Unfair Coverage

As a sportsman, I've had cause to have my name in print more than a lot of people, and I'm nothing special.

Anyone who's had their name printed because of sporting achievements will be able to attest to the glaring inaccuracies often present in local news reports of sporting events. God knows I've had my name spelt a thousand different ways before now. I've had tries I did'nt score attributed to me, and tries I did score attributed to others.

All of these things I can live with. The local journalist, working on a small paper may be reporting sport as a secondary duty, more often than not wasn't at the event and is reporting second hand news. I understand all that, and it's fine.

Why though is there so often imbalance in reporting?

Link to the North Devon Journals story

That links to a report on the boxing day derby between my hometown team and their local rivals. They are the only two rugby clubs in the area, and this is the biggest game of the year for both. It's the only game of the season they'll draw more than a thousand people to, and they normally hit about three times that figure.

But equally important to the supporters are the results of the games that go on between the development, third and colts teams. Read the article I've linked to and skip to the bottom. The dev team and colts get only a sentence to mention the scorelines, whilst the thirds slide by un-noticed. And it happens all the time.

End of Year Awards?

With it being the end of the year, every sport supplement worth it's salt is running as many end of year awards as possible.
Why look forward to a new year when there's an old one to look back at? Why not remind everyone who cocked up of how spectacularly badly they did?

Guardian Unlimited's 'The Fiver' included such desirable awards as ''The Gordon Brown award for the most hopeless promotyion of a No. 2 to a senior position'' (Steve Mclaren if there was anyone wondering) and the equally inauspicious ''Joey Barton award for services to Football literature''.

Meanwhile, BBC sport's 'Robbo' went down the slightly alternative route of giving sporting personalities gifts rather than awards. For poor Scott Carson, from premiership non-entity to national villain in one howler: ''some empty crisp packets to replace the gloves he used during the first half against Croatia''. How dry.

Well, if everyone else is doing it, why don't I do the same?

The WYA? award for rubbing up the people who pay your wages the wrong way is shared by Rafa Benitez, Jose Mourinho and Sol Campbell. Benitez for waging a public war with his chairmen, Mourinho for something very similar. Campbell possibly shades this, his attack on fans was disturbing. Not because what he said was grossly unfair, in fact, most would agree with him, but at the same time he failed to accept that a number of his fellow professionals shoot themselves, and by association, other footballers, right in the metatarsal.
Happy New Year Joey Barton!