10-man Sheffield United Beaten

Does anyone else find that this by-line is not only totally misleading, but also diminishes the achievement of the winning team? For crying out loud, the player was sent off in the 80th minute, and his team was already losing. The sending-off had very little to do with the final result. There should be a rule that you can’t write this headline unless the sending off was in the first half.

Back in my youth, it wasn’t unusual for me to turn up on a Saturday and play a match for (or against) a team that was a player (or two) short. The headline in the Croydon Advertiser would read something like “9-man Croydon West End beat 8-man Addington Villa“, and it would be a fair and accurate headline. 

The match report may not have been quite so far and accurate though. For some reason, the Croydon Advertiser didn’t bother sending a reporter to our games, which was a pity because he would have doubled the attendance, (trebled it, if he’d brought along his dog), and so the report had to be submitted by a representative of the club. This, as might be expected, resulted in some rather biased reporting, with the Press Officer often receiving a quite astonishing amount of praise. But my Mum was impressed.