To redress the balance

This blog will do exactly what it says it will do. It will watch the media from a Manchester United perspective.

The idea came to me after many years of arguing with my friends about the coverage we receive in the media. My friends, from their various perspectives, think our media coverage is pretty fair and balanced. While my friends support different clubs they all have one thing in common: they hate Manchester Utd. They won't admit it, obviously, but their words betray them. This is precisely the position of the British media: analysing games from an "impartial" perspective but with their hatred of us shining through.

So after much argument among friends I'm starting this blog as a catalogue of bias.

I'm certainly not going to pretend that this is an unbiased account. I am a Man Utd fan (why else would I devote my time to this?). This is half the point: why don't football pundits just admit their prejudice. It would be so much easier.

From tomorrow I will be rounding up the days stories and pointing out their biases.

For today I will give a few brief examples of the type of thing I mean.

Firstly. It has struck me over the last couple of weeks that every time we get a decision against us and Sir Alex complains the standard response is, "Ahh! Don't you remember that Pedro Mendes 'goal' that crossed the line but wasn't given?! How you can complain about anything ever again when that actually proves you get every decision ever! So there!" Yeah. We got a decision in 2005. Amazing. If that's the last decision we got (or equally if that's the worst decision ever given for us) then frankly it proves the opposite.



Secondly. There was a report in, I think, The Daily Star Sunday, in which it was claimed that Sir Alex's claims about Ronaldo being kicked out of games was rubbish because he was only like the 4th most fouled player in the premiership. What this ignores is the fact that this season referees seemingly have a directive to not give Ronaldo anything so, for every 5 fouls he receives he'll actually be given only 1 (ie he's kicked 5 times but the ref blows up once). Thus rendering the most fouled player table absolutely useless and boosting Sir Alex's claim that it is all Keith Hackett's, as head of referees, fault.
(Couldn't find a weblink for this story, not a big fan of the Daily Star website)

Thirdly. As an example of a more mundane bias we can look at match reports of our game against Derby at the weekend. From The Times:

Foster came into his own. But for his two brilliant saves from Kenny Miller’s shots within 60 seconds near the end of the first half, Derby could have been eyeing a shock victory.

From The Guardian report the headline will suffice:

Foster saves United from disgrace but still expects to be sent on loan

So there we have it. Our keeper has to make two saves so we were lucky to win a game of football. Two saves, imagine that, in a game of football! Amazing!

And that's basically what I'll be doing every day because they never stop slagging us off.