Untold Arsenal » Blogs and press caught out by Sun’s Fábregas hoax

A hoax mistranslation of an interview given by Cesc Fábregas in Spanish in relation to Spain’s Confed Cup defeat has been repeated as fact by newspapers and blogs alike around the world.

The Sun was the first paper in the UK to run the story, and from there it spread very rapidly indeed.

The original interview is 90% about the Spain international team who lost to the USA in South Africa. At the end of the piece the interviewer asks Cesc about Arsenal and the Ronaldo move to Real Madrid. Most of this is general chit chat, as in this opening bit…

“This year we tried to win the league, we gave it everything, but did not reach the level that everyone expected of Arsenal. When you win you are loved, but when you do not then you lose that love. For four years we have lived on that trust and we need to return that trust our fans have shown.”

Then when asked if he might leave as C Ronaldo did, Cesc said…

“That I never will. It is not my way of doing things. If I have something to say I will say it openly, not using the press. If someday I am not happy that I am the first to tell the boss.”

The interviewer asks, “So could you live without Wenger?. Are you always bound to his life?”

Cesc replies, “He is a very important person, whom I consider a second father. He has helped me and trained me. He has made me captain of Arsenal at 22s. He has given me everything. He is worth ten men and I respect him, appreciate him listen to his advice because it transmits confidence.”

Cesc later put out a statement on Arsenal.com reiterating that the piece in the Sun was nonsense. A few newspapers slightly changed their story on their web sites, but even those gave only a half-hearted retraction suggesting that Cesc had changed his mind. As we know few blogs or papers admit it when they have been caught.

This is the second time an Arsenal player has been the subject of a hoax interview. A couple of months back the Daily Mirror were caught out with a false translation of an interview in Danish by Bendtner which appeared to say that he demanded to play 90 minutes of every game as he was the best Arsenal had. They eventually published a mealy-mouthed retraction and a half-baked apology.

Of course, Untold Arsenal is not immune from such matters. We have had a huge number of posts from people who express negative views about Wenger and Arsenal.

Until now I believed that what linked them was the fact that they never produced coherent arguments and were often posting way off topic. But following a lead given by an insightful friend of the site, I started to check the IP addresses of the computers these people write from.

IP addresses are not perfect identifiers of people’s identities, but they give a clue. What I discovered was that loads of people contributing negative and off-topic comments to this blog had the same IP address, including our old pal Mason.

Which makes you think.

Anyway, it looks like following our ploy of printing a list of all the Arsenal players and where they are going, the newspapers have retaliated with a different game – the fake interview.

Maybe we should do one or two ourselves.

You will, in due course, find this article on Team Talk under a different author – a site where some of the people (ie the same person) who spread negative rubbish here, will engage in their habit of copying bits from here to there. Sky, the ultimate owners of the Team Talk site, don’t give a toss.

Hello Team Talk. Greetings from the real world.

(c) Tony Attwood 2009.