Tag Archives: The Sun

As Leeds Fans Mourn Bielsa, The S*n Brands Revie’s Boys “Team of Brawlers” – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 02/03/2022 | 16 comments

The other day, still reeling from the loss of my latest and probably last Leeds United hero, Marcelo Bielsa, I was indulging in some gastronomic therapy in a cafe in Horbury, as I waited for Mrs. Rob to have her hair appropriately marcelled at the local salon. As I tucked into my sausage butties, I noticed a copy of Rupert Murdoch’s withered and flaccid organ on the next table, saw that it had a story about new United manager Jesse Marsch, and thought I’d have a quick and free read – as, obviously, nobody actually buys this degraded gutter rag.

I really should have known better, shouldn’t I. The piece was written (scrawled in crayon) by a hack with the unlikely name of Oscar Paul, clearly a graduate of the scumbag school of “journalism”. Swiftly bored with the task of covering the Marsch story, and aware that United’s army of fans were already hurting over the traumatic loss of Marcelo Bielsa, ‘Orrible Oscar was clearly looking for a chance to smear a Leeds legend, preferably one who had passed away and couldn’t hit back. That’s the way of things at the Super Soaraway S*n after all – find and exploit a hapless victim for the pursuit of its own disgusting agenda. Murdoch’s base bogroll has form for this going way back, as those who remember its disgraceful lies in the wake of Hillsborough will be all too well aware.

In the article I was idly perusing, the calumny was of a lesser order than the Hillsborough lies, but nonetheless gratuitously offensive and untimely for that. Stretching for a legend’s memory to daub with his masters’ own particularly noisome brand of excrement, this moronic S*n hack decided that a random reference to Leeds icon Don Revie was just what he needed, and wielded his crayon accordingly: “such is the influence Ralph Rangnick has had on (Marsch), do not expect a team of brawlers like Don Revie’s”. There. Job done, and Oscar must have been hugging himself with glee, having brown-nosed the current boss at the Pride of Devon, while simultaneously if ungrammatically dancing on Revie’s grave. It doesn’t get any better than that for an ambitious if illiterate Murdoch scribbler, surely promotion into the front ranks would follow.

Let’s consider the team that Oscar was scribbling his rubbish about – the likes of Eddie Gray and Paul Madeley having their illustrious names blackened, despite their singular lack of any inclination to “brawl”. A team of brawlers? This is lazy and glib even by the standards of the dregs of Wapping. The Revie boys could look after themselves and they stood together, as a top team should. Super Leeds operated in a brutal era, but they were not solely or even mainly about brutality. Those lads, all of them, could play, brilliantly. On their day, and there were many of them, they were peerless, incomparable. For them now to be invoked whenever some talentless purveyor of Murdoch malice is at a loss for his next sentence is harsh and unjustified in the extreme.

Let’s not forget some of the other big beasts on the prowl in that era. Arsenal with Peter Storey. Chelsea with “Chopper” Harris. Liverpool, Tommy Smith and Emlyn Hughes. Even Devon, with Stiles and Crerand. All thugs and brawlers on their day, and none of them could hold a candle to Hunter, Bremner or Giles. But none of that found a place in Oscar’s empty head, he was far too eager to perpetuate the myth of Dirty Leeds (now an ironic badge of honour among United fans weary of the 60 year old lie).

Rant over. I’ve had my say, and we all know what the Oscars of this world are all about. And what lesson can we take from this? Well, the obvious one is “Don’t buy the S*n”. But we all already knew that, too.

Marching On Together

16 Comments

Posted in Football, Leeds United

Tagged Andrea Radrizzani, Arsenal FC, Champions, Chelsea FC, death, Don Revie, Elland Road, fans, Football, Football League, gutter press, history, hypocrisy, justice, Leeds United, Liverpool FC, Man Utd, Manchester United, Marcelo Bielsa, media, Oscar Paul, Premier League, pride, rivalry, soccer, Sport, The FA, The Sun, UK Football, Wordpress, Yorkshire

Sun ‘Newspaper’ Confirms New Manager Contract By Reporting Leeds Have Sacked Monk – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 30/04/2017 | 23 comments

The Scum

Leeds United fans can rest assured that a new contract is on the table for manager Garry Monk, with notorious lie-sheet The Scum reporting that the Whites boss is on the point of dismissal.

