The judgment for Manchester City is in! (It isn’t.) The penalties are set in stone! (By a few journalists from Liverpool Echo.) Before all the recent drama, Everton was poised to break their transfer record and sign a World Cup star. 57 years ago, assuming we’re keeping track.
Make decisions, make decisions
A humorous headline from the Liverpool Echo that is lacking one important detail.
Liverpool awaits Premier League news as Man City’s punishments—a transfer ban, a point deduction, and relegation—are decided.
Penalties determined? We were unaware that they had already been declared guilty! This is quite significant.
Until you realize that the true headline should be “Man City punishments decided… by various Echo journalists who support Liverpool.” Whom, regrettably, we don’t believe will, in reality, get to make these choices when the time comes.
Furthermore, it’s noteworthy that every story in the media about Manchester City’s possible punishment for alleged offenses over a ten-year span in which Liverpool finished second in the Premier League to City exactly once is presented as a Liverpool story. We know this is the Echo, so this is kind of their job.
“Every employee and supporter of Manchester City Football Club to be fired directly into the sun” might be the punishment meted out to City, yet the question of Liverpool’s future would still be covered the following day.
Breaking records: We believe we may have a new clubhouse leader in the game of “dredging up and repackaging old quotes out of context” somewhere else in the Echo.
Everton’s spending is making headlines right now for obvious reasons, and the Echo teases us with this:
Everton was willing to break transfer records in order to acquire a World Cup player.
The key word in that headline is ‘were’ and it is doing a great deal of heavy lifting. Because we’re not talking about a 2022 World Cup star here. Or even a 2018 one, or 2014 or… well, you get the idea with that.
We’ll give you a pound if you can guess the World Cup star in question here first try without cheating. As an extra clue, the record-smashing fee Everton would have apparently been willing to pay was £200,000.
Because the World Cup star Everton were at least theoretically willing to smash the transfer record to get was indeed 1966 Golden Boot winner Eusebio.
And how do we know this? Because of an article in the People written by Everton boss Harry Catterick a couple of months after the tournament.
Yes, that’s right. We’re using quotes from 57 years ago to do transfer stories now.
And the best part? This isn’t even an Arsene Wenger-style ‘Oh, we nearly signed him.’ This isn’t even a ‘showed him the training ground, posed with a shirt’ kind of tale.
It’s all built on one sentence in a wide-ranging (and genuinely interesting) piece by the then-Everton manager about English football’s reluctance to welcome foreign stars to its game.
Given where we are now, it’s properly fascinating. But the Eusebio quote couldn’t be more equivocal and hypothetical.
‘If Eusebio of Portugal came on the market and it were possible for an English club to sign him then Everton could be interested – even if it cost £200,000.’
Two ifs, a hugely significant conditional clause and a could. It was basically a done deal.
Harry’s game
For neither the first nor last time, one of the Daily Mail’s notoriously lengthy online headlines manages to lose the run of itself in a dense fog of grammatical confusion.
Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards name their England starting XIs for Euro 2024… but clash over Harry Maguire, who starts at left back – and one pundit picks Phil Foden AND Jack Grealish in his team
We definitely don’t think Harry Maguire should start at left-back.
And while we’re here, the ‘clash’ over Maguire amounted to Shearer picking him alongside John Stones while Lineker and Richards opted for Marc Guehi instead. Lineker’s verdict on Shearer’s team? ‘That’s good and I wouldn’t argue with that either.’
Lucky for us all the Mail was on hand to expose yet more hate and vitriol from the loony lefty wokerati crisp-hawking bantersmith.
Least surprising sentence of the day
‘Jose Mourinho has revealed that he is open to managing in the Saudi Pro League.’
The Sun
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