The assumption of any match report is that the writer’s eye is an unfettered and impartial one, and one unencumbered by distractions. How much stock this idea holds rests mainly on who the reporter is and, more importantly, what the seating plan in the press box is. Certainly, if you’re sat next to Andy Dunn from the News of the World for ninety minutes, you’re going to be less likely to lose yourself in conversation.
Journalists happily go along with this conceit because, when you’re being paid generously to watch football and scoff on prawn soufflés at halftime, it may seem slightly like pushing your luck to be doing something else, browsing your friends’ status updates, say, or otherwise just looking in the wrong direction, when a big shout goes up for a penalty in the second half. So you rarely get a match report like this one, which begins with the confession that I didn’t actually see some of the game, as it was on the television in the corner behind the counter, and I was supposed to be working at the time.
So, 2-1 to Man City, yeah? Yeah, I just about caught that, in between a sea of fifteen year olds attempting to buy cigarettes and men asking the score and otherwise trying too hard to be interested in a cheap bid to impress their girlfriends.
City’ll be happy then, though no doubt pained by their overall failure to get Mark Lawrenson on board with the project. “The equaliser does not mask how second best City have been in this half,” he said, following Carlos Tevez’s penalty.
But surely it does exactly that? It is the purpose of goals to render peripheral, almost trifling, matters pertaining to possession graphs and amount of time the ball has spent in each half meaningless, is it not? To decry them for their entire purpose seems odd, and speaks to an obsession with analysis and ‘straight laced punditry’, which serves to miss a fundamental point, one crucial to our understanding of the game: namely, that none of that other stuff is important. When other pundits talk of the only thing mattering is what is in the top corner of the screen, they tend to not be referring to the instruction to press red for interactive options.
What the second City goal masked, you would have to ask Mark, as I was busy at the time outlining our strict no returns policy on already half drank from bottles of wine. I caught the celebration, though, and somebody really needs to have a word with Carlos Tevez. Is it just me that finds his chronic inability to move on from his rejection at Manchester United a teeny bit embarrassing? It cannot be doing much good for the City fans’ egos either.
He is like an ex in a bad sitcom plot, all extravagant gestures and attention seeking. At one point I thought he was going to jump on the lap of his new boss, only after first ensuring his old one was looking over. Carlos, be a man: tell your friends you couldn’t care less, cry yourself to sleep for a few months and spend the next three years plagued by a low key but nagging depression, the source of which must never be revealed. We’ll get you through this together, bro.
One last note, this from Guy Mowbray, with Man. Utd one up and playing well (they played well all night, I thought, Rooney was superb): “The fans have responded too. It sounds a little like Old Trafford- not much noise coming from the home fans.” Yeah, I noticed that as well. Uncanny.
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