Did Declan Rice really say England have the World Cup’s best penalty-takers? | OneFootball

Low tide in Content Bay today with all eyes and hot takes focused squarely on England v DR Congo later. One way or another, we doubt Mediawatch will be as short of material on Thursday.

Don’t despair, though. There’s always Liverpool to help you out of a content bind, even if it means brazenly describing things from two weeks ago as ‘new’.

And if all else fails, there’s always Danny Murphy’s cat.

The pen is mightier

Little room for doubt from this Mirror headline-intro double-down of a combo.

Except, and this will shock you, he didn’t say that. Or insist it. Or name it.

He said/insisted/named this:

If every other World Cup nation in North America this summer is just previous England squads, then maybe it is coming home after all.

Crucial taunt

We’re very aware that we are doing nothing more than once again yelling at clouds in ever more old-man fashion, but we’ve seen the phrase ‘crucial World Cup knockout match’ at – and this is a conservative estimate – 1857267 times this morning in relation to England’s game against DR Congo.

To whoever needs to hear this: you don’t need to tell us a World Cup knockout match is crucial. It is very much implied. Thank you in advance.

And no, The Sun, ‘high-stakes World Cup knockout clash’ is no better.

Quit playing games

Lovely bit of rehashing from the Mirror here, noticing that it’s now July 1 and thus…

The ‘quit’ there makes it all sound very dramatic, rather than it just being 12 players we already knew were leaving at the end of their contracts on June 30.

Three of the 12 are, and sorry for the spoilers here, Mo Salah, Andy Robertson and Ibrahima Konate. Hope we haven’t shocked anyone to the very core there with this brand new information.

The other nine quitters and splitters for whom it was definitely their decision are Rhys Williams, Kareem Ahmed, Emmanuel Airoboma, James Balagizi, DJ Bernard, Oakley Cannonier, Josh Davidson, Terence Miles and Jacob Poytress.

Verily, crisis and despair has descended upon the red half of the city in light of all this.

Again, all of this was confirmed weeks ago when Liverpool announced their retained list for next season. There is genuinely no new information at all here, unless we generously include the investigative efforts required to add Konate, Robertson and Salah’s reported weekly wages together and come up with £710k.

And before you Liverpool fans get excited about a ‘new £34.5m deal done’ that is… also not in fact new. It’s the signing of Victor Munoz, which happened on June 18.

One could, if one were still feeling of generous spirit, argue that all things are relative and that compared to everything else in this article, a signing that took place two weeks ago is indeed ‘new’.

Q&A

Simple stuff from the Manchester Evening News here.

One day like this

Stunning deployment of the ‘just days’ trope – a longstanding Mediawatch favourite – from The Sun here.

We can see why the idea of joining these two stories was irresistible despite there being absolutely no real connection beyond coincidental timing. We can confirm the German FA headquarters were not swarmed by 150 police investigators because they wanted to try and find out where Jonathan Tah’s penalty had landed.

No, it’s all some dreary scandal or other about ‘favoured guests’ getting ‘preferential treatment’ at Euro 2024. All very worthy and important, we’re sure, but not as funny as them coming to arrest Nick Woltemade for crimes against the stereotype of German penalty-taking prowess.

Are we nitpicking entirely unfairly, though, to suggest that in fact nothing could really yet be happening in Germany ‘just days’ after their shock World Cup exit given that said World Cup exit didn’t actually happen until the early hours of yesterday morning German time?

We’re no Football Cliches, but that surely still falls well within ‘just hours’ territory.

World Cup Headline of the Day

Comes courtesy of The Sun

We did enjoy The Sun taking care to point out the stock picture they included in their story of a cat, in case any of their readers don’t know what a cat looks like, was not in fact a picture of Danny’s lost cat Bob. That really would have been a scoop if they’d found him.