August 2008

I don’t usu­ally do this. Com­ment on arti­cles penned by sports jour­nal­ists. Maybe, it’s because I under­stand where they’re com­ing from. They need to be awfully skewed in their assess­ments (I’m gen­er­al­iz­ing of course) to sell their papers. Rile up emo­tions amongst sports fans and wham! — they’ve swirled a whirlpool of con­tro­ver­sies to start tongues wagging.

How­ever, when a foot­ball jour­nal­ist gets it so wrong about a club (Liv­er­pool) I’ve sup­ported as a child, I feel obliged to respond. The jour­nal­ist in ques­tion is Ken­neth Goh, a foot­ball cor­re­spon­dent whose col­umn appears in a local news­pa­per aptly called — Today.

The title of his piece — Rob­bie Keane’s No Tor­res. Bril­liant. At this point, he needn’t have con­tin­ued, because every Liv­er­pool fan knows that.

Fer­nando Tor­res is cur­rently the most fear­some striker in the game. His goal, which won Spain the Euro 2008 con­firmed that. So, why did Ken­neth even attempt to jux­ta­pose Keane’s cal­i­bre against Tor­res’? To dis­credit him­self as a gen­uine foot­ball cor­re­spon­dent? At least that was the impres­sion I got from the headline.

No mat­ter, I fig­ured the head­line was prob­a­bly a tongue-in-cheek attention-grabber for what would actu­ally be a mag­nan­i­mous eval­u­a­tion of Liverpool’s acqui­si­tion of Keane. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

{ 0 comments }