The 'Tomorrow's Fish & Chip Wrapper' awardsUpdated: August 28th, 2007
Thanks to everyone who sent in nominations. Normally we’d have to wait a whole year to get enough entries for an awards, but at the current rate I might have to make this a monthly event.
So, without further ado, here are the worthy winners:
The ‘Turn up your hearing aid and buy a dictionary’ award
Winner: Joe Lovejoy (The Times)
This article received more nominations than the rest combined.
Lovejoy’s first outlandish claim was that Sven had ‘received a lukewarm welcome from the City fans’ at the Doncaster match. Are these the same fans who chanted his name from the second minute of the game, asks Michael Fryer?
Equally inexplicable was his description of our club as ‘Humdrum’. After going through three relegations and three promotions in just over a decade that’s not exactly the first word that springs to my mind.
‘A thoroughly unpleasant piece of anti-City, anti-Sven crap’, is Mike Jenkinson’s assessment.
The ‘Selective use of statistics’ award
Winner: John Aizlewood (The Times)
Mocking Bianchi’s scoring record without mentioning the 18 goals he sored in Serie A last season makes John a worthy winner.
The ‘Trivialising mass murder’ award
Winner: Louise Taylor (Sunday Telegraph)
Runner-up: Peter Ferguson (Daily Mail)
Our new owner has been ‘likened to Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot’, claims the Telegraph’s Louise Taylor. After extensive Googling I’m yet to find anyone who has made that claim. If such a person exists I suspect their preferred choice of writing implement would be crayon.
For the record, Pol Pot killed around a third of Cambodia’s population during his five years in power, while Saddam’s many crimes include the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in one attack.
That’s not to say that allegations about Thaksin’s human rights record shouldn’t be taken seriously. Questions still remain over his role in suppressing a Muslim insurgency in the south, though as the Thai junta recently asked a former assassin to help them deal with the problem, the issue appears far from black and white. His role in the killings of more than 2,000 suspected drug dealers is clear-cut though, with this report from human rights group Article 2 detailing how Thaksin’s government offered financial incentives to police officers who killed suspected drug dealers.
According to this list of mass murderers that would still leave Thaksin around 1,698,000 killings short of Pol Pot’s total.
Taylor faced stiff competition from the Daily Mail’s Peter Ferguson, who claimed that Thaksin had been likened to ‘Hitler, Saddam and Pol Pot’. But at least Ferguson’s article was supposed to be about Thaksin. The fact that Taylor’s absurd claim was casually slipped into a match report of the Doncaster game makes her a more fitting winner.
The ‘I’m more disgusted than you’ award
Winner: Simon Hattenstone (The Guardian)
Runner-up: Michael Henderson (Daily Telegraph)
This was to prove a ding-dong battle between the Guardian and the Telegraph.
David Conn made an early bid for the crown, telling City fans who weren’t criticising Thaksin that they needed to ‘grow up’. The Telegraph’s Michael Henderson went one further, announcing he had withdrawn his support of the club (though it seems he had done that years earlier anyway).
But in the battle for the moral high ground there’s only ever going to be one winner. The Guardian soon wheeled in its big gun in the shape of Simon Hattenstone, who is apparently ’suicidal’ about the takeover, describing it as his ‘worst nightmare’.
The ‘Desperate use of an historical figure award to back up your argument’ award
Winner: Simon Hattenstone (The Guardian)
Invoking the spirit of City’s founder, minister’s daughter Anna Connell, earns the writer his second gong.
Hattenstone wonders what Connell would make of a billionaire buying the club. As City was founded in 1880 with the duel aim of promoting Christianity and abstinence from alcohol, it has already proved a spectacular let-down on both counts. The fact that the club’s biggest shareholder by the 1890s was Chesters Brewery (who quickly filled the old Hyde Road stadium with bars) suggests that Miss Connell probably became disillusioned with the sport well before her demise.