Bellingham ‘behaviour’ under the spotlight as Man Utd face ‘scary’ ‘nightmare scenario’ | OneFootball

The English teams conducted a collective bed-sh*tting in the Champions League last 16 this week that has the press boys all in a tither.

While Mediawatch has spent much of the last 12 hours or so chuckling at two less inherently ludicrous Premier League teams suffering defeats just as bad as Spurs’, what we should apparently have been doing is recognising an unfolding ‘nightmare scenario’ with the ‘biggest losers’ not even being any of this week’s actual losers.

Plus Jude Bellingham has done something entirely normal, so obviously someone had to be weird about it. There’s fresh hell for Spurs, and Pep Guardiola has confirmed he is not in fact an immortal being.

It’s all going off, basically.

Behavioural science

One of the problems with doing this job is that it quickly becomes very easy to go quite mad. No good can come from consuming this much tabloid media content on a daily basis, and Mediawatch often wonders if it’s actually sent us a bit peculiar, if we aren’t sometimes seeing things that aren’t really there.

But we are very confident that a very deliberate and cynical choice has been made here by the Mirror.

That word ‘behaviour’ jumps out at us. That is not a standard headline word for this type of fluff, and nor is it as neutral as it might appear. There are strong negative connotations in play; if you aren’t convinced, imagine getting a message from your kid’s school saying ‘We need to talk about Mediawatch Junior’s behaviour.’

Is your first reaction ‘Wow, they must be the best behaved fictional child in the whole fictional class’ or ‘What the f*ck have they done?’

Exactly.

Almost any other player of sufficient headline-worthiness for this to be a story at all – because it does ultimately boil down to ‘man reacts with delighted astonishment to team-mate’s astonishing goal’ – does not get that headline.

It would be ‘Kylian Mbappe’s reaction in Real Madrid stands speaks volumes as Man City implode’. That’s the standard construction here. This is absolutely classic ‘speaks volumes’ territory – although the Star opt for ‘true colours’ which, if we’re nitpicking (and we usually are), doesn’t quite seem to fit. But either way it is definitely a reaction not a behaviour. Obviously.

But it’s Bellingham, and there is obvious mileage in nudge-nudging the implication of ‘behaviour’ when all he has done is react entirely rationally to his mate scoring a brilliant goal.

Scare tactics

Fair to say this has not been a vintage Champions League week for English clubs, but we do have to take issue with this Daily Express angle and desire to make it in fact all about Manchester United.

However much we understand the financial appeal of making absolutely everything a Manchester United story, sometimes it just… isn’t. And, spoiler alert: it really isn’t that scary anyway.

Right, this is nonsense.

What they’re getting at here is that England’s Champions League woes might mean that the Premier League doesn’t get a fifth place in next season’s competition.

Two things. First, they will still almost certainly get one of those two extra places. They already have a higher total score than third-place Italy managed by the end of last season, and hold a lead that in simple terms, and acknowledging that bonus points for progression will also come into it, amounts to roughly 16 wins over Spain and Germany, both of whom would have to overhaul England with Italy already almost mathematically unable to do so.

Second, how would that make Man United the biggest losers anyway? Sure they might finish fifth, but they are currently third.

Mediawatch would argue that even if you’re going down this doom-mongering and unlikely path, the biggest losers are in fact actual fifth-placed Chelsea and even sixth-placed Liverpool who lost actual Champions League matches as well as being dealt if anything an even scarier ‘Champions League blow’ about next season than United.

But the Express aren’t done yet.

We’ll just ignore ‘most premier’ even though it’s making our teeth itch and get into the meat of this. There is a chance of that happening, obviously, but it is very, very slim.

Arsenal remain the bookies’ favourites to win the whole competition, and overwhelming 1/7 favourites to qualify at Leverkusen’s expense next week – with the added effect that would have of reducing Germany’s ability to eat into England’s still huge lead any further. Liverpool are also heavy odds-on to get past Galatasaray despite that 1-0 defeat in the first leg.

And even if both those and the other admittedly more likely fallers do disappear, it remains entirely possible that England could lose all nine of their European teams in the round of 16 and still be absolutely fine.

To repeat, only one country other than England themselves managed a higher overall total last season than England have already racked up this time around. There is no nightmare here. Or at least not this specific nightmare.

Spursy

Things just go from bad to worse for Spurs, with The Sun bringing EXCLUSIVE (see Mediawatches passim for our views on their use and understanding of that word) details of a ‘new blow’ and ‘major loss’ for the beleaguered former football club and current punchline.

Immortals

Big news from the Mirror, who tell us Pep Guardiola has dropped a ‘fresh retirement hint’. Tis the season and all that, and even though this story was written before last night’s antics they certainly won’t have done it any harm.

Slight problem we have is that the retirement hint is these specific words.

This is less a retirement hint than acknowledgement of the accepted passage of time. Guardiola has confirmed he is not immortal and will not be Man City manager in perpetuity. Good to have that pinned down, anyway.