“We have guys on our team that speak English that are hard to understand because they’re Scousers,” a quote from Tom Hicks in a recent interview with American sports magazine Sports Illustrated. Somehow The Telegraph have today interpreted that as a “jibe” at Scousers. Quite how Im not sure?
Ask Carragher himself and he’d no doubt admit he’s hard for new players to understand! I’m sure he often has in interviews and many times joked about it. This is obviously a classic case of the poor press coverage currently being played out in the wake of the whole Hicks-Benitez saga.
It seems the media are only happy to create negative press associated with our club at the moment.
While every other paper today picks up other quotes in the same interview, somehow declaring that Hicks has ‘re-opened his war of words with Benitez’. The quote in question is:
“We just wanted to see if the team was going to gel. Then he [Benitez] went to a press conference and kind of pouted and answered in the same way 20 times: ‘I’m focusing on my team’.”
In all honesty, can anyone even argue that isn’t almost fact? Benitez did ‘pout’ and although it’s not neccesarily a word we’d use regularly in England, Americans often use the word and Hicks would loosely have used it to briefly explain the situation to his uneducated American audience. Not much harm there really is there? I’d hardly call it re-opening a war of words.
What’s important to understand is that Sports Illustrated is the number one sports magazine in America, subscribed to by millions – 23 million adults per week to be exact – and the fact they have choosen to interview Hicks is a good thing for Liverpool FC. And while Hicks has been very public – if not overly public recently – I can see exactly why, he as an American, would take the opportunity to give an interview to such a huge magazine and audience.
The truth is, the original article is a very positive one which the writer does well to provide their American audience a good overview of Liverpool FC, our history, heritage and current situation.
The sad part is that the English media have decided to take very small parts from quotes (which were given two weeks ago now!) completely twist them and throw them out as negative press about Liverpool. Which has been happening for many weeks now since the saga began.
Interesting to note the English media have choosen to ignore facts such as the writer describing Hicks as “analytical (rather) than critical” when dicussing his thoughts post-United, or his quote “the media made up everything from that point forward. They made up that we were going to fire him”.
Ignore the pathetic headlines today and enjoy the match this afternoon!
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