Standard Newspaper 'Interviews' Arsene Wenger - Or Not.

Friday, 09 July 2010 14:40

Written by Nova Hinga

Straight from their new look adventures on the internet (not really straight but not far off all the same), the Standard Group is at it again. This time in providing the insatiable internet world with an exclusive 'interview' with that tall, Harrison Ford lookalike who manages a football club in England and somehow managed to have his very own clubalike name - Arsene and Arsenal. The 'interview' was exclusive enough in that The Standard Newspapers Online edition happened to be the only one who published an item on the interview stating that it was a genuine one on one interview and promised all that more was to follow. As it turned out this was not really a one on one interview with Arsene Wenger as Arsenal Football Club website swiftly released a statement saying that the quotes were incorrect and Standard Newspapers never had any one on one interview with Arsene.

The statement read:

Arsenal Football Club would like to clarify that quotes attributed to Arsène Wenger today in a Kenyan newspaper are not correct. Arsène Wenger did not grant a one-on-one interview to the newspaper and have kindly asked all media not to attribute any quotes from this source to him.

Thereafter, the various websites that had quoted the said 'interview' or based their stories on it promptly apologised, pulled them down or simple ignored them and hoped that somehow new stories will wipe them clean off the face of their servers.

From the statement issued by the Arsenal Club website, it however seems that some interview must have been granted to somebody maybe even from Kenya and which interview did not have Arsene Wenger saying what The Standard claimed.

As we await for part two of the 'interview' a good number of readers on numerous football blogs are busy lamenting why any blogger or newspaper, or person should ever believe what a Kenyan publication says. And this reminds me of the days when I used to read Pulse pull out of the Standard and they had a football column where they would reproduce almost word by word articles from Arsenal bloggers like Arseblog and Goodplaya.