A Game of Two Halves, etc, etc...

Well, the Premier League season is finally over an I, for one, will be glad of the (brief) rest from over-excited sports journalists over the Summer.  What is it about the media's coverage of sports generally and football especially, that makes them feel obliged to hype up every fixture as if it was of earth-shattering importance?  They always have to have something to go wildly over the top about.  Take last Sunday, with the race for the Premier league title long since sown up by Manchester United and all the relegation issues resolved, they had to turn to the battle for fourth place and the last Champions' League berth to ramp up as some kind of epoch-defining event.  The fact that it was between North London rivals Spurs and Arsenal just made it even easier for the media to artificially build up the hype.  The trouble was that it wasn't that exciting - all Arsenal had to do was win their final match, which was against Newcastle, who, being safe from relegation, were never going to put up much of a fight.  So Spurs victory against Sunderland was ultimately meaningless and left them in fifth place, just missing out on Champions' League football next season.

However, if  you were to believe the media, such a result was tantamount to having been relegated!  They'd pumped themselves up so much on their own propaganda that being the fifth best team in the country and qualifying for the Europa League was considered a humiliating failure.  So much so that we'll be unable to hold onto our best players and we'll be lucky to avoid actual relegation next season.  Of course, the news that Gareth Bale is likely to sign a new contract with improved terms has rather stymied the 'Summer of Transfer Speculation' the press were clearly planning to weave around him, rather as they had done with Luka Modric last year.  But don't worry, I'm sure they'll find plenty of other stuff to get over excited about - already every other player in Europe is being linked with Spurs as the media hastily re-write the narrative to one of how we're going to spend billions rebuilding our team for a push on the Premier League title next season.  When Spurs don't do this it will be back to the narrative of how we couldn't attract the big name targets because of our failure to qualify for the Champions' League and how we're going to be also rans again....