- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Australian captain Mark Viduka (9) competes for the ball with Sotirios Kyrgiakos of Greece. AP Photo/Mark Baker
I got a lot of personal satisfaction a year ago in anointing Mark Milligan “Where’s Wally” for his habit of leaving clubs without notice and jetting off overseas, but I’m starting to think it could also be a good nickname for Mark Viduka.
Not playing in the Premiership and AWOL with the Socceroos, the V-Bomber has been linked to just about every Australian club going around in recent months, from Melbourne Victory to Melbourne Knights to Melbourne Heart and now to Gold Coast United.
Then there was that embarrassing story about Pim Verbeek sending an “SOS” to Viduka to play in the World Cup campaign, which turned out to be completely fictional.
The Viduka to Gold Coast yarn was enough for News Limited to run with a big story on Tuesday declaring “Gold Coast United coach Miron Bleiberg is planning to bring 33-year-old Viduka to the new A-League club as a guest player.”
Bleiberg denies it, Gold Coast moneybags Clive Palmer denies it.
Not to say it might not turn out to be true, but until such time as there’s any verification from the player or his manager or the officials of the club he is supposed to be going to, why bother printing it? Just another cynical ploy to sell papers and a sign of the diminution of editorial standards in the Australian football media.
What are editors there for any more?
Not to say I don’t deal from time to time in rumour and innuendo, but I’m careful to couch what I write or suggest as possibilities (strong or otherwise) and not fact and I usually only listen to a few trusted sources.
Like any writer working in this business, though, I’ve been seriously burned a couple of times and I try to make amends when I make an error. And what I write is always opinion; I’m not writing news.
But there are some sites on the wild-west frontier of the worldwide web that seem quite happy to pass off completely unsubstantiated rubbish as fact – and there are a number of them in Australia and overseas. But it’s not just the start-ups. The websites of established newspapers, as my colleague Mike Tuckerman revealed in January here at The Roar, also swallow stories without verifying the facts.
The “Masal Bugduv” story completely fooled The Times and was a nadir for online football journalism.
But it achieved one positive thing: it made football fans a little bit more sceptical about what is presented as news – and so they should always be sceptical.
The internet has been a boon to football followers in this country but it’s also created a monster: the expectation of news 24/7 when there often isn’t a lot of real news to go around. And the pressure to publish what passes as news when it really shouldn’t be published.
So next time you read a news story about Mark Viduka, you’re likely better off not reading it unless it carries a quote from the man himself or is written by somebody who knows the player personally and can vouch that he’s what he’s written is the honest-to-god truth.
Otherwise, chances are, like Palmer said, it’s just “made up”.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.