A Living Hell

‘PUTTING the news in perspective so often depends on which end of a pint glass you’re looking at it through.

Looking down, staring into their pints, readers can see a small corner section of the Sun’s front-page given over to the grim news: “30,000 die in quake.”

“You can hear kids crying under rubble,” says the story of the Asian earthquake inside the paper. There are awful pictures of flattened houses and tower blocks, and a hideous shot of an arm limply hanging out from between two huge slabs of fallen rubble.

But how important is it? Does such news affect everyone in Blighty equally?

Not if we look up at the Sun through the bottom of an emptying glass of lager, drunk fast to celebrate the news that England FC have qualified for the World Cup finals this summer.

Sure, the Sun mentions the devastation centred on Pakistan, but the core of the paper’s readership is invited to tremble at the front-page headline proper: “WORLD CUP CHAOS.” It is “fans’ ticket hell”.

The story is that while 100,000 fans are “hellbent” on spending their summer hols travelling around Germany in an England football shirt and chanting about two World Wars and one World Cup to bemused and terrified Turkish shopkeepers, they’re only being offered 3,000 tickets per game. And this is nothing less than “hell”.

While many British subjects are worrying over loved ones possibly caught or trapped in the earthquake, “desperate” England fans are ready to pay £1k for a football ticket.

“This is a slap in the face to genuine fans,” says Kevin Miles, international co-ordinator for the Football Supporters’ Association. “The people who are getting tickets are less deserving than the ones who are missing out.”

Not that you always get what you deserve. Just ask the England football fans who travel abroad to raise a glass too many and cause mayhem.

And then ask the people searching the ground for signs of life in Pakistan…’

Posted: 10th, October 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink