Kill the Poor

Patrick Collins, "respected" columnist in The Mail, today tells us he hates football fans.

His article is the tiresome "aren't footballers frightful oiks compared to our beloved Olympians," but he goes one step further than just slagging off footballers.  He slags off football fans, not the usual "mindless minority," that are usually criticised in situations like this, but all of us:

Then there are the crowds, the screeching, threatening, intimidating crowds, that Scudamore describes as ‘tribal’. The term is disingenuous, since it offers a blanket absolution for vile abuse. During the Games, we discovered that sports crowds could be honestly partisan. Opponents are not enemies. Respect is not a sign of weakness. Because sport, any sport, has more to offer than the dubious thrill of blind allegiance. Only in football is it considered admirable to be biased to the point of imbecility.

Brilliant move from Patrick, slagging off the people who are presumably reading his clichéd old shite.  

Only in football writing (especially in The Mail on Sunday) is it considered admirable to write bullshit and hate your audience to the point of imbecility.

He should maybe take a lesson from Gary Neville, who chooses the Olympics as his subject, but is more critical of it and simplistic notions of nasty football:

I'm delighted that the Olympics were so successful and proud of the sportsmen and women who worked so hard to achieve their goals to win medals for Team GB. But it's just lazy to use their success as a stick to beat football. Some of the clichés that have been trotted out this week are that football needs a Dave Brailsford, the magnificent performance director of our cycling team.

But it was only nine years ago that football needed a Sir Clive Woodward after he guided the rugby union team to the World Cup. We have one of the great performance coaches in Sir Alex Ferguson, following in a long line of the likes of Sir Matt Busby, Bill Nicholson, Sir Alf Ramsey, Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Brian Clough.

The rest of the days stories summed up briefly, because I've not much time.

The Mail on Sunday make up a story based on the loose wording of an anonymous source - Sir Alex retires in two years apparently.

Carrick has a few quotes about today, here from The Observer:

"As a club we do tend to bounce back. If we have a defeat or setback we tend to come back stronger. We can't forget how close we were. It wasn't a disaster in terms of how the season went because we had a good season.

"We'll bounce back. We're strong this year and we're hungry, not that we wouldn't have been hungry anyway. It will be a good championship."

Henry Winter has a long detailed look at van Persie and us.

Mark Ogden in The Telegraph has a story I hope isn't true, about an injured Rio Ferdinand.

And The Independent reckon our defence is already a weak spot...

Concerns in this early part of the season, when United have sometimes lost valuable ground, are defensive, as Phil Jones and Chris Smalling are both unfit and there is a shortage of cover at full-back. In the meantime the old guard of Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand will take care of business; and the Manchester United way always was to worry more about the other end of the pitch, which they have certainly done in the past few days

The Mirror report that Sunderland want Berba. 

Same paper has non-story about the "true cost" of signing  RvP.