The Media just love a bit of Toon bashing

[TheMoog 0]

Football FanCast columnist Chris Mackin looks at the latest media bashing of his beloved Newcastle.

 

Less an entertaining round table discussion based show and more a room full of pub bores rustling newspapers and grunting moronically at each other, Sky's Sunday Supplement is a show catered around the sole premise of irritating you; that's what it is, that what it does. Credit where it's due, it gets the job done brilliantly; it makes waiting in a queue at the cash machine look like sitting down with a nice cup of tea and a good book.

 

The show began as something of an oddity. Time was, Jimmy Hill pretended to be hosting the show from his kitchen- a baffling artifice seemingly designed with the clubber on a Sunday morning come down in mind- and the whole thing had a bizarre charm which meant its more distasteful qualities were well concealed beneath a blanket of Jimmy's family albums and china tea pots and homespun cosiness. This wouldn't do though, we needed ‘slick'. Sterile and self important discussion soon replaced homeliness and the whole thing soon descended into unpleasant and pompous posturing.

 

Terrified of sensible and constructive discourse, the guests take it in turns to spout all the latest platitudes, only ever spicing things up with tedious clichés and trite received wisdom, each of them abstaining from ever disagreeing with one another. Occasionally you'll get the finely spoken and elegant Patrick Barclay speak in eloquent defence of Steve McClaren and his normally obnoxious and gobby colleagues will clam up in sheer confusion, the expression on their faces replaced by neon flashing ‘DOES NOT COMPUTE' messages. Most of the time though, the show works as an instructive snap shot of sports reporting in this country, all sneering and bullying and shouty strength in numbers. This is all violently disheartening, of course, and rotten and insidious at its core, but it's not until the subject of your club is brought up that you are able fully abandon your critical faculties in favour of swearing loudly and hurling any household pets to hand at your television screen.

 

That Newcastle United, then, cuh, what is earth is going on down there with those crazy Geordies and their madcap antics? Sam?

 

Sam Wallace was on today's show. A fine writer with an interesting take on things, Wallace was the first journalist to point out Holland's first goal against Italy at Euro 2008 was actually perfectly legitimate. Yet shove a mic into his shirt collar and an unconvincing spread of sandwiches on the table by him and he turns into a blustering Talk Sport presenter stuck in traffic. He isn't blaming Joey Barton for being fouled yesterday, which is conciliatory of him, but does feel that "He made the story himself by being there". So the plan is that Joey Barton must cease to exist lest anything bad ever again happen in his immediate vicinity; fine in theory, perhaps but perhaps a bit trickier to implement in practice. It's Arsenal I feel bad for- a team built on pacifism and honesty having to resort to sneaky fouls they ordinarily consider so anathema and being forced into kicking that nasty Joey Barton for the sake of all humanity.

 

And Keegan will retire when Owen goes for twenty five pence, a couple of drags off Spurs' Lambert and a shot on their Xbox 360 later on. Obviously. Well, why wouldn't he, now that James Milner has left and it's crisis time and our certain relegation has been cemented and the Germans are coming, THE GERMANS ARE COMING. (I don't want to say too much about Milner, by the way, because he's handled himself with a measure of grace you don't see exhibited by so many other big daft drama queen professional footballers, but, em, twelve million pounds for a winger who can't cross a football? We'll probably wind up coping somehow).

 

And they all share the assumption that Keegan wasn't being truthful when he said Milner leaving was his decision. They do this with such disdainful nonchalance that it's easy to forget they're calling Keegan a liar (and if they done that in print they'd get sued). And the reason he gave Barton another chance is because, according to the News of the World's Andy Dunn, "he was desperate". Unlike Steve Bruce, who Sam feels doesn't get the credit for sticking by Jermaine Pennant after his spell in chokey (bringing this up in a rather incongruous manner, incidentally- ten minutes after the mass condemnation of Keegan and Barton was over and when everybody else was discussing Spurs' slow start to the season- shows that either Wallace has a giant void in his brain where everybody else has a sense of irony or the man has an eye for sly mischief to rival Andy Kauffman.)

 

Dunn provided a brief moment of (albeit inadvertent) redemption when describing Newcastle as "masters of controlled chaos". This makes them sound so much like The Joker that it could have been an extract from the press release promoting the new film and this, coupled with the fact that they are from the same city that produced ‘Viz', ran Oswald Mosley out of town and spawned Peter Beardsley means that, despite the lofty sniping from smug and badly informed onlookers, Newcastle United always win and everybody else always loses.

 

Something different to transfer news

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Some good points there.