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Taking the pith!
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The football season has started! That is to say the season in the game where only one member of the team touches the ball with his hand, the ball is shaped like a ball not an egg, and the general principle is that you use your feet to kick the ball rather than your hands.. hence "foot"ball. Now that my incessant and typically English moaning in this instance is complete I shall proceed to my point (assuming I have one). Footballers, that is good ones, get paid obscene amounts of money. This is largely true in most professional sports but the obscenity of footballer pay (be it soccer or yank) is truly astounding. On both sides of the Atlantic it is also a general truism that the aforementioned overpaid sportsmen are - to put it bluntly - thick as pig shit. Were these people not good at their sport they would be doing a shitty manual job somewhere after dropping out of school early. Ok, I'm generalising, there are always a couple of exceptions to the rule, but for the most part they're all a sandwich short of a picnic in the brains department. The fact that they all get royally screwed for millions by their "agents" is evidence enough (although the phrase "more money than sense" may also be applicable in this case).
So where is all this leading to you may wonder. Well, now that the football season has started in earnest it means that the competition between the papers for the football review coverage begins. What does that mean? It means advertising. Shitloads of it. Television and radio telling what the best paper to buy on Sunday or Monday is should you want to know what happened over the glorious footballing weekend. “All the goals, all the analysis!” as the adverts say. Now, you can have all the fancy graphics and voxpop game clips in the world in your advert but nothing is going to beat official endorsement of your review as that of an overpaid footballer, and so we come to the national treasure that is The Sun. All the limeys know it, and most of the merkins do too. It's a redtop rag owned by Rupert Murdoch, the New York Post is modeled on it. The Sun – gawd bless'em – have a section on Monday called “Super Goals”. Now The Sun is not the most sophisticated of papers, it is targeted at the lowest common denominator and that is why it sells. Its hacks though are by no means stupid and it seems clear that they like to have a laugh at others expense as well. Why do I say this? Well the person they got to endorse “Super Goals” is none other than Frank Lampard of Chelsea. Nothing spectacular there I hear you say. He plays for England and is a big name. The advert takes the line of “Super Goals in the Sun with Super Frank”. Frank smiles and delivers his line wonderfully but for one tiny problem.........Frank Lampard has a seriously bad lisp.
What we actually get is “Thuper goals in the Thun with thuper Frank”
Now.... I'm sure somewhere in the marketing department of the Sun's Wapping office someone was watching “The Life of Brian”, saw the “welease woderwick” bit and then heard Bigus Dickus speak and exclaimed “I think I know how we can take pith and get away with it!”
Now you know why I rambled on about them being “thick as pigshit” and having “more money than sense”.
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