Meltdown?
Half of the fun of Twitter is the exposure to opinions alien to your usual circle. Some have estimated that as many as 85% of the people you follow should be those you dislike. I don't have the stomach for that much masochism, but the point still stands. I already know what people I like will probably think, and I probably think the same. One of the reasons I like them is that we share opinions and tastes. For this reason, there is more value in following those that you don't agree with, as they will often be presenting a different side of the argument.
All of this precursor was by way of avoiding the obvious response ( "if you don't like what he says then why don't you just unfollow?") to what is to follow this very colon: Andrew Benbow is a bit of a prat.
Benbow is a West Brom fan, apparently, and also "blogger for hire" (aren't we all?). He writes for one of the many (many, many) ugly and unmemorable football blog sites that rope in team specific writers to try and drive some traffic. No doubt Benbow does bring a bit of traffic, because the persona he presents - and that is being charitable because I suspect it is not a persona at all - is of the typically incendiary, knee-jerk, pessimistic, never-satisfied, football fan.
Benbow seems to have a few hobby-horses he likes to ride from time to time. "Our fullbacks are useless", "our chairman is useless", you get the idea. His latest, though, appears to be an attempt to drum up support for an anti-Anelka campaign.
You might well ask what Benbow has against Anelka. I'd certainly like to know. I'm pretty sure though that whatever his reasons I would not be convinced. I like football to be fun, and to my mind there can be little more entertaining than a languid, musilm, moody Frenchman, with a penchant for fallings-out and fights, a genuine star of world football, one of the most gifted players of the last decade, strutting about in a West Brom shirt.
I would have thought this view would be shared by most fans, but not according to Benbow. His view on Saturday was that:
When the team was announced with Anelka in the starting role, Benbow claimed:
Lepkowski's response made me laugh. You can take it as you like, but I know which way I prefer to read it.
Someone definitely has lost the plot. These kind of reactions are crazy. I can handle Benbow's usual nonsense about Jeremy Peace and the fullbacks, because those are the kind of opinions you get in football. Some people like to be negative about their own team. There is, for example, a guy who sits along the row from me in the Birmingham Road End who has been known to spend the entire half-time break with his middle finger raised in the direction of the Directors' box, assuming that he hasn't already stormed out in disgust before that point. But I can't understand a single West Brom fan not enjoying having Anelka here. If you don't want to see troubled but supremely talented athletes playing for your team, I don't think football is for you.
Anelka of course played superbly on Saturday, particularly in the first half, and was very unlucky not to score. No mention of his performance from Benbow, though...