When one of my rag mates put this up on Facebook last night I assumed I'd stumbled into a 'fanzone' area of the MEN site where they let City and united fans blog mind-numbing 'banter' about each other. I was staggered to realise that this guy is actually a fully paid-up staff member and this nonsense was published in the main section of their site.
What I find even more staggering is that a professional sports journalist has spent the biggest football match of the season scanning the crowd for empty seats rather than focusing on the action in the middle. These are not 'swathes' of empty seats; in fact they're barely noticeable, even with Lynch's ridiculous red rings around them.
This is clearly someone who attended this match (or watched it on TV) with a preconceived idea of what he was going to write afterwards, and then spent 90 mins trying to find the flimsiest of evidence to back it up. I suppose the question is, whose preconceived idea was it - his own or his superiors'?
We all read the police reports last year about the thousands of weekly no-shows at the Swamp, and we've all seen sellout games at City that are well below capacity, so there is a modicum of potential for delivering a fairly sensible opinion on the matter, but this particular game was clearly not relevant.
The MEN could have attempted to explore the myriad reasons behind this growing phenomenon for ALL football clubs (TV companies messing around with kick-off times, wealthy JCLs buying up season tickets with the intention of only going to 'big' games, the growing geographical spread of supporters, the impact of televised games, too many seats going to sponsors/corporates, inadequate ticket exchange schemes etc etc), but instead they chose to have a pathetically ill-informed sly dig at ickle old Ciddy, alienating a huge slice of their readership in the process.
It tells you everything you need to know about this pathetic excuse for a newspaper that their so-called journalists would rather throw playground jibes around than properly investigate the actual issues affecting real football fans. Shame on them. I certainly won't be clicking on it again.
