Writers' Block

If your taste is for cheap fiction, you like football and you haven’t a lot of money to spend, you could do a whole lot worse than the Daily Mirror’s coverage of the F.A. Cup replay between Bolton Wanderers and Arsenal at the Reebok Stadium.

Between them, Mirror writers Alan Nixon and David McDonnell have managed to produce two pieces of archetypal tabloid journalism while maintaining the impression that either they did not attend the game, or they know virtually nothing about football, or both.

According to Nixon, the main point was that the “Wasteful Gunners” missed a hatful of chances, including two penalties, so the nearest he came to any awareness of the sublime quality of Arsenal’s football was to quote their manager and add, rather begrudgingly it seemed, that it was a “classy display”. This masterpiece of understatement was swiftly followed by the theory that actually it was Stelios Giannakopoulos who won Arsenal the game because he had “a personal nightmare” – but what more should we expect of a journalist whose sub-heading was “Freddie kills off Big Sam”?

Remarkable as it might seem, David McDonnell’s match report managed to be even worse. First there was the embarrassing determination to establish and sustain a running analogy with Valentine’s Day. Thus the headline “Romance of the Cup”, the sub-head “a Valentine’s Day epic that had it all” (all, apparently except good sound journalism from the Mirror) and, most cheesy of all, the Gunners’ penalty misses described as “Stupid Cupids”, subbed with “Valentine’s arrows that missed the target. Were these the worst ever pair of FA Cup penalty misses?”

After that, it was virtually all downhill, from the absurd first paragraph “If Arsenal go on to win the FA Cup this season they will look back on this night of farce and high drama and wonder how they ever managed to stay in the famous old competition.” to the description of extra time as “30 minutes of mayhem”.

Leaving aside the fact that a decent dictionary defines ‘mayhem’ as ‘violent or damaging action’, we are left wondering how a journalist, even one with a limited gift for the use of words, manages to reduce one of the great Cup ties, full of captivating football and alive with tension, to a “night of farce and high drama” and, presumably, a classic case of the old ‘lucky Arsenal’.

But worse was to follow. McDonnell, blissfully unaware of the extent of his ignorance, proceeded to take issue with Arsene Wenger’s description of the game as “electric”, suggesting that “slapstick” would be more “accurate” and later following up with “bizarre” – an apt word, ironically, to characterise one of the poorest pieces of tabloid journalism you could find anywhere outside the fiction shelves.