So by now you’ve seen the image of the banners hung outside Cobham this morning, allegedly placed by a disgruntled Chelsea supporter.
Yet I’m sat here thinking there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Why was the banner a day late? If the supporter in question was fed up with the Wolves result, why didn’t they place it the morning after the match?
Ok they could have been late back from The Midlands, but still…. wasn’t it placed during the early hours anyway?
Equally, it’s a little convenient that there was a press conference due only hours afterwards, where the country’s media descended onto our training ground for the build up to our FA Cup match.
The predictable ‘supporter protest’ questions came early and Carlo handled them in good grace; “If it’s only one, there’s no problem. In Italy, it’s different. You can find outside the training ground 1,000 people not happy. It’s difficult to fight with 1,000. With one, you can manage.”
Echoing sanity, Carlo reasoned; “For a manager, it is important at this moment to have the support of the club, of the players, and obviously of the fans – minus one.”
What’s also fishy, is that almost all of the mainstream, and not so mainstream media have almost identical stories on what we’ve called ‘Bannergate’. Check out NewsNow, seriously, it’s almost as if they’ve all been written together. As ever, the football is secondary to the headline.
You won’t find any Murdoch titles there, because he threatened to sue NewsNow and such sites for aggregating ‘his’ news, then cut them all off anyway and hid his content behind a paywall. Suits me, you’ve got to be a special kind of idiot to read that trash AND pay for the privilege.
However having played the media game a while, I’m all too aware of how it works. The journalists at the conference do exchange notes, and agree to a common theme for the next days news. There are notable exceptions, but most are like pack animals, and they move together almost in unison, in all that they do.
It was especially apparent when Jose was manager, as his words could be snipped and quoted to fulfil any journalistic desire, yet Carlo is more coy and until recently, they’ve not really been able to get at him.
It’s widely known that the headline hunting tabloids will stoop to any depth in order to print something sensational. Phone tapping, entrapment, theft, coercion… in order to grab a few headlines, would you put a staged protest past them?
I certainly wouldn’t.
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