Sensible criticism of me is fair. But please, stay out of my back garden | Soccer

When should you take criticism seriously and when you should just ignore it? This has been on my mind since the Carabao Cup final – Liverpool’s victorious teenagers against the “billion-pound bottle jobs” of Chelsea.

I found myself questioning Gary Neville’s planned line pretty soon after the final whistle. This Chelsea team are also young. You can cost £100m and still be young. Moving halfway across the world as a youngster may be more difficult than coming into the first team from within the stability of an academy. The Liverpool kids had some adults alongside them to shepherd them through the game.

And so my colleagues and I put these ideas out there on the Guardian Football Weekly podcast the following day. It wasn’t so much a quest to change the narrative, more something interesting that might have been lost amid the justifiable praise for Jürgen Klopp.

The criticism, mainly – but not entirely – from Liverpool fans, was pretty strong. We had underplayed a chasm in experience between the two sets of players. We had missed the magic. We “should be ashamed”.

It would be trite of a football journalist to get touchy about criticism when we spend our lives critiquing footballers. There are differences: questioning what happens on the pitch isn’t personal. Criticism of a broadcaster is often by definition personal, especially when it begins “nothing personal but …” And we are being paid to give our opinion: it is our job – presumably because someone somewhere finds it interesting. It seems unlikely that @davestoptheboats102843 is being paid to call me a nonce – fair play if he is.

What can be difficult, though, is filtering out the sensible, constructive criticism from the morass of people telling you to “shut your mouth scumbag Rushden before you get fist in anus in your back garden” (™ @bigdutty in 2016). It is easier sometimes to discount everything, rather than refreshing your replies to see whether anyone else wants to “wellie you with a polo mallet, you absolute c***” (credit: @Fluffnut_Trades).

On a much more serious note, but within that context, it was interesting to read Marcus Rashford’s piece on the Players’ Tribune. The Manchester United striker has been widely criticised for reacting publicly to the stick he’s received this season. I actually found parts of his piece quite moving. As someone who never had to worry about the next meal, how can I possibly begin to understand what that is like, and he articulates very well how much work it takes to make it as an elite sportsperson. Moreover what he did for vulnerable kids during Covid is ultimately greater than anything he could do on a football pitch.

“I’m not trying to have a go at the media,” he says. “I understand the game, you know what I mean? They’re not really writing about me. It’s like they’re writing about this character, ‘Marcus Rashford’. It can’t just be about me as a 26-year-old lad on a night out, or a lad getting a parking ticket. It’s got to be about how much my car costs, guessing my weekly salary, my jewellery or even my tattoos. It’s got to be about my body language, and questioning my morals, and speculating about my family, and my football future. There’s a tone to it that you don’t get with all footballers. Let’s just leave it at that.”

It is an assumption, but not a leap, to suggest that Rashford believes there is a racist undertone to much of the reporting on him. And the fact is that young black players are treated differently to young white players in certain parts of the media – as Raheem Sterling illustrated so perfectly with how one paper dealt with Tosin Adarabioyo and Phil Foden buying houses at the start of their careers – the same story dealt with entirely differently.

And yet a lot of criticism for Rashford has come recently because he is simply not playing very well. He was brilliant last season, he got a deserved new deal, but that Yeboah strike at the weekend notwithstanding, he is having a bad season, and that’s when people legitimately start asking why. However as well as the justifiable stuff, he will almost certainly be getting horrendous abuse online and like every non-white player his DMs will be a vile place.

So if you’re Marcus Rashford it’s unlikely you have a separate Google doc for race-baiting abuse and one for genuine objective constructive criticism, even from match-going United fans desperate for him to succeed. It will be just an avalanche of noise, some of it really grim. In many ways it’s a surprise he hasn’t completely insulated himself from all of it. That would be a totally understandable survival mechanism.

Clearly the situations aren’t comparable in their seriousness but I reflect on the criticism I received after that cup final and think I missed the magic, that feeling a fan would have had when Virgil van Dijk scored that late header; the energy and joy of any last-minute winner in extra time. It’s David Platt. It’s Scott Rendell. It’s indescribable breathless happiness.

And that is an interesting part of working in the game. The magic does go a bit. You don’t work hard all week and watch the game as an escape – watching the game is your ‘working hard’ all week. You watch in a different way. If you’re not careful you can forget why you fell in love with it in the first place. And then you are in danger of losing the connection with your audience.

It is equally vital to be dispassionate and cynical and to question whatever popular narrative is doing the rounds, but a goal in the last minute of extra time, when you have all those academy players on the pitch, is magic, the criticism of me was fair. I’m totally fine to admit I was wrong. But please, stay out of my back garden.

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