Gary Lineker’s impending departure for Match of the Day is treated like a manager’s sacking and that’s a bit too much, while elsewhere the many varied but unfortunately fictitious fools who write off Man City are firmly put in their place.

The sound of silence
It really is a point of order. Mediawatch has had fun for years and years with the concept of various football figures “breaking their silence” on various issues, usually because said “silence” has usually been “broken” at the very first available opportunity and very often in a few hours, or even within a few hours. minutes of what elicited such a silent response. Sometimes this silence can even say a lot, which is confusing.

Mediawatch admits that probably no one else cares, but the latter Mirror The title makes us worry about the opening of a whole new front in the wild world of breaking the silence.

Gary Lineker breaks silence for first time since BBC Match of the Day release was confirmed

Is this just a simple, innocent fallacy of tautology, or are we truly entering a horrible world where every Lineker social media post or podcast counts as a new second, third, fourth, or 879th break of silence ? You have to tell us.

Take Micah
Mediawatch is, in truth, completely baffled by the breadth, depth and dominance of Gary Lineker’s media coverage across the board.

All the major football homepages are dominated by it. not even Cootegate or the arrival of a new Manchester United manager can really compete.

We have long understood that people are much more interested in the circus surrounding football than in football itself. But it’s still a step away from that, isn’t it?

It’s a circus around a circus around football. The whole thing is treated as a manager’s dismissal, following all accepted conventions for covering such an event.

In addition to breaking the silence, there are the “leading contender” articles, the predictive articles that sneak into the headlines that feel like announcements and confirmations until the end (‘Mark Chapman replaces Gary Lineker, ‘Englishman Roy Keane added’ – how new Match of the Day could work‘), those where future former colleagues pay vibrant tributes under titles which, through sheer bad luck, suggest that they might do the opposite (‘I worked with Gary Lineker at the BBC – I won’t forget how he treated me‘). You know, all that good stuff.

But surely the best thing is to resurface old quotes and pretend they are important or relevant. Especially since the Mirror have concocted not one but two ridiculous stories based on very, very obvious jokes. It’s also very obvious who these jokes are about when you combine all the information in this pair of titles.

Alan Shearer has expressed ‘huge concern’ over one of the favorites to replace Gary Lineker on MOTD

And…

Gary Lineker has already named the man he wants to replace in Match of the Day

They both joke about Micah Richards in the jokey podcast they do with Micah Richards, a podcast in which jokes about Micah Richards are a key pillar.

Aside from the obvious follies, “one of the favourites” is also a bit of a stretch for a man currently ninth favorite with the bookmakers behind David Jones and Manish Bhasin and who hasn’t even made the list of “9 possible replacements for Gary Lineker as Match of the Day host to leave BBC role‘.

READ: Match of the Day has pitfalls to avoid in the search for Gary Lineker’s replacement

Paillediola
We fear Ollie Holt may be losing his touch slightly. He usually doesn’t let you see behind the curtain so clearly, to see all the cogs when constructing one of the straw men which he then has no choice but to tear apart while shaking his head sadly .

You can’t write off Man City despite their record losing streak, writes OLIVER HOLT

Mediawatch will never accept this new Mail obsession with capitalizing journalists’ names in headlines, but that doesn’t matter now. We… we weren’t going to rule out Man City, champions of the last four seasons and currently second in the standings. Premier League table four points ahead of third.

Which, precisely, rules out Man City to the extent that Holt has no choice but to promise several hundred words behind the Mail+ paywall to poop said idiot while so bravely pointing out that Pep Guardiola is a good manager?

Is someone, somewhere writing off City? These are bullets. But luckily, Holt tells us precisely how he determined that they are.

Even the bookmakers have relegated them to second favorites for the title behind Liverpool.

I find it strange that they, and so many others, seem to write off City.

He almost sneaked that over to us all, didn’t he, especially with that vaguely non-specific “so many others”. It shouldn’t really need to be said, but no, the bookmakers aren’t ruling out City as second favourites.

Do you know who wins things quite often? Second favorites. Liverpool were third favorites a few weeks ago. Had the bookmakers written them off then?

You can quibble, as Mediawatch would, whether City should really be as big as 9/4 second favorites at the moment. But there’s a big leap from “that seems like a pretty high price” to “write off City.”

Every breath you take
Mediawatch is always painfully aware of having its own little obsessions that no one else cares about. The silences are broken. True colors are shown. Spoken volumes.

Our most recent, as Monday readers will recall, the confusing trend of MEN’S “I saw/watched/spotted” headlines. It’s a little scary, and also strangely juvenile; many of their titles now read a bit like a six-year-old’s homework “what I did on my school holidays”, if six-year-olds were more interested in spotting really obvious things on the grounds football practice only finds a rock on the beach and decides it’s a dinosaur tooth.

Anyway. We don’t expect you to share, but hope you’ll at least forgive our excitement at seeing two of these favorites combined to devastating effect.

I spotted what Omar Berrada did when Ruben Amorim arrived at Man United and it says a lot

Gorgeous. Observer badge for Kieran Horn. For what it’s worth, the thing that says a lot about Berrada and that was so skillfully spotted is really worth an entire column: reader, he smiled.