So I Checked The Other Newspapers

After publishing this morning's blog, I started to wonder whether I was simply viewing the world through football-coloured glasses.

It's a fair question.

When you've spent much of your life around football, there is always the risk that everything starts to look like a football story.

Perhaps I was being unfair to the Mercury.

Perhaps Australia beating Turkey at the World Cup wasn't actually that big a deal.

Perhaps I had finally succumbed to football bias.

So I did what any responsible blogger would do.

I conducted a highly sophisticated media analysis.

By which I mean I looked at the front pages of other newspapers.

Sorry about the blurry screenshot - behind a paywall.

The Australian. See screenshot above.

The Sydney Morning Herald.

The Age.

The Courier-Mail.

The Advertiser.

The West Australian. See screenshot above.

Even the Daily Telegraph.

Different cities.

Different editors.

Different audiences.

Different ownership groups.

Yet one after another they appeared to reach a remarkably similar conclusion.

Australia's World Cup victory was front-page news.

Some made it the dominant image.

Some made it the lead sporting story.

Some splashed it across half the page.

Some across almost all of it.

But they all seemed to agree on one thing.

The Socceroos had done something important.

Then there was Tasmania. By the way the Advocate and the Examiner weren’t interested either:

Now, before anyone accuses me of comparing apples with oranges, let's be clear.

Every newspaper makes different editorial decisions.

Not every paper will have the same front page.

Nor should they.

But when newspaper after newspaper independently arrives at the same conclusion and one paper arrives somewhere completely different, it is at least worth noticing.

The interesting thing isn't that The Australian put the Socceroos on the front page.

Or The Age.

Or The Sydney Morning Herald.

Or The Courier-Mail.

The interesting thing is that all of them did.

Without consulting each other.

Without a conspiracy.

Without a football summit.

Without a secret meeting in a dark room attended by Nestory Irankunda.

They simply looked at the same event and reached a similar conclusion.

Australia had won a World Cup match.

That mattered.

Perhaps that's why so many football people occasionally feel like they are living in a parallel universe.

We watch the biggest game in the world.

We see the biggest tournament in the world.

We see newspapers around the country treating it as a major national sporting moment.

Then we open our local paper and wonder if we're watching the same country.

Maybe I was wrong.

Maybe this isn't football bias.

Maybe it is simply perspective.

Or perhaps, as I suggested this morning, the Mercury really is waiting for me to make a cup of tea before handing me my next blog topic.

Honestly, sometimes this writing lark is just too easy.