One major difference is that Liverpool don't get punished or criticised in most media for it. Take this example: https://www.90min.com/posts/6481377...he-most-yellow-cards-for-diving-since-2018-19 No dives last season? It's laughable.
I disagree over Kane.Usually their are at least 2/3 players around ready to chop or sandwich him.He's got to go down...….and they don't hit him with their handbags either!
Wouldnt say i liked them, but weve all got them. I choose not to get all annoyed at it, part of the game has been for ever in some form or other, puching fellas off the ball back the day, now its diving and stuff cos if cameras. Sportsmen trying to gain an unfair advantage in sport? Crazy huh Ps on your boring comment, its boring for me reading all the squealing about my team on here, but i dont complain i just play along. You know its never my intention to annoy you guise innit pnp
You misunderstand why people get annoyed by it. If Ashley Young got booked every time he did a star jump, then nobody would give a ****, apart from his managers. He doesn't. It rarely happens, despite everyone knowing that he's a massive diver. You're not bored by comments about Liverpool cheating, either. You wouldn't constantly whine about it otherwise, you'd stop reading. You complain, then pretend that you're not, just like you applaud your team cheating and use whataboutery as an excuse.
Over the past 5 years, the following have been established as (quote Rafa Benitez) "facts" (end quote): 1) 2015: There is corruption in football, all the way to the very top. 2) 2017: There are narratives at play in football, and officials are both aware of and sometimes actively contributing to them (Mark "look at me everybody" Clattenburg). 3) 2018: The standard of officiating has sunk so pitifully low that there was an overwhelming groundswell of support for the introduction of technology, otherwise known as VAR. Taken on their own, the above 3 facts are relatively innocuous. You need a combination of the three to create an orchestrated effort almost impossible to trace and even more impossible to derail. As I said in a post earlier this season: am I certain that there is bias in favour of certain teams? No. Would I be surprised to wake up tomorrow to headlines of 'FA Scandal!" plastered all over the back pages? Equally, no. What worries me more than any of the above is a closer look at the money-driven links connecting multiple elements of the footballing world which don't necessarily make corruption inevitable but do make it far, far easier to direct and incentivise. In the early days of the TV mega-money era, we sat back and watched as one of the biggest providers of football coverage and news - Sky Sports - launched a gambling wing - Sky Bet - and then slowly as the years ticked by, interlinked the two. So much so that we are now at a ridiculous stage where you can open their website and one tab is reporting x looks likely to move to y, while the other tab is offering bets on x moving to y with odds clearly fixed according to the coverage offered in tab 1. Seems innocent enough but personally I have always found it disturbing to the point of being unethical. In securities fraud terms, it strikes me as a Pump & Dump scheme. But lately even more disturbing developments have occurred - again, without a peep from Joe Public. I'm sure many of us enjoyed the excellent Amazon Prime coverage over Boxing Day. But isn't it a bit unsettling that the same company have started making documentaries about all and sundry? Is it really all that far fetched to envision a subtle yet intrusive directive from the very top to ensure x,y & z happen in a group of games in order to make 'great TV' from the documentary being filmed at the same time? And is it really all that far-fetched, as football becomes ever more Hollywoodised, to envision the retail giants interlinking its sports coverage department with its merchandise department? Much in the same way as Sky Sports 'uses' its own coverage to 'pump' select stories before 'dumping' the odds on its gambling clientele, could we one day see Amazon use its coverage to 'pump' a certain team's merchandise (also available on Prime, with same day delivery of course) before 'dumping' it on its retail clientele? It may sound sinister, but there is no question that a great narrative makes great TV. Leicester winning the league, City winning the treble, Liverpool winning the league after 30 years...these are gripping stories. What Amazon are doing is taking niche TV and financing it to go mainstream, turning it into documentaries which (they hope) will compete with the best Netflix series out there. And once that goes mainstream, the capital potential in the game will increase exponentially, thereby also increasing exponentially the chance that someone, anyone at the the very top of the ivory tower will start orchestrating a linkage of the 3 ingredients above: exploiting the corrupt heart of football by driving the 'best TV' narratives and securing both via an unseen technological system answerable to no-one. Rant over. Tin foil hat back in drawer.
Now lads.As we begin a New Year,you have to remember I'm always right and you are always wrong! HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I don't know what you mean. It's not like City won virtually everything, while Sunderland got relegated twice, is it?
I'm still trying to understand what happened to Sunderland.Big ground,big support (I thought!).What could possibly happen?
Not a rant at all. What annoys me most and I've said it before is that we don't 'play the game' Just as our owners won't splash the cash on players, they won't share out the brown envelope. That said, it could change now we have Jose as he is a 'story' and for once we may have a little chance of being 'liked'.
Well that's the thing...and again, I know this is seriously tin foil territory...but would you be that amazed to discover that the ongoing Amazon documentary had something to do with our appointing him, of all people? I mean let's be honest, they probably signed up to film us hoping for a glorious season in our glorious new stadium,but by mid-October had come to the resounding conclusion that they'd picked the wrong horse and we were on course for a season of mid-table, trophy-less tedium... I personally don't think there is a connection, but at the same time we aren't a million miles away from individual multinational corporate behemoths becoming the gatekeepers to all of: coverage, merchandise and sponsorship, with the latter leveraging - even if only indirectly - access to the former.
