Bonkers football sparks confusion as Man Utd get clever in the transfer market

Mediawatch has said it before and will say it again: the Premier League must return immediately to save all of us from the media and the media from themselves.

Minds are being lost everywhere you look. The biggest story in football today is about a goose.

We wish we were making that up.

Silly goose

We are firmly in football’s silly season. The transfer window feels like it’s in a bit of a holding pattern right now, waiting for one or two dominoes to fall to set the whole thing back in motion again. We’ve surely already had more summer managerial changes than we can eat.

And the actual football that matters – proper football, Premier League football, Our League football – still feels absolutely ages away even though we’re now hurtling toward mid-August.

So we have some sympathy with any football news outlet at this time. We can’t ever entirely condone pretending Arsenal pre-season games matter or that any football club is desperately racing to complete six or seven or eight transfers by the arbitrary deadline of this weekend, but we can understand the need to find something, anything to feed the culture machine.

Things have reached a head, though, when The Sun feel the need to resort to pretending, as the football homepage on their website does this unnecessarily hot Wednesday morning, that this is currently the biggest story in all of football.

To be fair, there is some content gold in here. Golden goose content, if you will. It’s surely the most attention the Isthmian Premier League has received for quite some time.

We put it to you that the final sentence of that undeniably succinct three-para summary is, intentionally or otherwise, one of the greatest ever committed to print about this wonderful sport of ours.

Everything about it. The second mention. The full name of the stadium. And above all, ‘sparking confusion’. Brilliant. Mediawatch is aware that we may be entering the arena of the unwell, but we’ve been chuckling at that sentence for a good 15 minutes now and fear we may never stop.

But there is an important point to be found here.

Can you really be ‘sent for an early bath’ ‘as the encounter ticked into stoppage time’? At that stage it feels like you’re just being sent for a bath.

A fine line between stupid and clever

Every now and then Mediawatch sees a curiosity-gap headline and thinks ‘But surely they can’t just mean…’ and then we click on it because we’re idiots and sure enough they absolutely did just mean…

Today’s example comes from the Daily Express.

But surely, Mediawatch thought to ourselves, they can’t just mean ‘not managing to sell Marcus Rashford and having to keep him instead’?

Of course they mean exactly that.

Now we’re not about to question Rashford’s Like A New Signing bona fides or even query the idea that he could be a very, very useful player for United if indeed he does eventually find himself fully reintegrated into the squad.

But…

… ‘might not need to spend a penny’ is certainly an interesting choice of words about making use of a player whose unexpected return to the Old Trafford fold is in large part due to the fact nobody other than Man United has yet proved keen to yeet 325 grand every single week in his general direction.

Career highlight

Just sensational framing here from The Sun.

Let’s not get bogged down in just how mortifyingly sh*t that ‘EN-DER’ pun is. Let’s move swiftly on. Because this is a headline that makes Maresca seem like, well, a bit of a dick. Why’s he so happy about f*cking over England managers?

The answer, inevitably, is that he’s not.

What he was happy about, what he did consider a major highlight of his playing career, was scoring two goals in the final as Sevilla won the 2006 UEFA Cup. What a weirdo.

Now we don’t want to speak for Maresca, but we’re pretty sure the reason that’s a career highlight for him is, well, the fact he scored two goals in the final as Sevilla won the 2006 UEFA Cup.

To The Sun, of course, the actual reason scoring two goals in the final and lifting a European trophy is actually special to Maresca is because the opposition that night was a Middlesbrough side managed by Steve McClaren and captained by Gareth Southgate.

Who says English exceptionalism isn’t real?

But it caps off an extraordinary couple of days for the new Man City manager. First he sensationally BANS Erling Haaland from captaincy