Rochdale: A Struggle With The Truth

This blogger has posted an article that is, while generally factually accurate, making some rather silly assertions.

Firstly, the blog claims that:

Bradford were the league’s fakers; occasionally elegant but underneath lay a seedy underbelly of consistent fouling and bad discipline. That’s what you get when you’ve got Stuart McCall in charge, no matter how funny he is at falling over.

I wondered about this assertion, because it didn’t match my perception of City’s performances last season. I certainly don’t recall City being more sinners than sinned against, so I checked. On ESPN Soccernet, the Fair Play League table for 2008-09 shows City in third place with 46 yellow cards and 2 reds. Rochdale, by way of contrast, are in 11th place (with 57 yellow cards and 4 reds). If City have a seedy underbelly of consistent fouling and bad discipline, then Rochdale players must have a seedy underbelly indeed and the blogger I linked to above must be very disappointed indeed with the dirty play of the thugs he must watch weekly. The implied accusation that City are dirty because McCall is their manager is not just a cheap shot, I believe it is an inaccurate one. I watched McCall in his first spell at City and followed his subsequent career in the top divisions of England and Scotland and in the international arena as best I could via the limited TV coverage football received in those days. While I don’t have the stats to hand, he never struck me as a dirty player. As a manager, he has certainly not set his City teams up to play dirty so this accusation is an unworthy one.

Also, there is a section that repeats the claim that City offered more money than Rochdale when they were trying to sign Ramsden:

They’ve slashed their budget for this season, but it still remains higher than most clubs, and they could afford to entice Simon Ramsden to West Yorkshire by offering higher wages than us (or were they the same?).

This is particularly stupid, given that no-one at Rochdale has disputed McCall’s confirmation that we’re paying the same as Rochdale offered. Linking to an article with an opposing view for ‘balance’ does not excuse making daft, unfounded assertions. Rochdale’s manager had been misled into thinking that City had offered more money. He accepted McCall’s clarification. So why print an untruth in a blog post? Deliberately making an article you write inaccurate and misleading strikes me as a silly thing to do and certainly not the way to build trust in a readership.

I expect bloggers to have certain ethics, truthfulness being one of them. It seems that other bloggers agree with me: news story on the ethics of blogging. (Quote: Key issues in the blogosphere are telling the truth, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution.)