Wapping’s most odious piece of bogroll, a publication so mendacious that it has people checking their calendars if it reports on Friday that tomorrow will be Saturday, launched into an orgy of wishful thinking after Leeds’ home draw with with Norwich ended their play-off aspirations. Those familiar with The Scum‘s record for inaccuracy and fabrication will see this as a cast-iron indication that Monk’s future is at Elland Road.

Recent achievements at the notorious Murdoch rag have included the comparison of Everton’s Ross Barkley to a gorilla, and the assertion that the only other people on Merseyside earning Barkley’s level of remuneration are drug barons. This piece of “journalism” saw well-known moron Kelvin MacKenzie suspended pending an investigation, and also the complete disappearance of The Scum as a Merseyside football resource, with Everton applying the blanket ban that Liverpool FC instituted some decades ago, following the disgraceful Hillsborough reportage. It is now thought that Tranmere Rovers FC benefits from an army of Scum correspondents 37 strong.

Current Leeds United co-owner Massimo Cellino commented “You know I’mma dodgy character, my friend, and even I don’ read that sheet”.

Rupert Murdoch is 142.

23 Comments

Posted in Football, Leeds United

Tagged Everton FC, Garry Monk, Kelvin Mackenzie, Leeds United, Liverpool FC, Rupert Murdoch, The Sun, Wapping

Relief for Leeds Fans as The Sun Fabricates “Ross Wants Out” Story – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 28/06/2014 | 35 comments

The gutter end of the Fourth Estate are after us again

Summertime is always a tense part of the calendar for the long-suffering fans of Leeds United – rivalled only by the January transfer window, as we wait in uncomfortable anticipation for the identity of the next star to be sold for a song. That’s the way it’s been for a good – well, bad – few years now. It remains to be seen whether things will be substantially different under the reign of il Duce Massimo Cellino.

Clearly, this year’s speculation was inevitably going to surround Ross McCormack. Top scorer last time around and always first in line to wear his heart on his sleeve when it came to confirming his love for and commitment to Leeds United, McCormack is the jewel in the crown for club and fans. Such a player is bound to be marked down by the rutting hogs of Fleet Street as the Number One target for their idle speculation, scare stories, made-up rumours and downright lies as they set about their task of appealing to the Leeds-hating majority of their readership. The lower you go into the gutter, the higher the proportion of Leeds-haters there will be among the buyers of whichever toilet roll you’re talking about – and at the very bottom of the sewer, beneath even the excrement and detritus that is the Mirror, the Mail and the Express, there you will find the Sun and the Sport, rotting away in a noisome mulch of their own writing.

So it’s a big relief when one of these illiterate rags comes out with a clearly made-up story. Such a one, you can bet your bottom dollar, is Simon Austin’s pisspoor effort today in the Sun. No sources are quoted – unsurprisingly. The whole thing stinks of a speculative effort which the hack concerned will quietly forget about when it’s proved wrong. Austin is merely doing his masters’ bidding in an effort to thrill the anti-Leeds brigade out there – all in the interests of selling more copies. This commercial prime mover, the need to sell, sell, sell, has always ranked for the Sun and similar toilet papers, far, far above any such considerations as factual reportage and journalistic integrity. The net effect of all this is that anyone who hates Leeds United will get another cheap if temporary thrill – and anybody with the individualism, originality and sheer good taste to love the club will breathe a sigh of satisfaction and murmur to themselves “It’s in the Sun, so it must be bollocks”.

Similarly, today has brought a couple of snide little reports in the Sport and the Mirror – further examples of the very worst of the British press – about the Leeds players bringing packed lunches in to training. Here, it’s the crafty implications of penury that are offensive, not so much any factual inaccuracy. It’s Fleet Street acting as a purveyor of anti-LUFC propaganda that irritates. The thought of booze-sodden hacks having a chortle over this sort of thing is annoying – but again, it’s merely a sign that they’re doing their level best to paint as negative a picture as possible of a club that it’s firmly in their commercial interests to be seen hating. It’s a gutter press thing, a talentless hack thing – it should be regarded as natural in terms of what happens all the time at the very bottom of any cess-pit. The particularly disappointing aspect is that certain internet outlets, who should know better, pick up these myths and recycle them as fact

The moral, of course, is to avoid all of the bog-roll tabloids, or – at the very least – to take their lies merely as confirmation that there’s nothing to worry about as yet. More reliable information is usually available from the better-informed blogs of several clubs, from players’ Twitter feeds, from the so-called “quality” press (some of them) – or even (occasionally) from Leeds United itself. The local press also provides an option that is almost respectable as compared to the mendacious hacks who peddle their lies for the gutter-end of the national press.

