There’s little point whining about media bias. We all know it exists, but is it worth actually complaining about? Surely what is important are the cold hard facts: that Spurs failed against Leicester in 2015-16 and that if Liverpool fail to win this season — it’s not over till it’s over — they will have failed in their objective also? Hacks can spin away failure all they like but only one club collects the silverware in question at the end of the season.
In a way, biased media analysis and generally fawning coverage of certain clubs or managers tends to be detrimental to its would-be beneficiaries, in that they give a false impression of the true values in the field, and can lead the ‘favoured’ clubs to make bad decisions which can potentially set them back years.
Just look at United being unable to resist media pressure to set ‘Ole at the wheel’, a decision which is sure to come back to haunt them, or Liverpool giving in to nostalgia and reappointing Kenny Dalglish as manager some time ago, which set them back in their rebuild by a good few years.
Klopp is a very good manager, as is Poch; neither is perfect, neither is a miracle worker. Their respective failures to win the league (in Klopp’s case I’m assuming for the sake of argument that Man City go on to win the title this year) should not cause people to lose sight of the excellent job they’re doing and the long-term upward trajectory on which they’ve placed their clubs.
Mourinho won more titles at United during his brief tenure than Klopp and Poch combined during their longer tenures at Liverpool and Spurs respectively; yet does anybody view his time at United as a success?
My advice is to not get sucked into this dog chasing its own tail cycle of real time scanning of every broadcast or tweet or article or opinion piece for evidence of bias. You’re giving these people way too much credit. Their jobs require them to fill the airwaves, pollute the internet and waste newspaper ink with something or other, however vacuous or inane.
So, for want of genuine insight or analytical capacity, most of the time the majority of them resort to the well worn gambits of playing devil’s advocate; intentionally winding people up to get a reaction by (for instance) presenting a tough Tottenham loss in a way that stops just short of using the actual word “spursy”; having a laugh by (for instance) casually dropping references like “slip” and “slipping” in a piece about Liverpool’s title bid; and generally just rehashing the usual pub talking points in a slightly more artful way.
Throwing pity parties about how a monolithic media ‘they’ are blowing smoke up the arses of certain clubs whilst conspiring against plucky underdog Spurs only guarantees that the Chiellinis of the world will continue to be able to observe, quite truthfully and dispassionately, that “it’s the history of Tottenham.....they always create many chances and score so much but, in the end, they miss always something to arrive at the end” for as long as the persecution complex persists. Don’t let the warmed over ‘opinions’ of a bunch of coked-up hacks bother you in the slightest; deveop a thicker skin.