Newcastle United fans up and down the country got nicely settled in on the couch tonight and turned on the TV, flicked over to Sky Sports Main Event and rolled their eyes into he back of their heads.
In the studio at Old Trafford sat three pundits: Wayne Rooney, Roy Keane and Andy Cole. Let's ignore for a minute the absolute lack of personality on two out of the three and focus on what they all have in common shall we?
Every single one of them played for Manchester United. You can try and come back with "But Andy Cole played for Newcastle too" but that's not going to fly. Cole sang anti-Newcastle songs when he won the league with Manchester United so he may have been a Toon legend, but his own loyalties clearly lie elsewhere.
The Sky Sports 'Big Six' bias is nothing new, but they aren't even trying to hide it anymore.
Would it really have killed them to get an ex-Newcastle player in, hell, we'd even take a neutral, but three former Man United players is ridiculous.
People pay a fortune for Sky Sports and they treat the majority of their subscribers like mugs when they do stuff like this.
It's obviously not just an anti-Newcastle thing, every one of the 'Other 14' will likely feel the same when their club is swept aside so they can appeal to the glory supporters.
Countless times a team will put in a top performance against one of the 'Big Six' and the analysis will be focused almost entirely on how poor the top side played rather than giving credit to the winning side.
BBC's Match of the Day has been guilty of this too, but they are under much bigger time constraints than Sky and at least they tend to mix up their pundits in terms of biases.
Clearly I'm still raging after Newcastle's performance against Manchester United and just needed to vent, but I can't be the only one getting wound up by this.
PL | GD | PTS | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Liverpool
|
14 | 18 | 35 |
2 |
Chelsea
|
15 | 17 | 31 |
3 |
Arsenal
|
15 | 14 | 29 |
4 |
Manchester City
|
15 | 6 | 27 |
5 |
Nottingham Forest
|
15 | 1 | 25 |
6 |
Aston Villa
|
15 | 0 | 25 |
7 |
Brighton
|
15 | 3 | 24 |
8 |
Bournemouth
|
15 | 3 | 24 |
9 |
Brentford
|
15 | 3 | 23 |
10 |
Fulham
|
15 | 2 | 23 |
11 |
Tottenham Hotspur
|
15 | 12 | 20 |
12 |
Newcastle United
|
15 | -2 | 20 |
13 |
Manchester United
|
15 | 1 | 19 |
14 |
West Ham United
|
15 | -9 | 16 |
15 |
Everton
|
14 | -7 | 14 |
16 |
Leicester
|
15 | -9 | 14 |
17 |
Crystal Palace
|
15 | -6 | 13 |
18 |
Wolves
|
15 | -14 | 10 |
19 |
Ipswich
|
15 | -13 | 9 |
20 |
Southampton
|
15 | -20 | 5 |