Rashford ‘in’ Arsenal ‘talks’ as England face ‘humiliation’ in America and Palace cause headache | OneFootball

Today’s Mediawatch is a neat reflection of the kind of neither-nowt-nor-summat hinterland football currently finds itself in.

We’re not quite out of this season yet, we’re not quite into full World Cup madness yet, and nor has pure uncut transfer bullsh*t fully taken over the column inches.

But we do have a little bit of all of those things here. So that’s nice, isn’t it?

It’s good to talk

Mediawatch is interested in this piece of Daily Express tish and fipsy primarily because it does tell us something about the headline decision-making process, a process that obviously fascinates and appals us in equal measure, and hints that while that bar may be almost on the floor, there is still at least a bar to clear. Which we guess is good news? Kind of?

The story itself is reheated Daily Mail guff about Marcus Rashford. He wants to stay at Barcelona… they want another loan… Anthony Gordon etc. All the stuff you already know.

The Mail throw in the detail that…

All perfectly reasonable – weird if those clubs and others hadn’t discussed him to be honest – until you get to the headline the Express choose to slap on their version. Or more accurately, headlines.

What it says now is:

Now that is a naughty headline that entirely misrepresents both Rashford’s ‘transfer request’ (because that is ‘I’d quite like to stay with Barcelona tbh’ rather than a formal ‘transfer request’ as it’s widely understood, and in either case has nothing to do with Arsenal) as well as suggesting direct talks between Rashford and Arsenal.

That would require a very elastic reading of the Mail’s throwaway line. But while it is still very naughty, it is less naughty than the headline that first appeared on the story.

Mediawatch would genuinely love to sit in on discussions at Reach about just how much mistruth you can have in a headline before it just becomes a great big fat lie that needs revising.

Ticket outs

For perhaps the first time ever, Mediawatch finds itself unsure about a headline from The Sun. We know, if you can’t even rely on those guys…

Anyway, here it is:

Now first point of order is that while this is quite rightly listed as a World Cup story, the key phrase you need to worry about is ‘Three Lions’ first game in America’.

Because, yep, this story is about their warm-up game against the mighty New Zealand in Tampa. With tickets starting from £54. In a 69,000-seat stadium. For what is, we cannot stress enough, a warm-up game. That headline is very careful not to directly mislead you into thinking it’s an actual World Cup game with 50,000 unsold tickets. If that’s where your head went, then that’s on you.

What we really like, though, is that all the clever phrasing and subterfuge of the headline is just forgotten and abandoned by the intro.

No, he really could not.

Let’s look at the actual numbers of tickets sold, though. For the New Zealand game where England face ‘humiliation’, ‘just 13,000’ tickets have been sold.

What about their second warm-up game against Costa Rica? How are things looking there?

One man’s ‘just 13,000’ is another man’s ‘already sold 12,000’. We’re not even going to start on that 16 per cent claim. Because that would mean there are 55 million Costa Ricans in the USA, 10 times more than the number of Costa Ricans in Costa Rica, and we honestly can’t even begin to work where they’ve gone wrong there or what they even meant.

Crystal clear

Meanwhile, Crystal Palace’s Europa Conference League victory isn’t all good news.

Beyond the obvious line of Adam Wharton looking every inch a player who should probably be in England’s World Cup squad, there is even graver trouble:

Far be it from us to suggest the Mirror are slightly overegging a very ropey pudding here, but by the intro things have got even more dramatic.

It’s now a major issue. This must be really bad. We fear for the Carabao Cup, we really do. What precisely is this unsolvable disaster to befall everyone’s favourite competition sponsored by the most foul-tasting of all the energy drinks?

Uh-oh. Serious thinking time, is it?

That is a massive problem. The presence of nine English teams in European competition next season presents the EFL with a problem they simply haven’t had to solve since… 12 months ago, when England also had nine teams in European competition.

Now we will grudgingly concede that the four lowest-ranked Carabao Cup teams forced into a preliminary round to square the numbers a year ago were more easily split into north (Accrington and Oldham) and south (Barnet and Newport) than this time, where Crawley are joined by the distinctly northern trio of Tranmere, Rochdale and York.

But we’re not ready to accept one League Two team facing an awkwardly long away day in a theoretically regional qualifying round constitutes much of a headache or major issue for the tournament as a whole. It is simply one of those things.

Let’s also not kid ourselves Barnet and Newport are local rivals, either; it was still a 300-mile round trip for Newport fans to see their side win on penalties at The Hive after blowing a 2-0 lead in injury time.

While we’re in the realm of grudgingly conceding things, we did like the Mirror describing the situation as ‘not totally unprecedented’. Gracious of them, given it is, barring one geographical quirk, totally precedented.