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Deputy Editor Gordon Thrower takes a look at the reporting of recent events in E20 and wonders if some reporters were actually at the same match as he was...?

Did you go to the match last night? Did you lay awake at night traumatised by all the crowd trouble? Are you off to get counselling to get you through the day? No? Me neither.

Like most amongst the crowd last night I’ll admit to being on a natural high when I finally got home in the early hours of the morning, but that was purely as a result of a fine performance that had seen us deservedly beat Chelsea 2-1 in the 4th round of the League Cup. I mention those details because they seem to have been overlooked in most reports of the game, which concentrated on a minor outbreak of crowd trouble towards the end. I was rather gobsmacked to wake up this morning to read that somehow I had managed to survive something akin to a cross between the 2011 riots and the Glencoe massacre.




The reporting by the mainstream media both in the run up to the match and after the event has been sensationalist in the extreme. Now I know we’ve come to expect this sort of thing from the sort of newspaper read by people who point to the words and move their lips as they read, but that doesn’t make it right. And, in my naivety I sort of expect a bit better from the good people of the BBC.

In the run up much was made of the fact that there were four (yes FOUR!) arrests at the Middlesbrough match. Indeed the BBC website’s report on last night's match repeated this statistic, the implication being that there is an underlying trend of violence at the London Stadium. However, what they ignored in quoting that bald statistic was the reason behind those arrests.

According to the recent supporters’ feedback forum one arrest was for ticket touting and another was for possession of cannabis. Which left one West Ham supporter and one Boro’ fan taken away for anything vaguely disorder-related. So an already rather small arrest figure is halved when you bring context and relevance into the equation. Which, unfortunately, the BBC has continually failed to do.




It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the same standards of “reporting” were applied across the board. Take Liverpool, for example. Now there is a club which managed to incur three UEFA fines in as many months as a result of the actions of their supporters earlier on this year. Yet a Daily Mail report on their Europa League tie against Manchester United last season referred to police making “just” seven arrests during one of the matches.

Another video of their supporters “welcoming” the Seville team bus with a hail of bottles and flares appeared on one (admittedly local) newspaper’s website captioned “Liverpool supporters create an intimidating atmosphere for their visitors”. Older readers with memories of the TV comedy “Yes Prime Minister” may remember Bernard Woolley’s fondness for “irregular verbs”: “I am creating an intimidating atmosphere, you are throwing bottles, they are causing a riot” would seem to cover things here. At the time of writing I understand that there were seven arrests made last night. I’m willing to bet that you won’t find anywhere that will say “just” seven arrests for this one!




The problem we seem to have is that, when it comes to reporting matters relating to West Ham, the media seem to lose all sense of perspective. I have written elsewhere of the events at Manchester Piccadilly station earlier this year where the actions of Network Rail, Virgin Trains and the various police forces present created dangerous overcrowding on the station concourse.

Somehow the red top newspapers somehow managed to portray this as “crowd trouble” (the honourable exception being the Manchester Evening News which pretty much reported what happened). The only place I’ve seen the official report into that debacle mentioned since then is, well, here. Presumably “football supporters remain remarkably calm under the circumstances despite dangerous crowd control errors” doesn’t make a particularly good story.

Now nobody - least of all me – is condoning what did happen last night. But to dress it up as if it were the opening overs of World War III, rather than a minor confrontation that was over in a few minutes is just a little bit dishonest in my opinion.

Still, there was one small nugget of common sense in the BBC’s reporting of the evening’s events. Presumably as part of his radio commentary, David Pleat commented: "In my opinion we have over-egged this a bit. There was a hint of confrontation, arm-waving gestures and some hint of the usual rubbish. You didn’t see any real fighting as such and it was quickly dispersed."

So there you have it. I now find myself in agreement with David Pleat.

Now THAT’s what I call traumatic!


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