Russell Cowper looks in vain for sense in the silly season.
The silly season is now going into overdrive as red tops fight each other to print the most ludicrous hyperbole you could possibly imagine and then some you probably thought could only derive from the realms of fantasy.
The hacks take great care to show they are unbiased, favour no club and only report “facts”. In reality it is a fake news-fest of Trumpian proportions and its delivery must have the Donald himself creased up laughing at its ridiculousness.
I’m sure we all have opinions of which hack, newspaper, or radio station star in this One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest-esque version of reality. The way they all strive to conjure up headlines of multi Zillions spent by one team unjustly but the same amount spent by another team is perfectly acceptable. Each version of any story increases the rhetoric ten fold. It is like buying a coffee at Costa for a pound, by the time you get to the door it cost 5 pound, eventually when you get to the car it cost 50 pound, but the cup is empty and becomes a non-story, yet the desperate hacks claim the coffee wasn’t wanted anyway and has moved to Starbucks for 500 pounds, although it is rumoured a London coffee company is expected to offer 5,000 pounds for the coffee.
Then we have the comparisons, a much loved form of expression on social media. The people love comparisons, hence why Martyn Lewis does so well. The press love a comparison too, although their comparisons are of wildly unrelated issues. Last week we had the comparison of salaries to that of the Prime Minister. Due to my political persuasion I rated her as about equivalent to a second team player at my local non-league club getting a fiver a week boot money.
The ludicrous one doing the rounds this week is the comparisons of what MCFC have spent on defence in relation to countries military budgets. The people who come up with this nonsense must have far too much time on their hands. I wonder if they will be waiting for Jim White night when some reporter outside a military base in Lichtenstein gets over excited as he hears that they are in talks with a Chieftain tank. One trundles past and hordes of locals make funny faces in front of the cameras in delight at the great addition to their defence. And it’s a loan signing as the UK have too many tanks on the payroll and want it to gain experience on the international stage.
I wonder if the signing of Alf Common in 1905 was met with lurid headlines in the Daily Bugle comparing the astronomical fee as being equivalent to a brand new naval Dreadnought.
And the circus goes on.
