Back in university, I distinctively remember my journalism professors stressing the importance of good headlines. It had to be short, concise and above all, catchy. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning story runs the risk of going unnoticed by readers if it isn't accompanied by a good headline. As such, news organisations, be it newspapers of the 24-hour cable news stations, strive real hard to come up with the best headlines to grab our attention.
Anyway, there I was sipping a cold one at my friendly neighbourhood pub absentmindedly watching a 24-hour cable news station being projected on screen that has seen better days when one headline on the news crawl caught by attention: "France World Cup squad suspended." Suspended?? I immediately turned to my drinking buddy to see if he caught the same headline. He did and he was just as puzzled. How does one suspend an entire World Cup squad? Due to the excessive noise at the bar (it was a Friday night after all), we weren't able to hear a word of what the newscaster had to say about the news. So we were left to our own devices to guess just what the headline meant.
Other news stations carried similar headlines such as "France squad banned!"and "Blanc suspends World Cup squad." And so we came up with all sorts of conclusion but the most common one that was derived from all these headlines was that Laurent Blanc had banned all 23-players in the France's embarrassing squad in the 2010 World Cup from playing for Les Blues for a long time.
Later when I got home, despite or due to my intoxicated state, I found myself extremely annoyed when I found out that the suspension on the French squad was for just one game and friendly at that! My annoyance wasn't so much at the fact that the French squad was getting off extremely easy after their shameful behaviour at the World Cup but more towards all those misleading headlines which suggested the squad was banned for at least a lengthy amount of time. I guess it was a dry day at the news stations that they had to play up such a mundane story. Still, couldn't they have been a little more truthful with their headlines? If there's one thing worse than a boring headline, it's a misleading one. Those are the worst.
On an added note, it's a bit sad, though not surprising, that new Les Blues coach, Laurent Blanc only chose to suspend France's World Cup misfits for one match only and that too a friendly. If anything, Nicolas Anelka and Patrice Evra should receive some lenghty bans from the national squad for their roles in the series of embarrassing espisodes in South Africa. Don't get me wrong. I'm not one to defend a manager as bad as Domonech but those two displayed a behaviour unfitting for a professional footballer. Period.
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