In his essay 'On Bullshit' in 1986 the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as a statement made by someone who does not care whether it is true or not, which is phony, excessive or disingenuous and which is often repeated mindlessly and uncritically. Frankfurt bemoaned what he saw back then as a modern trend in the media and in public life to spout bullshit.
Regular readers may have noticed criticism of lazy and poor quality football journalism as a trend on this blog. Unfortunately, this bullshit is too often parroted by fans, players and managers to the point where the discourse of the football world is seriously weakened.
Below I analyze what I think are three egregious examples of bullshit from the world of football. Sadly, I could have written about many more.
Used as a reason to justify sacking a manager. But it's a bullshit phrase. It carries the underlying assumption that a team's performance under a manager should constantly be improving (I.e. the team should constantly be making tangible progress). This is obviously an unrealistic expectation, it is perfectly natural for excellent managers to go through good and bad periods and good or bad seasons.
2. [Insert team] have only won [insert number of points] from the last [insert number of games] and that's relegation form!
This is also used as an excuse to sack (or call for the sacking of) a manager, most notoriously Steve Clarke at West Brom in December, 2013 after apparently winning only 31 points in the previous 34 games. Please don't misunderstand me at this point, I'm not saying that form is irrelevant, instead I mean that managers should be judged primarily by their league position on a season-by-season basis, not by their points haul over an arbitrary number of games. It's just disingenuous to look at points rather than league position. In some seasons 31 points would be enough to keep a team up and it would be mathematically possible to avoid relegation with just six points.
West Brom were 16th when Clarke was sacked, one suspects they'd take that position at the end of the season with Alan Irvine now. Moreover, in Clarke's only full season in charge West Brom finished 8th. They don't have a prayer now of doing that with Irvine. In fact, if they do I'll eat my hat.
3. Manchester United were [insert negative phrase] when Moyes first took over.
The idea that Moyes inherited a weak Manchester United team is not only preposterous, it's bullshit.
Think about it morons, they won the title by eleven (!!) points that year. It simply doesn't make any sense to say they were a weak team. Journalists knew this so they used a roundabout phrase such as 'in need of strengthening', 'ageing' or 'not a good team' to imply it instead. Either that or they said that United were lucky to win the title that season (the Premier League is 38 games and luck evens itself out over that time, it is impossible to be lucky to win it) or they said something like 'the rot of mediocrity had set it' (a phrase which is so vague it is meaningless). Most ridiculous of all, some journalists said that it was only Ferguson's brilliance as a manager who won them the title. This makes it sound like Fergie was on the pitch himself, in fact of course it is the players who do all the work, score the goals and carry out the managers instructions. To imply otherwise is....
If you want to have your say then please leave a comment below. Please also like and share on Facebook if you others might like to read this.
Next Thur happens to be Christmas Day, and the Thursday afterwards is New Year's Day, but I will be blogging as usual on both those days, so speak to you then :)
No comments:
Post a Comment