The transfer rumour mill is swirling apparently, and has today landed upon the names Jack Grealish and Viktor Gyokeres. Enjoy.
Jack of all trades
Mediawatch is well used to swallowing more sh*t than an Olympic triathlete and this glorious Wednesday is no different.
It’s the Mirror claiming top spot with this confected piece of absolute tosh that first pretends Manchester United might sign Jack Grealish and, having carefully constructed this straw man, laughs at the silliness of the thing that absolutely nobody has seriously suggested is a possibility.
Jack Grealish to Man Utd transfer rebuffed with Marcus Rashford comment
Weird for Marcus Rashford to be speaking about this, and that’s because of course he’s done no such thing. The ‘Marcus Rashford comment’ that has apparently ‘rebuffed’ the otherwise-nailed-on Grealish-to-United move is, obviously, not in fact a comment by Rashford but one about him.
Dwight Yorke is the actual rebuffer here, insisting Grealish wouldn’t get in the United team and then comparing him to Rashford as a player who is paid a lot of money and hasn’t delivered, at which point the Reach headline printer goes brrr.
Meanwhile, one has to admire the pot-kettle element of the Mirror coping with the slightly awkward fact that absolutely no ‘serious’ – a word we use quite incorrectly – publication has even linked United with Grealish since about 2021 until Yorke decided to tell some betting company or other his views on the subject.
With the transfer rumour mill swirling, one club touted as a potential destination are his Manchester rivals, United.
Ah, the old rumour mill swirling, is it? Loftily above it, are we? As a general rule, always a massive, massive clue when even somewhere like the Mirror can’t even bring themselves to mention the source of a rumour on which these nonsense constructions are built. Just all emerging from the generic swirling mill.
Don’t be afraid to let them show
Meanwhile, Grealish has also been doing a thing that has become bafflingly prevalent among football types recently: the showing of true colours.
According to the Manchester Evening News:
What Jack Grealish did after Man City goal vs Barcelona showed his true colours
Now we’re going to once again go to the Cambridge Dictionary definition of this phrase:
To show what someone’s real character is, especially when it is unpleasant
The last bit is so important to what makes this an, ahem, unpleasant recent development in the world of headline chicanery. It’s a phrase that is generally associated with someone revealing something unpleasant about themselves. It has negative connotations. But, crucially, that’s only ‘especially’ and not ‘exclusively’.
What your modern headline writers have realised is that they can use this appealingly enticing headline phrase to draw people in expecting something titillating about someone showing what a piece of sh*t they are and apply it to the most trivial and mundane of acts and maintain a wafer-thin veneer of innocence.
Sorry to go on, but it’s really starting to boil Mediawatch’s p*ss, this one.
Anyway, what has Grealish done to show his true colours? What dreadful thing has Grealish done to reveal his real character, ‘especially when it is unpleasant’.
When Mateo Kovacic turned and darted past five players in two touches, Grealish set off, holding his position and finishing powerfully across goal and into the top corner. He could have run off celebrating madly, or back to the centre circle. Instead, he threw a fist as if to say ‘about time.’
He could indeed have run off celebrating madly a goal in a pre-season friendly but we would argue that would have been enormously unusual behaviour and in fact far more compellingly a showing of true colours.
MORE ON TRANSFERS FROM F365:
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Viktor’s spoils
The Liverpool Echo remain in the desperate position of requiring industrial quantities of copium in the absence of any actual transfer activity from Liverpool.
Today that means rummaging around in the bag of Big Transfer Strikers and coming up with Viktor Gyokeres.
Liverpool handed Viktor Gyokeres transfer fee boost as swap deal talks emerge
That boost is in the form of an HITC report that states Sporting might accept a fee below Gyokeres’ £86m release clause.
That report doesn’t mention how far below Sporting might be willing to accept, meaning the actual scale of any boost is very much TBC, because £86m does seem an awful lot. Most importantly of course this boost applies every bit as much to Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Atletico Madrid and absolutely any other of the great many clubs who’ve been loudly linked with Gyokeres this summer.
The ‘swap deal talks’? Well we expect you’re already well ahead of us here and have already deduced that the textbook deployment of what we like to call the ‘Reach As’ is telling you quite correctly that it has absolutely nothing to do with Gyokeres.
The swap deal talks instead concern Gleison Bremer and a rock-solid report from Todofichajes who on this occasion don’t even bother to make up some names of the players Liverpool might be willing to chuck Juventus’ way to bring down his fee.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. There is a university dissertation out there waiting to be written about the rise of the humble ‘as’ to its current pre-eminent status as the single most important word in headline writing given its ability to allow writers to cut-and-shut two entirely different – and in this case equally spurious – claims and make them seem like one tantalising and coherent whole.
Not even true colours displays or the speaking of volumes can compete with a simple ‘as’ in the right hands.