Whilst the catalyst for the media onslaught was unquestionably Sterling daring to leave the dippers, and in the process delivering them (the media) a golden opportunity to harvest clicks galore, there is no way that from then on in racism hasn’t been an underlying motivation. The 4 papers that have consistently pilloried Sterling the most have been the Fail, the Sun, the Star and the Express, all of them right wing publications, all of them ever ready to play up to the prejudices of their demented readerships.
Every story in the Fail in particular comes with a comments section, and every story is designed to enrage Tory voters in the Shires to the point that they log on and start venting their bile. It has “go to” scapegoats too numerous to mention. Lily Allen and Gary Lineker both dared to speak out against conditions in the migrant camps in Northern France. Both are served up as tax dodging, luvvies on a near daily basis. There is always a non-story about “breastfeeding in public places” to undermine women’s rights, there is always a “single mums most likely to die of cancer” scare story designed to promote the idylls of marriage, and you would have to be blind not to see its agenda on Brexit, with 20 stories a day referring to “remoaners”, “traitors” (judges), and “the will of the people.”
I am constantly amazed then that people would imagine that papers would necessarily limit their prejudices to the front pages only, as if promulgating them on the sport’s pages would be to cross some imaginary line of morality. Raheem Sterling is a young, successful black man, of Jamaican descent, everything readers of the Fail would instinctively fear and loathe, and if you want a recent example of its race-related bias, it was the double page “a tattoo-free hero England can be proud of” pile of bullshit it served up as an homage to St Harry of Kaneshire when the manufactured “Sterling gun tattoo” outrage was at its zenith
