Nobody's Fault But Mine

It's a bit of a special paper round-up today, where I take advantage of being to busy to write one all weekend to do a round-up of all the anti-Man Utd stuff that's been in the papers all weekend.

Some people chanted some things.

It's been interesting to watch the story unfold over the weekend.  Starting with an over-wrought tweet, "Madness"?  Really.  At best insensitive, never madness. And then asks the club for a response, which response is then reported as the club spontaneously issuing a statement condemning the chants.  Which I've no truck with.  We can indeed contrast this quick response and unequivocal condemnation with a certain other club's response to wrongdoing.

The next phase is the entire media misreporting the chants as Hillsborough related, which they weren't before gradually changing their reports to anti-Liverpool, which they were.  The two are still linked in reports though:

The song in question has been sung ever since the Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra incident in the corresponding Anfield fixture last season, after which the Uruguayan was found guilty of aiming racist slurs at the French left-back, receiving an eight-match ban and a £40,000 fine.

While a minority of United fans have directed chants at Liverpool regarding Hillsborough for a number of years, a Liverpool minority have also sung songs referring to the Munich air disaster of 1958 in which 23 people died.

Anti-Liverpool does not equal anti-Hillsborough.  Having said that perhaps the chants were insensitive.  But then again, we were at home, against Wigan.  The chants weren't aimed at Liverpool supporters, the media coverage thus stirs the bad feeling, bringing it to attention, creating the story. By their very nature offensive chants are meant to be offensive.  Bringing them to the notice of those they were meant to offend seems a little counter-productive, especially when many of the stories also go on about how flames should not be fanned before the meeting of the two clubs next week.  The media have their cake and eat it - "We're just reporting events, we are not responsible for setting off any chain reaction, let the fans be responsible, not us."  The media stir up trouble while at the same time pretending to be a neutral canvas just waiting to be painted with news.

The story is so ingrained by this point that The Telegraph can turn MUST's statement saying the chants weren't Hillsborough related, into a statement condemning the chants, with the headline saying 

"Manchester United supporters group condemn Hillsborough chants directed at Liverpool fans," which they do, but they also note that there weren't any Hillsborough chants.

By Sunday the papers are reporting that The Premier League won't be taking any action over the chants.  Well of course they won't, there's nothing to take action against.

The Independent link the chanting with John Terry and Anton Ferdinand not shaking hands, in a bizarre piece presumably trying to paint football in some sort of uncivilised brush.  It confuses me why one man refusing to shake hands with the man he thinks racially abused him somehow means that football is a horrible sport.  And this after all the papers were up in arms when Sepp Blatter suggested that racism on the pitch can be solved with a handshake.

So yes, one little chant snowballs into the biggest story of the weekend.  The impression is created that we were singing anti-Hillsborough chants, and even though all the stories now admit we weren't, the fact that the the stories are still going on undermines that point.  Thus they get to say, "look nowhere do we claim they were anti-Hillsborough," but always linking it with Hillsborough.  And so we prepare for a Liverpool-Man Utd game where the media are doing their best to create a situation.

"Only the media, it's never their fault..."

A further thought - that the ground for this weekend's story was already prepared with stories beforehand, and the question to Sir Alex, on the need for fans of both clubs to respect the others.  The weekend was a self-fulfilling prophecy, any chant would have done, it was the story they wanted to write.