England real losers from Spain-France but ‘Lionel Messi’ still backing Three Lions | OneFootball

The Daily Express have spotted the real losers from France v Spain last night, and it turns out it was in fact England. Bit of a setback, that.

Meanwhile, there’s a fun cryptic quiz with Didier Deschamps, banter with a Lionel Messi lookalike and a desperate if understandable attempt to suggest there may be a world where Gianni Infantino isn’t in charge of FIFA by the end of next year.

If you’ll forgive us, Mediawatch is now away to rest up ready for tomorrow and what will be, regardless of the outcome, the biggest outbreak of nonsense we’ve ever yet encountered.

Cryptic clues

Not for the first time, The Sun have a spectacularly low bar for the word cryptic.

They’re so impressed by Deschamps’ mischief-making that they double down in the intro.

And what scheming, dastardly path did Deschamps use for his piece of cryptic wizardry, his clue as to his real feelings so well concealed it is decipherable only by the very sharpest of minds or Dan Brown lead characters?

That’s not a cryptic clue. That’s a rhetorical question. It is very, very easy to spot.

We will cut The Sun some slack, because apparently Deschamps himself is under the impression he has been rather clever and arch here.

Ah yes, the faux-reasonable ‘Hey, I’m just a neutral observer asking questions here’ approach so beloved of every b*llshit argument on the internet ever. And Didier so nearly managed to avoid falling into the trap of talking in specifics, didn’t he, only tumbling fully into it just before announcing that he definitely wouldn’t be doing that.

Folie a deux

Mediawatch understands the need to entice people in to a story with an intriguing headline. Got to create the ol’ curiosity gap, haven’t you? If done right, it’s genuinely fine. The problem usually comes when it’s done in a disingenuous or outright misleading and deceptive way. That’s when you end up with clickbait.

But there is also another potential problem with these headlines. It’s rarer, but it does still happen. And that problem is failing to create the curiosity gap at all, as the Mail discover here.

There were two Premier League players in the France starting XI, one of whom went off early with a back injury – and not even the infamously brutal L’Equipe grading system was going to give poor old William Saliba a two for that.

The other was Lucas Digne, who spent the entire game being scared sh*tless by Lamine Yamal.

So yeah, probably him, we reckon. Suppose you could argue that it was perhaps a slight surprise to find L’Equipe in sufficiently generous mood to give him a full two marks.

Fight, fight, fight

Mediawatch is willing to file this one under ‘Headlines We Wish Were True’ and do understand why the Mirror would, like the rest of us, hope to pretend it might be. Even just as a coping mechanism.

But the reality? No, he is not. At all. Even as controversy has swirled around him and his tournament in North America his support base has grown rather than shrunk. There’s a reason he talks about a 64-team World Cup.

All that’s happened is that his opponents have grown louder. But they are howling at the moon and p*ssing in the wind.

Even if there were a contested election, which is unlikely, Infantino would still p*ss it. Which is why it’s unlikely.

NARRATOR: Infantino’s next election was, as first thought, a procession.

It really is impossible to overstate how little any of that matters.

The FIFA president is elected by one member, one vote. There are 211 FIFA members, meaning you need 106 votes to win. You can muster all the support you like within UEFA, but it means nothing if you’re not bringing the other confederations with you for the ride.

And Asia, Africa and South America have already confirmed they will once again bend the knee en masse for Infantino. That gives him 111 votes. Until and unless a wildly unlikely challenger emerges who can call on the support of at the very least Asia or Africa, Infantino is going nowhere.

And even the floating of a 64-team World Cup will have hardened his support in Asia and Africa, the two largest confederations in terms of absolute numbers and the two likely to see the greatest benefit from any further expansion.

You don’t have to like it, but you do have to understand it.

Spain pain

Tell you who was good last night: Spain. Really good, weren’t they? At beating France? And we do kind of understand the thrust behind the Daily Express’ argument that playing them in the final might be even worse for England than the alternative.

But we’re not having this headline at all.

Really not sure having to beat two of the three best teams in the world back-to-back in the space of four days is actually a lot harder than the alternative, which was having to beat two of the three best teams in the world back-to-back in the space of four days.

The hardness rating was already such that we really don’t think there was any scope for it to become a lot harder.

Worse news for France, we reckon.

Sky commas of the day

Courtesy of the Daily Star.

It’s a lookalike. And we are very, very generously not putting that word in scare quotes of our own. We’d suggest the big mistake the Star have made in their lighthearted story with 51-year-old(!) Jonathan Lingham is having him wear an England shirt instead of an Argentina shirt with a number 10 on it in one of the photos.

It does rather give the game away that without the costume, Lingham in fact looks like… any random bloke with short brown hair and sleeve tattoos.

Still, he’s happy with his life as a Messi lookalike and listen, fair play. He’s not hurting anyone, and if people want to squint a bit and convince themselves there’s an uncanny resemblance then all power to everyone involved.

We do worry, though, that Lingham is putting himself at risk of severe overexposure to banter.

These are very correct scare quotes.