There are many explanations for the media's propensity to err from the holy path of objectivity, I am sure you all have your own ideas, but there certainly have been several examples of late. Arseblogger pointed out this example of Alan Green's poor error. It seems that on this occasion Alan Green jumped on a bandwagon to criticise Arsene Wenger having made no effort to check the basic facts of the story. Incidentally I heard him on 5live on Sunday spouting some more anti Arsene stuff while another pundit refused to join in with the Arsene bashing, despite Green's blatant encouragement.I find it amusing that when an Arsenal player dives, the incident is replayed time and time again, while the country's pundits feel the need to express their moral outrage for many days on end. However when Ronaldo dives it is condoned by the media, as Andy Gray did on Sunday, using an argument with logic as robust as the Titanic's design; and English players don't dive, do they?
The same happened with the differing approaches used by the media in analysing Martin Taylor and Abou Diaby's dangerous tackles. A significant part of the media tried to downplay Taylor's tackle as just an unlucky accident, with the player's character being praised as lacking any intent, the media also used the event as an excuse to attack Arsene Wenger for being upset that one of his players had had his ankle sticking out of his sock. Abou Diaby did not receive any of the character references that Taylor had done while the lack of intent was not highlighted by pundits to the same extent, despite the fact that Diaby's was not quite as reckless a challenge.
I was also slightly perturbed by the BBC's slightly evasive coverage of the Arsenal Manu game on MOTD2 last night. They failed to show several key incidents in the game, amongst them a great Bendtner header, a clip that would have included Ronaldo tugging rather firmly at his shirt. Hansen did not even consider the the penatly decision may have been a little harsh, I found this strange given that the ball rocketed onto Gallas' arm whilst it was kept vertically by his side, just where was the intent? It was also bizarre that Sky did not even replay the Evra free kick incident once during of after the game, whilst the BBC whitewashed over it at rather high speed.
Maybe I'm just a paranoid fool, but maybe not. Amazingly Fergie had the good grace to admit that we were a tad unfortunate, something the media prefer to ignore in continuing to highlight our failure to hold onto the lead. One wonders was England's defeat by Maradona's hand of God in 1986 all the fault of the defence for failing to hold onto the nil nil? You see the point I'm hacking towards.
