Despite the fact that nowadays any goal scored in the Premiership can probably be downloaded, viewed and set as a screensaver before the Goalkeeper has fished the ball out of the net, managers of the league’s lower ranked clubs still have a tendency to get wounded about what they perceive as their placing lower down the highlight footage pecking order- a placing where, never mind your own chances of staying awake to watch it, you’re going to first want to make sure your Sky Plus box has plenty of strong coffee along with it for the journey.
These coaches always deliver their complaints wryly and on the back of a victory, which means that Gary Linekar can smile caustically and wave it off, but it’s clearly not an accusation that the BBC would welcome, particularly at a time when their right to operate as a funded independent media outlet is being scrutinised by several people with their own dubious agenda. How odd then that on Sunday night, when covering Newcastle United’s victory over Liverpool, Match of the Day 2 would be so open about their new policy on isolating incidents from particular matches, declaring no intention to show them, yet still going right ahead and condemning the player involved with smug assuredness in their own pretend outrage.
“Vulgar,” Colin Murray labelled Joey Barton scratching his crotch in the direction of the player who had just completed a forty yard sprint to confront him for no reason whatsoever (I’ve just remembered, you weren’t allowed to see it- the player was Torres, using the opportunity to double the amount of yards he's sprinted since Roy Hodgson joined Liverpool). He delivered his critique with such withered pomposity that I had initially thought he was joking. He does that a lot, I’ve noticed, Colin Murray, trys to tell jokes. And though you can mostly tell when other people are telling jokes because they’re making you laugh, there’s never any such luck with Colin Murray. But then Lee Dixon joined in and it became clear that the pair of them were being serious. Watching them in po-faced synchronisation felt like the sense of humour bypass equivalent of the famed Arsenal offside trap.
Something of a novelty on MotD2, being serious, given that the general mood of tends to be one of strained joviality, one that relishes the ‘lighter side’ of the game in much the same manner as loud people at work relish being thought of as characters. It certainly marked a jarring turn of pace to see them turn so puritanical on us without so much as the chilled silence that tends to precede such dark changes in the room’s mood (silence never being MotD2’s strongpoint- its every resolution seems to be accompanied by its own jaunty soundtrack). And it was an uplifting moment indeed, not to mention a relief, when the show rediscovered its mojo and moved on to 2good 2bad, a signature feature which usually features an elderly gentleman at Craven Cottage taking his teeth out to eat a pie and much faked laughter from back in the studio.
This week, Sunderland fans are singing ‘One Mike Ashley’, and how everybody laughed. Nobody is going to get defensive about that. But I would argue that MotD2 choosing to celebrate the chant- leaving aside its Wildean wit a second, and leaving aside the national media’s tendency to ruffle Sunderland’s hair and laugh along with them whenever their fans taunt Newcastle for reasons that, were they pointed out, would only upset their fans- places them in a rather precarious position. Who is doing more damage to English football, the talented and tee-totalling English footballer who speaks eruditely and honestly, or the dishonest club owner doing his best to strip a club dry and take it for all it has? And if it’s the latter why choose to jokingly indulge the celebration of him alongside taking umbrage at the former’s own, at worst, jokey indulgences? It couldn’t be because that player is Joey Barton could it?
As Kriss Knights, who writes for The Mag and has published two books on Newcastle United, puts it: "People who don’t like him see Barton as the very epitome of what is wrong with modern footballers, which is crap because Barton has shown more public contempt for the spoiled and over-rated within his profession than any other player in the league. If he is the epitome of anything – it’s as a reflection of how the world has treated Newcastle United."
The FA are not punishing Barton (stunning on Saturday night, by the way, the point was made afterwards that it was a shame Gerrard wasn’t on the pitch as he would have been thoroughly shown up by the type of focused, disciplined, selfless and dynamic performance his ego hasn’t allowed from him in years), though they “will be writing to him to remind him of his responsibilities”. As NUFC.COM notes, “Doubtless that will come as a great disappointment to the BBC, in particular the odious Colin Murray.”
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