Need to change my Sunday newspaper...
Mar. 9th, 2008 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f4f3Although Scotland on Sunday and The Sunday Herald are good, if stodgy, reads I usually buy The Observer. Partly because I've always bought the Observer, since the days when Clive James was their TV columnist, and it was the only left-of-centre Sunday broadsheet, and partly because I like to get the UK political news in more depth than the Scottish news. Unfortunately from time-to-time I get reminded that, despite it's pretensions to being a national paper, the Observer is only an English one. Mostly this comes up in sports reporting, and mostly when England lose at something. Yesterday Wales secured a Triple Crown (beating the other home nations in rugby union's Six Nations tournament, a rare achievement) and Scotland beat England in rugby's oldest international fixture, winning the Calcutta Cup (an even rarer accomplishment - I think that was the third time they've won since the mid-Nineties). Cause for celebration for half the UK, you would think. Coverage of this was bumped off the front page of the sports section in favour of an English FA Cup match, and an English athlete trying to get back into the Olympics.
The next two pages were basically a whine about how badly England had played, and something about an English player being dropped for having a lemonade in Dover Street on Wednesday night. It was "A horrible game, a blot on the Six Nations", and "An ugly game, one of the ugliest played at this wind-swept stadium". Little was said about an English forward sliding in with his knees up to hospitalise Rory Lamont, and nothing at all about one of the most horrible body checks I've ever seen in the international game. England were, indeed, ugly, slow and inept, but Scotland played out of their skins to make them look that way. Oh, and if you move on to the next two pages you can discover that Wales didn't win the triple crown, a "tame" Ireland fell short.
You could say that sport is a small matter, but since I can get coverage of UK politics in the Scottish papers, I think I'll be picking up Scotland on Sunday next week, where my country's sport will be covered, instead of England's.
The next two pages were basically a whine about how badly England had played, and something about an English player being dropped for having a lemonade in Dover Street on Wednesday night. It was "A horrible game, a blot on the Six Nations", and "An ugly game, one of the ugliest played at this wind-swept stadium". Little was said about an English forward sliding in with his knees up to hospitalise Rory Lamont, and nothing at all about one of the most horrible body checks I've ever seen in the international game. England were, indeed, ugly, slow and inept, but Scotland played out of their skins to make them look that way. Oh, and if you move on to the next two pages you can discover that Wales didn't win the triple crown, a "tame" Ireland fell short.
You could say that sport is a small matter, but since I can get coverage of UK politics in the Scottish papers, I think I'll be picking up Scotland on Sunday next week, where my country's sport will be covered, instead of England's.
