It must be like a double-edged sword for the rags at times: on the one hand you will rarely, if ever, see a negative article about them in the media and the tabloids. They will not be publicly called out for the money they've wasted or for the amount of years they've been doing it, you never ever hear Sly/BBC/ITV ridiculing them for spending billions and billions on over-priced crap players when all they've got to show for it is playing for survival rather than trophies.
Myself, and many others have long felt that they are being 'protected' by the media in this country: as if they have some kind of hold over the establishment, an agreement that the media will treat them with kid gloves all the time.
If this is the case, it means the plastic day-trippers will have no idea of just how bad things really are at the swamp because they are never told the truth.
We see the brief highlights on MotD and other programmes, but even from the highlights we can see that -despite the tabloids' insistence that the rags are a great team playing terrific football, etc- we can see that they are in fact a very very poor mid-table team who have repeatedly been assisted by various forms of football officialdom over the years to keep them relevant.
The last few games reported on by Slimy Stone that I have bothered to read have been in stark contrast to what I have seen on the tv. It's almost as if the likes of Slimy and the others are seeing a different team to the one I'm seeing. He sees a team of 'highly skilled players' giving their all for the collective, whereas I see a handful of sub-par journeymen interested only in topping-up their bank accounts. These players couldn't give a flying fuck about the club, they couldn't care less about the Far Eastern market and the selling of club shirts and other forms of merchandise. They know that if the club was dissolved tomorrow they would all jet their way back home to the multi-million pounds they have accumulated for turning up and going through the motions for the rags. Why should they give a fuck about where their money comes from? It's entirely legal, and if the club is happy to pay a player three hundred grand a week to just basically show his face for a couple of hours a week then of course they're going to bite your arms off. Fair play.
But one day, in the not too distant future, the whole facade is going to go crumbling down to earth because, as the saying goes: 'You can't fool all of the people all of the time.'
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