Certain people single themselves out for special treatment by their actions. Sports stars misdemeanours in the public sphere draw particular attention. Politicians are easy game with their engaged mouths backed by disengaged brains. But journalists reporting on a particular football team, well that’s a new one by me.
That’s the fate that has befallen Phil Hay, a respected journalist with the Yorkshire Post newspaper group. It doesn’t help if the team that you are chiefly reporting on is Leeds United and where everyday dealings seem more akin to a ‘Big Top’ rather than a ‘big club’, what with proposed 17-minute walkouts on 17 minutes over Massimo Cellino’s running of the club and a compulsory £5 pie levy that has some Leeds fans growling in a spitting and frothing conniption fit of hysteria.
Ah Massimo Cellino, Leeds’ maverick and madcap owner who swept in on a promise of buying back the ground that many of the Facebook Mafiosa and Twitterati call ‘Church’, ploughed through with a vapour trail of court cases and now sits stewing and vowing never to attend Elland Road after fan disquiet turned to open protest.
Open protest, how very dare they? The ungrateful bunch of rabble-rousing neds, rounding on the shining paragon of virtue and saviour of all that is Leeds United and dragging his very name through the primordial mud – tarnishing and blackening his very reputation. How very dare they indeed! Do they not realise that il duce Cellino rode into Leeds United and saved the club we love from the very grabby hands of GFH who were more interested in Leeds United as a going concern than going anywhere. He then banished Ken Bates to the shadows and finally beyond the outer barriers of the club. For these acts we should fling ourselves prostrate in front of the man and hail him as a conquering hero, a veritable Caesar without resorting to the ‘et tu Brute?’ narrative with knives and barbs thrust at his back.
Cellino is like Marmite, you love him or you hate him and with few lonely stragglers in between. In fact, the diametrical polemic between the pro-Cellino and the anti-Cellino leaves a very sparse path travelled by very few nomadic and peripatetic Leeds United fans. Put simply, there are very few ‘well you know, I’m not really that sure’ bodies between the two warring Cellino groups: those who love him and those who loathe him. Such is the strength of feeling that Massimo Cellino draws from Leeds fans, that adherence to one of the two camps is a must. With such adherence there grows an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ conspiracy with slings and barbs thrown from both camps. What few stragglers remain undecided, or impartial, between the warring sides end up being often struck and caught up in the melee. Phil Hay is one of those.
Hay’s only ‘crime’, his position as a Leeds United reporter. A reporter whose job it is to report. A reporter who does report, very well I might add, on all aspects of the club. With Leeds United, a man like Phil Hay is never going to be short of things to write about at a club that almost auto-generates column inches like an American ticker tape parade. In fact, when you have a club that can introduce a compulsory £5 ‘Pie Levy’, allegedly put the whole first team squad out to tender and have the owner walk into the changing room at half-time and order a change in formation…then your pay cheque almost writes itself.
Still, it does single you out for the slings and daggers of outrageous fortune and puts you in the middle of a sea of troubles, especially as the enemy line you up in their sights. It was such a situation that Phil Hay found himself embroiled in he was sucked into an almost Shakespearean situation that wasn’t as much tragedy as farce.
It all stems from a Facebook post by one of the Admins of a pro-aligned Cellino group, captured by a Twitter user and released into the Twittersphere.
"The hugely acidic reporting" of @PhilHayYEP 😂 pic.twitter.com/BwMIXYxL9V
— 𝗥𝗶𝗼𝘁𝗕𝗮𝗱𝗴𝗲𝗿 (@RiotBadger) December 3, 2015
Still, with such strong words and aspersions being cast at him, it wasn’t long before support was garnered for the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post reporter. As potent as the accusations against him were, the counter-support for Phil Hay was just as vehement.
An incredulous Twitter jumps to the defence of Phil Hay
@PhilHayYEP @riotbadger @B1GRich74 It beggars belief Phil.
— Adam Pope (@apopey) December 3, 2015
In response to the supposed vinegar-esque reporting style of Hay,
@riotbadger @PhilHayYEP These people are among us. 😂
— The Square Ball (@TheSquareBall) December 3, 2015
https://twitter.com/kevbooden/status/672484057595445249
https://twitter.com/J3tt4tur4/status/672482553434083328
In response to Phil Hay being asked who is making ‘decisions’ up Elland Road way,
@PhilHayYEP @mrwayneg @APOPEY 😂 pains me to be laughing at fellow Leeds fans but jesus wept!
— Jamie (@JayStevo86) December 3, 2015
Even the embattled and entrenched journalist has to see the funny side of the ‘issue’,
@riotbadger acidic? I'm sure the Campaign for Plain English would rather he just used the word "shite"
— Phil Hay (@PhilHay_) December 3, 2015
In week that someone at Leeds United thought that they’d ‘encourage’ Leeds United fans in the South Stand to use the catering facilities there by hiking up the ticket price by £5 as a ‘food and refreshment meal deal’, this is more a squally shower in a thimble than a storm in a teacup.