For the time being, then, there is no cause for alarm. The Sun says that Ross wants out; so we can be tolerably certain that – at present – he’s looking forward to another season of stand-out performances in the white shirt of Leeds United.

35 Comments

Posted in Football, Leeds United

Tagged commercial interests, fabrication, gutter press, Leeds United, Leeds-haters, lies, Ross McCormack, The Express, The Mail, The Mirror, The Sport, The Sun

Leeds-Hating Gutter Press Step Up Campaign to Sell Ross McCormack – by Rob Atkinson

Posted on 18/04/2014 | 21 comments

Daily Heil – one of the gutter brigade

The crappier end of the press in this country can be very, very predictable indeed when it comes to their coverage of Leeds United. I’m talking here particularly about the likes of the Mirror, the Mail (or the Daily Heil, as it’s colloquially known) and the Express – and then even a step lower than these diseased organs, down to the trash comics like the Sun and the Star. Even the so-called “quality” papers can be relied upon, more often than not, to print rubbish about the Whites of Elland Road. They hear the song that echoes around football grounds everywhere whenever a game of professional football is played in this country. They know from this that there’s a lot of clueless individuals out there who “all hate Leeds scum” – without knowing why, beyond the fact that their dads did too, back in the long-ago sixties and seventies. They know that this Leeds-hating, brainless yet massive constituency forms a significant market, and they’re ready and willing to pander to it – as this will sell thousands more copies of their grubby rags. It’s not big and it’s not clever – but it is lucrative. And really – why let a few scruples get in the way of the bottom line?

So, in the interests of satisfying their Leeds-hating mass-market, the papers will have no hesitation in printing any old rubbish that might stir things up or cause upset around LS11 – anything they can fabricate or indiscriminately recycle to unsettle things at Elland Road is grist to their less-than-choosy mill. Sometimes this will take the form of bare-faced lies – one outstanding rag the other week claimed that, if Massimo Cellino’s appeal against his tax evasion verdict were to fail, he would probably go to jail – and sometimes it’s just a matter of making something up and running with that. For this latter category, the hack concerned will normally look at the best player Leeds currently have and write some illiterate piece linking that player with one of the last clubs Leeds fans would wish to see him leave for. This is done with the aim of making the player restless if possible, irritating the Leeds fans and pleasing their army of anti-Leeds readers.

At its worst, this type of sleazy journalism can amount to illegal approaches from interested clubs with the media concerned acting as a conduit. It’s not confined to the printed press either. In January, Sky TV got ever so hot and bothered on deadline night, when the furore of McDermott’s abortive sacking developed into a feeding frenzy over Ross McCormack’s immediate future. With literally only a few hours of the window to go, Sky went into overdrive, doing their level best to generate interest from the likes of Cardiff and speculating frantically that the player would be making an urgent transfer request and heading off back to the Valleys. There was genuine excitement and eagerness at Sky HQ – and a palpable grief and disappointment amounting to actual sulkiness, when nothing happened after all.

Now, we have the fag-end of the season to go; those last few games with not a lot hanging on them for Leeds, not a lot for the lazy hacks who masquerade as journalists to exercise their poison pens over. So, we start with the traditional “let’s whip up some transfer interest in their best player” nonsense – and all of a sudden, our Ross44 is linked with the likes of Leicester and West Ham and sundry other smaller clubs. It’s calculated to annoy and to disrupt – but we should bear in mind that, from all we now understand, transfer policy in these Cellino days will be advised by what is best for the club first and foremost – not by any desperate need for money and not by a willingness to pander to a player’s own whim. The fact of the matter is that, for every transfer “story” in the gutter press that actually comes to be, there are perhaps 19 that never had even a whiff of truth about them, and which end up being far more useful as the wrappings of choice for those who love fish and chips.

It’s all part of being Leeds, after all. We don’t need to foster a siege mentality at this club – it arises naturally because there is a state of siege as far as the rest of football and the assembled media are concerned. And that’s annoying and sometimes even a bit upsetting – but really – would we have it any other way? Would we rather be a Man U, fawned over by a media which is comprised of liars, cheats and sycophants? Not really. It’s better to be Leeds, and to know exactly where we stand in relation to our enemies out there. We just have to remember: don’t believe everything they put in the papers. Or, in our case – disbelieve just about everything.

At least that way we’ll be nearer the truth.