Man Utd boss Carrick handed ‘£20m transfer boost’ after dramatic ‘DAWN RAID’ | OneFootball

Unsurprisingly there is a vast torrent of guff to navigate in light of Michael Carrick’s appointment as Manchester United interim boss.

Without giving too many spoilers away, we now live in a world where people are apparently surprised to discover mornings can be quite dark in northern England during January.

Plus there’s all the usual transfer boosts and scaremongering and all such tishes and fipsies.

Melodramatic headline of the day

Unusual for The Sun, usually a more calm and thoughtful voice in these troubled times, to claim this prize but they’ve smashed it out of the park here.

The story? New Man United interim boss Michael Carrick gave his assistant Jonathan Woodgate a lift to Man United training this morning.

The headline?

We spent longer than we care to admit desperately scouring those eight apparently wildly overexcited letters to try and find the cheeky bit of harmless wordplay concealed within and drew a blank.

Luckily the standfirst was there to explain it for us, and to give away the fact that even The Sun knew it might be a bit much because they realised they needed to explain themselves.

Surely there’s something crack/Carrick of dawn here. We can’t quite get there ourselves, but that’s not our job. It’s The Sun’s and they have let us down badly.

Let there be light

The Sun are not the only ones leaning into this, though. Over at the Mail they are blown away entirely by the concept of anyone arriving for work in January ‘when it was still dark outside’.

Sunrise this morning in Manchester was at 8.17am. Arriving to work before that time is neither unusual nor noteworthy. Mediawatch is frankly jealous of the ‘many’ who are still asleep at that time.

As ever, this feels like a story that fails the Mediawatch Test: would the opposite be more newsworthy? Carrick casually sauntering in for his first day with a coffee and an almond croissant at 10am would surely be more notable than arriving at the training ground, as the Mail so wonderfully put it, ‘just several hours’ after being appointed interim boss.

And now we find ourselves entirely obsessed by just where exactly the cut-off exists for this. At what number of hours does the tabloid standard ‘just hours’ require the addition of a ‘several’ so as not to be too overtly taking the p*ss. And can you in fact even have ‘just several’ of anything? Is it not an oxymoron?

It’s no life, this, is it?

The 100 per cent club

More good news for early riser Carrick this morning from the Daily Star, who bring us this standard Frankenstein’s monster cut-and-shut of a headline.

We read the whole story to piece this together, so we trust you’re grateful.

The ‘£20m transfer boost’ is itself clumsily welded together from two separate pieces of information: the first being The Guardian saying ‘transfer funds will be available’ and the second a Mirror story speculating that long-time United target Ruben Neves could be available this month for, you guessed it, 20 million of the King’s pounds.

The move that is ‘100 per cent happening’ does, of course, have absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It is in fact the chances of Manuel Ugarte leaving United, according to a Turkish journalist.

Unlucky 13

Adding up a list of players to get a scary final number has long been a staple of online football journalism, and the key was always not to worry at all about whether the players towards the bottom of your list of those who ‘could be SOLD’ or were ‘set to MISS’ some game or other were players who ever actually played games or contributed anything of value anyway. You could bundle in as many bomb-squadders and youth-teamers as your conscience would allow to get those numbers up, up, up.

Which makes it slightly surprising that it’s only relatively recently that these outlets appear to have cottoned on to what now in hindsight seems the obvious fact that if you’re talking about players missing a match you can simply combine a scary big number from each club and come up with an even bigger and scarier number.

Whichever content monkey came up with that deserves a raise.

Anyway, it’s now entirely standard practice, and we’re delighted to report has led to zero reduction in deployment of the previous one-club dark arts.

Take this one from the Mirror about tonight’s foaming pint of delicious Carabao.

Let’s get past the actual valid injury doubts on both sides. Boring. No interest in that genuine content. We want the p*ss-takes and the number-padders.

There are bonus points straight away for turning it into a four-page photo gallery story, of course. Clicks ahoy! Further bonus points for managing to even find a picture of Dario Essugo in Chelsea action.

Grudging acceptance that listing Arsenal first-team starters who ‘missed’ the Portsmouth game as continued ‘doubts’ for this one is very clever-stupid.

But mainly just a round of applause for confirmation that Chelsea appointing Liam Rosenior as manager hasn’t magically ended Mykhaylo Mudryk’s ban.

Missing words round

Another of Mediawatch’s favourite genre of headline here from the Mirror, in which the absolutely vital story-killing words have, by definitely real and necessary reasons of space, sadly had to be excised from the headline and left instead on the cutting-room floor, leading to the desperately unfortunate situation that nobody wanted where the headline is left looking like it might be atop an actual news story rather than just some guff.

‘…by Ben Foster’ the crucial but, alas and alack, absent words on this occasion.