Our Wankers this Week are the tabloid press, and the Daily Mail in particular. I bet that came as a surprise, didn't it? Not.
I may be making a huge mistake here, but I'm going to stick my oar in about the World Cup and the England team's departure from it. We live in a culture of blame, of course, and it was only to be expected that unless we actually won the whole competition there would be ravening packs roaming the streets looking for blood.
Logic would dictate that the packs would consist of disappointed England football fans, or out-of-work football managers resenting the fact that the FA had employed an Italian, or professional footballers confident that they'd have done better if only they'd been selected. That would have made sense at least, people who have studied the game and are presumably entitled to a bit of an opinion about it. But no, that's not the way it works.
The vengeful mobs are, as every fule know, journalists. And mostly journalists from the gutter press, at that (that's the Daily Mail, in case you aren't a regular visitor to this website). We've seen the blaring emotive headlines: “England's flops”, “the shamed stars” ... “the humiliated players” and so on. The Mail went on to attack the footballers because they earn so much money. If we'd won, the thought would never have crossed their tiny minds.
Never a paper to be afraid of leaping to unfounded conclusions, the Mail immediately has its claws into the manager: “Fabio Capello's tenure as England manager appeared to be over last night”, it said. The story byline was from South Africa, despite the fact that the FA will presumably make any decisions in the UK.
The Mail evidently expects the shamed, humiliated flops to crawl before the wrath of Derry Street, and unleashes a storm of indignant protest the moment any of them appear to be behaving like real people. Under the headline “Glad you're finding it funny”, the Mail's hacks write “With their nation humiliated after England's worst ever World Cup defeat, you might think looks of shame would be etched on the players' faces. Instead, just hours after the country's dismal 4-1 defeat to Germany Ashley Cole and Ledley King wore broad grins as they were spotted sharing a joke. The infuriating scene ....” Only a humourless, small-minded, self-righteous pen-pusher would be so annoyed at the sight of two healthy young men telling each other a joke. Oh, and shouldn't that have been “by Germany”? Footballers are humiliated because they let a couple of goals in, but professional journalists who can't write their own language can hold their heads high, apparently.
Even the estimable Richard Littlejohn, usually to be relied on for plain-speaking and common sense, gets into the act: “Three lions? More like the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz”. Wow. A cultural reference, even. That's really ... well, I suppose it's what passes for pungent wit in the rarified upper levels of Derry Street.
Other papers are not blameless. The Express described the team, confusingly, as “Undressed, embarrassed and finally humiliated”, and went on to propose that “the ignominy was complete”. To be fair, the article did also talk intelligently of the tactical factors that may have contributed to the result, like the dogged adherence to 4-4-2, and a rather unwarranted faith in the powers of Emile Heskey, which was a bit more than the Mail could manage ...
All right. This is what we think down here in deepest Grumpyshire: we lost a football match, that's what we think.
Our team weren't as good as the other team, or weren't as lucky, or something, and they scored less goals than the other side. Down here we don't feel particularly humiliated, to be honest, and we can't quite see what all the fuss is about. Do we describe our village football team as cowards or flops when they lose to the village down the road?
You may answer that Lampard and Gerrard and Co. aren't a village football team, they're very highly paid professionals. But the people they were playing against are highly paid professionals too, so you can stick that argument over the line by about half a metre.
And this is the other thing we think: this result was not a really a defeat for our country. It was not a defeat for our players. It was not a defeat for the manager. It was not a defeat for the fans.
It was a defeat for the newspapers.
It wasn't us, the fans, who printed great black headlines a few weeks ago about how England were going to win the World Cup – we knew they weren't going to: we hoped they would, but in our heart of hearts we knew they wouldn't. It wasn't the players who sat in an ITV television studio on Saturday night and said solemnly that England were almost certain to beat Germany. No, all the players did was put their lives on hold for months and months, train themselves until the pips squeaked, then run about with colossal agility and perseverance, risking permanent injury in flying tackles or brain damage every time they headed the ball. Have you ever noticed how famous footballers all look ten years older than they really are? That's because they're using themselves up at a faster rate than normal people, which is why they can look forward to a middle age of constant pain and a crippled old age. And no gold-plated public service guaranteed pension, either, so you have to hope they've got the sense to salt some of their outrageous salaries away.
And what of the manager? He may have made some errors, true enough. Many pundits have criticised his tactics, but you have to admit that he never claimed that 4-4-2 was a world-beating discovery or that Emile Heskey could walk on water.
And it wasn't him who did his best to whip the entire nation into a hysteria of misplaced confidence. That was the newspapers. Yes, these same newspapers that are now howling for sackings and ritual humiliation. Let's boot Capello out, let's seize the players' assets, send their Mercedes to the crusher, take their children into care and fill their Sunningdale mansions with illegal immigrants on housing benefit, because they've failed to live up to the completely unreasonable expectations we created for them!
So ... there you have it. That's the World Cup news down here in Grumpyshire. The tabloid press are brainless dickheads, and everyone who works for the Daily Mail is a Wanker.
Now that that's established, would they please do us all a favour, allow us to lick our wounds in dignified privacy, and bloody well shut up about it?
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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