Only one story on the front page of all the tabloids today. England losing to Brazil in the World Cup. Oh well. Can we go back to normal now please? It’s only a game.

So ten years ago England dropped out of the World Cup and the tabloids portrayed it as a national tragedy. What do you think the front pages will look like when England get knocked out of the current football competition?

The Sun still believe that this morning’s most important news is tomorrow’s football match. Of course, other than a bit of team news there’s actually nothing to say about the match, so their story just consists of jingoistic exhortations for the team to do their best. What a waste of newsprint. And tomorrow’s front page will, no doubt, be more of the same. Imagine how bad it’ll get if the team go even further in the competition.

Ten years on and nothing has changed. You only need to look at the coverage of Euro 2012 to see that.

There are still two days to go until England play Brazil in the next round of the World Cup, but the Sun still thinks this is the most important thing to put on their front page.

If you’re going to insist on putting football on the front page, why not talk about something that happened yesterday (like the Koreans beating the Italians) not something that’s not going to happen for days. To be fair to them, it wasn’t the whole front page. There was also a photo of a woman who had gone to Ascot and had forgotten to wear a vest.

This still happens a lot too. Particularly with large sporting events. The real news is often put aside for this kind of barrel-scraping news about the English (or British, depending on the competition) team. It’s like they believe that their readers shouldn’t even read about the other teams – in case they somehow get drawn into supporting the wrong people.

England won their game and are thru to the next round of the World Cup. Predictably this was all over the tabloid front pages. We  understand that they should be reporting it, but should they really make it sound like there’s a war on?

The Mirror was particularly objectionable with its jingoistic knocking of the Argentinian team.

I remember this being ludicrous. It was twenty years after the Falklands War and yet the tabloids covered this story as if the war was still going on. And ten years on I can’t say that this has got any better. The tabloids still treat Argentina as though it’s an enemy nation. It’s just like the way the Germans were portrayed as I was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

We’re getting pretty immune to the constant stories about the world cup, but we were particularly impressed with the hyperbole on the front page of today’s Soaraway Sun. Apparently the whole of the UK will be up early tomorrow to watch another England game. Sorry to disappoint them but we know of a number of people who would rather stay in bed.

This doesn’t change. Tabloids still routinely lie about the number of people who are interested in the stories they peddle. We’ve seen this recently with the Diamond Jubilee (the whole country celebrated the Queen’s reign) and no doubt there will be plenty of similar stories based on Euro 2012 which started over the weekend (everyone will be cheering on England). In reality, the TV viewing figures tell a completely different story. I’ll admit that a large proportion of the population will watch this stuff. But it’s nowhere near “everyone”.

The only sport that we at Wasted Inches hate more than football is boxing. It’s amazing that a sport like that is even legal. It’s very galling, therefore, to see that every tabloid front page today is about two grown men being paid obscene amounts of money to beat each other up. And we call ourselves civilised.

I have no idea at all who the two men were or what the bout was about. I do know, however, that the tabloids’ love affair with boxing doesn’t seem to have diminished one bit. It’s appalling.

Only one story on the front page of every tabloid today. In fact it’s on the front page of every paper. England won a football match yesterday. Apparently it’s also important to note that it was Argentina that they beat. This gives the tabloids an excuse to report it as tho’ it was the Malvinas Crisis of 1982 all over again. From the tone of the papers you could easily thing that they had won the World Cup, but our investigations reveal that it was a relatively unimportant match and we still have three weeks of this nonsense to go.

This was probably the World Cup, wasn’t it? I remember there being a World Cup that summer. It was great as it was held in a part of the world that mean that the games were all played first thing in the morning. This meant that on the days that England played the tubes, trains and buses were all deserted and travelling to work was a pleasure. Shame England didn’t play more games.

Apparently David Beckham has said that he would be willing to cheat if it would help England win some forthcoming football match aginst Argentina. It seems that one of the Argentinian players did something similar the last time they played so he sees it as poetic justice. We, of course, can’t understand why anyone would get so excited about a football match that they think it’s important enough to cheat to win it.

Ten years on and the tensions between the UK and Argentina over Falkland Island (aka The Malvinas) still dominate any sporting clashes between the two countries. Only last month there was furore across the tabloids as the Argentine Olympic team filmed a promotional video in Port Stanley.

Everyone seems to think that something important happened in a football match last night. When will they learn that nothing that has anything to do with football can

ever be at all important?

Sigh. Football again. I don’t suppose it will ever go away. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand the attraction. I honestly can’t remember what had happened the previous night.

Apparently the affair is over.

Can we go back to discussing important and interesting things then?

This wasn’t news when we first found out about the affair. It still wasn’t news when they split up. And that was a rhetorical question.