Want to be a football journalist? Lesson 1: Learn to rant

 

 

• Were Arsenal wrong not to have a successor to Edu already lined up?
• Is there an Arsenal crisis or is it just a media crisis?

By Tony Attwood

I really don’t know what to make of all this.  Referee David Coote has been suspended over an apparent video of a foul-mouthed Kloppian “rant”.

Now we must first ask, are all rants “foul-mouthed”?   Apparently not, as otherwise the Guardian where the quote comes from would have redundancy in its comment and it never ever does that. Not in the slightest.  Nope!  Certainly not!!

So it seems that saying, “Your are a jolly nasty chap who doesn’t know how to do his job” over perhaps two or three sentences, is a rant even though it is not foul-mouthed.  Glad we have that sorted.

But I wonder, why are journalists so fond of the word “rant,” for  I never hear anyone use it in real life.   I hear the phrase “he had a go at”, and “he seemed to get really angry” and even “he was fucking annoyed”, but “rant” – it seems to be one of those media words that no one uses, but journalists have become addicted to.  In fact show me someone who uses the word “rant” and I’ll show you a journalist.

Although it’s not a journo-originated word for it actually comes from Shakespeare and turns up in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”  So it is a bit dated, but then that’s just like most journalists and indeed PGMO.  So in that regard it is a perfect word for these people.

However I think the rules might be changed of late so that it also means any speech made by anyone called Jose.   But then again quite often it gets quite confusing as to who is criticising whom: as with ‘Lazy, disconnected’, and targeted by a teammate’s rant.  I’ll let you work that one out.

According to the dictionary, a rant is speaking or shouting at length in an angry and impassioned way.   And that is where the “rant” concept breaks down with football because although people speaking and shouting about football often do so in an angry and impassioned way, they rarely seem to do it at length.   Mostly it seems to be a few swear words.  Like “fucking wildebeest” which I heard in the stand at Arsenal last month.  Mind you I do sit in the expensive seats.

So if you want to join the journalists (and I can’t imagine why you would but just in case) and describe something as a rant (and remember these days almost any speech you don’t like can be described as a rant if it goes on for at least four words), you can do it at will because the word has pretty much lost its meaning.

But if you want to get it right fortunately there is now a Write a Rant website, which lays down all the rules, which I guess is what all the journalists study in the first place in order to pass their journalism exams.

First you need to choose a subject about which you’re well informed. 

Here the website makes a jolly good point to the effect that ranting (which is the act of putting forth a rant) about an unfamiliar subject is a great way to embarrass yourself.   So this discounts most football journalists since it is patently obvious most of the time that they know exceedingly little about refereeing or football – and absolutely nothing about the PGMO and why it is a secret society.  Clearly, without such knowledge, it is pretty much impossible to comment in a comprehensible manner on a football match.

Second list out the negatives.   

Now this is something journalists do very well.  Indeed try and think when you last read an article about Arsenal that did not actually amount to a ranty load of negativity.  In fact writing about Arsenal has become a rantistic (or maybe if you get paid for it rantastic) exercise.

Third, find a weak spot.   

Ah now again football journalists succeed 100% when writing about Arsenal – all we get are the weak spots.

Fourth, make mountains out of molehills.

Yet again this is where the football journalist always scores (as it were).  One slip by a player and that’s it, he’s done.  Rant rant ranty rant rant.  It goes on and on.

Fifth, Make it personal. 

Yep for journalists it is always personal.

So five topics for good ranting and immediately we can see that your average journalist scores 100% when writing about Arsenal.

Thus now we have defined rant we can see that each and every article about Arsenal in a newspaper is a rant.  And so now we know how, we can at last properly describe the journalists (ranters, rantists, rant-a-muffins, rantators, ranty-rants, rantistics…).

I’m rather glad we got that sorted…