipping up some placards with ‘HONK IF YOU SUPPORT A 50-GAME SEASON’ painted on them.
And of course, Rodri didn’t bring up the idea of strikes unprompted. He was asked about them and responded.
“If it keeps [going] this way, there will be a moment where we have no other option, but let’s see.”
It’s not quite the tubthumping union kingpin rhetoric Brown is hinting at, is it? It’s a bloke who’s hacked off with his workload going “Yeah, maybe” when asked if strike action is a future possibility.
But Mediawatch imagines the other reason Rodri’s actual words make no appearance in Brown’s straw-man destruction is that he makes it very clear this isn’t just his view or that of the small handful of players Brown insists are affected.
‘If you ask any player, they will say the same. It’s the general opinion of the players.’
Mediawatch is left to sadly conclude that the only way to save football is to send all players to a North Sea oil rig until they stop bloody moaning.
READ: Why Bruno Fernandes should lead Rodri in a players’ strike
Investigation Room
In the grand scheme and by wider Reach standards the following headline on the Mirror’s website is only a mildly sh*thouse one.
Anthony Taylor removed from refereeing duty as Premier League launch investigation
But given said investigation is not into Taylor and/or his own performance at all, as that headline so heavily implies, but in fact into what the Mirror themselves call ‘sickening’ ‘online trolls’ sending him ‘vile abuse’ on social media, it does seem like it might be one story where they might just for once consider not being disingenuous in the grimly relentless quest for a few extra clicks.
Unlucky 13
Breaking news from the Daily Star.
Neville Southall ‘well done, he’s 13’ star unrecognisable from Michael Owen clip
Truly, ‘36-year-old man no longer resembles 13-year-old boy’ is quite the scoop from the top Star diggers.
But that’s not even the maddest part of this. What’s mad is that the tweet from Neville Southall in which he’s pictured once again with the infamous goalkeeper in question, Jamie Hutchinson, is itself two years old.
Never mind Jamies, Twitter itself is unrecognisable from when this was actually any kind of news. Back then, for instance, it was still called Twitter.
