TEAM LINGARD GOING THROUGH A DODGY SPELL
JESSE LINGARD’S mighty faux- pas in appearing to tweet during the Munich memorial ceremony has inadvertently exposed the emptiness at the heart of many celebrity social media accounts. It isn’t really them.
Lingard received a tweet from an independent promotional group called I Love Manchester. Looking at their timeline, they post about every five minutes, publicising some element of Manchester life. New restaurants, new jobs, positive stories, positive observations. It’s a bombardment. This one asked when Lingard and Marcus Rashford were coming into their office for a few games of FIFA.
Three minutes after the minute’s silence had ended, Lingard replied: ‘Your not ready for me.’ The condemnation was pretty immediate.
Lingard was at Old Trafford, attending a solemn occasion, perhaps with the letter Sir Bobby Charlton had sent to each player still tucked in his pocket.
He needed, in modern media parlance, to shut this down. So the following message was hastily composed and sent: ‘ A member of my media team inadvertently replied to a tweet this afternoon on my Twitter profile during the Munich memorial service at Old Trafford. I was unaware as I was attending the service at the time, and don’t condone the post or the timing in anyway.’
So there you have it. Lingard’s social media profile, his banter, his personality, is quite often the work of a faceless media professional acting on instinct.
Worse, this person is either semi- literate or thinks Lingard (left) is, so drops in deliberately bad English to make the tweets more convincing. Either way, it’s worrying. You really shouldn’t be able to get a job in media without knowing the difference between ‘your’ and ‘ you’re’ or ‘any way’ and ‘anyway’; and if you do know the difference, it’s best not to make it obvious that you think your boss is a bit thick by factoring in poor spelling when imitating him.
These are modern problems, obviously, but it is safe to say the question of authenticity was not one the Busby Babes would ever have to answer.