The Page Which Heard A Rumour On Sky That Chelski Could Have Won The Title On Monday Night
Tuesday April 26 2005
Just The Man For Chelski
A few weeks ago, Arsene Wenger urged the Chelski hierarchy to be a voice for the club and take some sort of moral lead amid unrelenting adverse publicity.
The response was instant.
In the only language he understands, Roman Ambramovich immediately quelled internal discontent by giving Jose a double-your-money pay-rise.
Now, in what The Times proclaim is his 'first big interview', Chelski chairman Bruce Buck has stepped forward to help improve the clubs tattered image and ridicule any suggestions that the club's hierarchy is little more than a bunch of trumped-up gangsters.
Buck, if you're wondering, is chairman by stint of owning a single Chelski share. Roman owns the other 84 million. "Every English company has to have two shareholders," he explains helpfully.
Certainly, he appears to have just the authority, credentials and voice to be the figurehead of Chelski.
"It was not long ago that I was sitting in the East Upper Stand shouting, 'Kill Ken Bates,'" he reveals proudly.
The Other Team In London
Credit where credit is due. We may have given Sky Sports a bit of stick this season, but Mediawatch has to doff its cap towards the station for its coverage of the Arsenal-Chelski match on Monday 25th April.
Picking their studio guests with great aptitude, Sky ensured a lively halftime banter by drafting in an a representative for both teams - Quinn for Arsenal and Wilkins for Chelski. If Mediawatch was a Chelski fan it may have been a tad annoyed that the 'impartial expert' was Alan Smith, a Highbury player for ten years, but no matter.
Commentator Alan Parry more than compensated for Smith's pro-Gooner leanings by being both balanced and fair to Chelski throughout the match, constantly reminding viewers of how much the outcome meant to both clubs with the aid of such banner promos as 'Chelsea on the brink' and regular clips of Chelski fans in a west London pub (Presumably they were unable to buy a ticket for the match so they couldnt cheer on their team in person).
One aspect of Sky's coverage was very sloppy, however. At the end of the game, the Match Stats section had been set up wrong, and actually said that Arsenal's opponents had been some team called 'Tottenham Hotspur'!
It goes without saying that this was an error, for this Tottenham side had not received a mention all evening, and certainly no representative of Tottenham past or present was shown at any time in the Sky studio, or interviewed after the game...
Star Man
Never let the facts get in the way of advertising a bad story...
Returning with an old trick, the banner promo for Tuesdays Evening Standard proclaimed:
'Arsenal star in punch-up'
That 'star' being Quincy Owusu-Abeyie, he of the single Premiership start.
Mediawatch ranks this episode alongside the Standards headline from a few years back which thundered 'Arsenal Coach Quits!'. Upon buying said newspapers, readers were quietly informed that the club's youth team coach had retired.
Bucking The Trend
"We appreciate that the £250 million-plus is a lot of money, but we are just playing catch-up, says Buck to The Times. If you look at what (Manchester) United, Arsenal, Newcastle and Liverpool have spent in the last ten years, and then us more recently, by and large we are all similar.
Mediawatch would add a pithy comment but its eyebrows are stuck on the ceiling.
In The Nuts
Never let it be said that F365 doesnt provide a comprehensive report! To quote our match tracker of ManYoo v Toon on Sunday:
'59 mins - Shearer takes a smart free-kick from the edge of the box but Howard is alert and catches close to his left-hand ball.'
Filling Your Boots
Theyre busy filling their boots at PSV...
Reports Leander Schaerlaeckens in his article for The Guardian on Tuesday: 'DaMarcus Beasley was given the unfortunate task of replacing Robben& while Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink has filled Kezman's little boots nicely.'
Reports Kevin McCarra in his article for The Guardian on Tuesday: 'Young-Pyo Lee and Ji-Sung Park, the two Koreans in the squad, were both stalwarts of his 2002 World Cup team. Park, as best he can, now has to try to fill Robben's deft boots.'
Headline Of The Day
'Bruce rewarded for tagging along with Pennant' The Times
Quote Of The Day
"It was just a normal challenge. Both players went for the same ball and it was a fair challenge, the kind that happens in every game If that was a normal challenge by Lauren, Mediawatch is jolly happy that it doesnt play on the left wing in the Premiership.
Runner-Up
Harrys mood is very bad and it will go on being bad for a lot longer than 24 hours. It has hurt us all very much but I know it will affect Harry greatly. He is as low as I have seen him. Any defeat hurts but bad defeats hurt more and then particularly for it to happen at Portsmouth." - Jim Smith.
Rumour Of The Day
'Doctors in Romania are treating a 28-year-old whose penis exploded while he was making love to his girlfriend. Ilarie Coroiu was taken to hospital in the Transylvanian town of Cluj after his girlfriend, Magdalena, 18, "felt something strange" and noticed that the bed was covered in blood. Dr Angela Domocos, head of the accident and emergency department at Cluj General Hospital, said: "It is very rare for this to happen. We call it an exploded penis because it happens when the blood cavities in the penis burst. "I don't know what this couple were playing at, but there must have been tremendous pressure inside the penis to make this happen." Mr Coroiu is now recovering after an operation to stop the bleeding' Reuters with the remarkable news that a 28-year-old has managed to get lucky with an 18-year-old female&
Thanks to today's Mediawatch spotters: Clay James, Simon, Richard Hill.
Seen or heard anything that belongs on this page? It could be a commentator's gaffe, a terrible headline pun, a brilliant spelling error or just about anything daft that appears in the papers or on TV or radio. Send your submissions to , putting Mediawatch in the subject field