After a week of solid build-up towards Sunday’s visit of Man United to Anfield, with the attention firmly on the behaviour of both sets of supporters, we were always going to see similar attention placed on the behaviour of fans in the aftermath of the match.
What is becoming a growing trend now though is that the media spend the build-up talking about how the majority of supporters are well behaved and they hope/expect the match to pass without incident. The said match then passes without particular incident. Then the media go searching for the tiny minority so they can report their controversial and unwanted opinions/actions.
Twitter has given the very small minority a huge platform for their views to be aired and then reported by mass media. Today there are mentions of “abuse” in The Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail and Sky Sports.
There are abusive tweets out there on virtually any topic. It’s made-up fabricated “news” unless there’s something exceptional statistically.
In the days before twitter – and the internet in general – the opinions of the idiotic minority (and we really are talking minority when it is one or two people on a social network of millions) were kept to themselves, or at most between them and their small friends circle.
The person who tweets their pathetic opinions on a referee or the opposing supporters would before have done so in their living room or in a pub. Their comments would be heard by maybe a dozen people at best.
I’m not condoning the opinions of the minority – far from it. What is frustrating is that the mainstream media give these clowns such attention. The media court the controversy.
It’s disappointing that the behaviour of thousands of people who attend a match are overlooked for the behaviour of a few faceless people sat on their smartphones. Their opinions are worthless, why give them the notoriety.
Fan Comments