Mo Salah penalty ‘conspiracy’ truth emerges as Chelsea star heads to Madrid | OneFootball

It’s the morning after one of the most wildly entertaining games of elite football in modern memory, so of course the big news revolves around some Mo Salah conspiracy chat and a ‘Man United icon’ and his ‘stunning daughter’ and a ‘skimpy outfit’.

It’s pure hell-in-a-handcart areas before we even get to a sentence that includes the names Rupert Lowe, John Terry and Dennis Wise.

Give us the OTT giddiness about a 5-4 semi-final between two great teams any day.

Pen teller

Mediawatch is certainly not averse to a lovely bit of cake-having-and-eatery. You only need to see the headlines we chuck on these things every day to know that.

So it’s almost with grudging respect rather than distaste that we draw attention to Ian Doyle in the Liverpool Echo pooh-poohing the idea of conspiracy theories in this great game of ours while gleefully indulging in one.

Look at how he starts off here.

Alas, yes, there are a great many people out there of every persuasion who see only a ‘darker game’ against their own team. But that is, obviously, nonsense, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Ian?

Phew. Glad that’s sorted. Penalty-based conspiracy chat has no substance and is best ign… oh, you’re not finished.

Okay, we’re a bit nervous here. What’s that one circumstance?

Just to be entirely clear here. Yes, a penalty awarded to Salah being subsequently correctly overturned does from this point prompt the donning of tinfoil to point out he doesn’t get many penalties, does he? All while desperately trying to affect the sort of unconvincing ‘Hey, I’m just asking questions here’ faux-reasonableness more commonly associated with Matt Le Tissier on his iPad trying to get the last word in with a chatbot in the middle of the night.

Before, eventually, the conclusion.

So just one final little nod of encouragement for the conspiracy theorists at the end there. Rarely have we seen a piece more greedily have its conspiracy theory and eat it.

And, of course, it’s all placed under a headline that evokes The X Files.

Beautiful stuff.

Punch drunk

The Daily Mirror’s man in Paris Daniel Orme has got spectacularly giddy about PSG 5-4 Bayern Munich and declared it the greatest Champions League game of all time.

We don’t mind it at all. We’re not sure we agree but it was certainly incredible to watch and, in a world gone tits up, a bit of OTT positivity certainly beats OTT negativity.

Like, say, Kenny Cunningham pretending he preferred a notoriously unwatchable 0-0 draw, actually, or Wayne Rooney being a big ol’ misery guts about all the defending in a game featuring all manner of the world’s most dizzyingly exciting attacking talent at the peak of their considerable powers.

But we absolutely cannot have this.

We must go full Football Cliches here and declare this an unapproved usage. You cannot call a one-goal deficit after the away leg ‘a puncher’s’ – with or without the cliché-concluding ‘chance’. You would never dream of using it after a 1-0.

Bayern are neither outmatched nor outgunned here. This is two elite heavyweights trading concussive blows. There will be no victory against the odds whatever transpires in Munich next week. Quite literally; while some bookies do now make PSG the most marginal of favourites to progress, plenty have it 5/6 or 10/11 each of two.

A puncher’s chance is arguably what Bayern had at 5-2. It is absolutely not the situation now.

Ruling ends.

Headline news

And at least the Mirror’s giddiness about a stunning actual football match is exactly the sort of thing that should be top of a football website at this time.

Because what, for instance, does the Daily Star consider to be the biggest story in all of football in the middle of a teak-tough Premier League title race, the morning after one of the great Champions League games and the day of Arsenal’s own semi-final first leg?

Of course.

Chris cross

Lovely bit of technically-correcting from The Sun here.

That would be Christopher Nkunku, one year after his highly-anticipated transfer from Chelsea to Milan. But we all know ‘Milan flop who cost…’ ain’t getting the clicks.

Anyone for tennis?

You might not think that ‘man attends tennis tournament’ could very easily be spiced up into a juicy headline, but that’s why you aren’t earning the big bucks down at the football.london content factory.

Because when a footballer – along with all his team-mates – has been granted a few days off by his club, and decides to spend some of that time watching the Madrid Open, and that footballer is Real Madrid-courting Enzo Fernandez, it almost becomes irresponsible not to sh*thouse the hell out of it.

And sure enough…

Game, set and match. Smashed it. Etc.

The joy of six

Just a bit odd this from the Mirror.

There are only nine games left in total involving Man City and Arsenal. Might as well just include them all at this point, surely?

Any of them could decide it. And even if we accept as we must that some fixtures are more likely than others to do so, we’re not at all sure what it is about Arsenal v Fulham, Everton v Man City or Man City v Brentford that makes it less likely to happen there than in games that have made the cut here against your Burnleys and West Hams.

Lowe bar

Mediawatch doesn’t say this lightly, but we think we may have identified the most cursed sentence in the history of the written word, courtesy of the Mirror.