I’m a big Twitter fan, I spend most of the time on my way to work on the train tapping away and putting the world to rights.
I’ve got a small amount of followers, just over 700, so when I tweet something a tad controversial, it’s only read by a relative few.
But what if you are a professional footballer with 50,000 followers, surely you’d choose your words a little more carefully?
Carlton Cole recently twittered during the friendly between England & Ghana, “Immigration has surrounded the Wembley premises! I knew it was a trap! Hahahaha. The only way to get out safely is to wear an England jersey and paint your face w/ the St. George’s flag!”
As a pasty faced egg-head, if I’d have twittered this sort of garbage, I would have quite rightly been labelled a narrow minded racist. However misguided this tweet was from Carlton, he meant no malice and quickly followed up the tweet with, “It was a joke & it’s not even racist”.
As a black player in football, Carlton has probably been on the wrong end of many racist comments by crowds around the world, so he was obviously tweeting the immigration comment with his tongue firmly pressed against his cheek.
But regardless of his ethnicity, the comment was ill-advised and perhaps the FA charge for improper conduct in relation to media comments, which is a bit of a garbled mouthful, was probably the right thing to do.
Hopefully it sends out a message to footballers that they have a responsibility to use social networking mediums such as Twitter with due care.
Lord Ouseley, head of Kick It Out, football’s equality and inclusion campaign, spoke about Carlton’s comments and made some great points, “What can seem like harmless comments can be deemed offensive by others and lead to unwittingly reinforcing negative stereotyping, including racist ones. We will work with all our partners to ensure that education on what is and isn’t unacceptable behaviour is ongoing.”
Of course, Carlton isn’t the first to cause the FA to investigate the use of Twitter amongst the football community.
His cyber-rant is just one of many footballers who’ve used the site to vent their fury, letting their fingers and not their feet do the talking.
In January, Dutch winger Ryan Babel was fined £10,000 and warned about his future conduct by the FA following a post he made on Twitter.
Not the sharpest knife in the draw, Babel, who now plies his trade for German side TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, was a Liverpool player at the time and decided it would be a great idea to link a tweet to a mock-up picture of Howard Webb in a Man Utd shirt. This was in reference to the baldy official awarding a penalty to the home side and showing Stephen Gerrard a red card in Liverpool’s 1-0 FA Cup defeat at Old Trafford.
That cost the poor bloke 10 grand! And a month later Jack Wilshire amazingly escaped punishment when he condemned the decision making of referee Phil Dowd in an dramatic 4-4 draw against Newcastle at St James Park.
Jack tweeted that, “Inconsistent refereeing needs to stop, its killing the game. If Diaby goes, what’s the difference between that and Nolan on our keeper!?? joke.’
Not the most eloquent of tweets and I’ve tidied it up as well! Jack was obviously tweeting in anger straight after Arsenal had let a four goal lead slip against the Toon – the muppets.
Surely though, the FA should have showed some consistency and wrapped him on the knuckles with one of their drop-in-the-ocean fines?
There are plenty of other players who have fell foul at twitter misusage. Jose Enrique decided it would be a great idea to tell everyone he was injured 4 hours before his manager Alan Pardew handed in the team sheets at White Hart Lane, which as you can imagine went down well. Liverpool’s Jonjo Shelvey took the decision to close down his twitter account when he claimed a mate tweeted a dodgy picture on his account.
And Darren Bent, whose finishing as been compared to that of ‘Arry’s missus Sandra, had a famous rant about his stalled move away from White Hart Lane back in 2009. With Twitter still in relative infancy, Bent snapped and tweeted, “Do I wanna go Hull. No. Do I wanna go Stoke City. No”.
And he followed that up with the quite beautiful, “Stop f*cking around Levy. Sunderland are not the problem in the slightest.”
Those final 12 words cost him a £120,000 fine, that’s 10 grand a word! He groveled and got his move to Sunderland and not Hull City, so perhaps the whopping fine was worth it in the end?
Lower down the football chain is Aldershot striker Marvin Morgan who responded to fan’s booing him, by the brilliantly intelligent tweet of, “Where’s that going to get you! I hope you all die.”
What did Marvin think would happen after that? He was fined two weeks wages and sent on loan to Dagenham & Redbridge. Perhaps like Bent, that was his dream move as well?
There are also many fake player accounts that on the whole can be very amusing.
I follow a few on Twitter, the best in my opinion being @stuffmicksays who claims to be Manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers and occasional BBC pundit & a misunderstood comedy genius. He claims to like Yorkshire Tea, ferrets, flatcaps and putting in a shift.
Whoever it is claiming to be the great grumpy eagle comes out with such gems as, “I saw a dyslexic Yorkshire man the other day – he was wearing a cat flap.”
There is also the not so funny imposter like @Stevie_Bull who as the name suggests is pretending to be Wolves greatest ever number 9 and tweets entirely in the tongue of the dialect from the Black Country.
Recent tweets include, “Off on me oss an trap to @thefoxatshipley fer sum snakeboite an chaise burgers! An sum SClub 7 on the tape playa on the way! Lol”.
Amusing stuff and I was enjoying following him and having a bit of banter. Then he/she posted a tweet calling the great Matt Murray a cripple and for me it all turned sour.
I immediately got rid of the idiot as a follower on twitter and blocked all his future tweets.
But back to the positive side of Twitter, which when used well like with the banter between Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage can be a joy to use. Personally, I love having some great footie chat with Wolves fans pre and post match and I also follow fans from other footie clubs, including all our local teams which I think is really important.
It’s great to hear views from Baggies, Villa and Blues about the recent relegation struggles and it would be incredible if we can all still be tweeting each other in the Premiership next season. Not sure if I would enjoy Albion fans giving me pelters if we were in to drop down into the Championship next season!
Microblogging and Twitter are going to grow more and more in importance in the year’s to come and I’m sure football clubs will be giving their players better advice on what not to tweet to avoid repeating some of the mistakes above.
Follow me on twitter at @wolvesblogger and I promise I’ll follow back.
Thanks for reading. Up the Wolves!
@Wolvesblogger 