Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

The insufferable rise of the sportswriter bore

Can someone check on Guardian sportswriter Jonathan Liew? It would appear he is not taking events in the Middle East terribly well, and one suspects the election of Donald Trump hasn’t helped, either. 

I’ve noticed it for a while now, this trend of using the back pages – traditionally the fun pages – to foist desperate and uninformed sixth form bilge onto readers

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about hopelessness recently. Pretty much everyone I know is scarred and scared, bruised and hurting. And tired; so tired,’ he moans in his latest despatch, a thousand word diatribe on the evils of Israel – ‘an unhinged ethnonationalist far-right government’ – and, I think, although it’s not totally clear, the role of sport in countering it. 

‘Even if sport is a blunt and pointless tool of social change, it must nonetheless be deployed. Because there remains – even in this warped, fucked fairground mirror of a world – a thing called right and thing called wrong,’ Liew writes, by the sound of it with tears in his eyes, omitting naturally to make any mention of Israeli hostages, Hezbollah or Iran, and only once, in passing, bringing himself to write the word Hamas.

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