As Rudi points out today, Atiba Hutchinson has been named the Danish SuperLiga player of the year. That's kind of like a Danish hockey player being named the top player in the Deutsche Eishockey Liga. So, not Messi/Sidney Crosby territory, but not bad either. Certainly that would give inspiration to the ice hockey players in that minnow nation.
You would hope that the Danish sports sections would give their new hockey hero a little attention.
Here in Canada the reaction to Hutchinson's win has been incredi...wait, what?
Yeah, nothing. Crickets. Not even a 100 word brief on page S18, right there beside the actual cricket scores. It's the same old story for the sport in this country. Yes, TFC and now the Whitecaps have grabbed some attention and the World Cup is a month of hyperbole before the media returns to debates on the merits of a four-man rotation. But, when you are talking about Canadians playing the game in Europe they might as well be playing hopscotch on the moon.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
There are a lot of reasons for the lack of attention stories like this get. Some are legitimate. Many soccer fans have an unrealistic expectation of what kind of coverage the sport should get. But some are based on old biases and prejudices. The sports media world is still run by boomers. Soccer was a non-factor in Canada during the Summer of Love (actually the Summer of Love was a bit of a non-factor in much of the Canada that the people runing sports media come from -- there, soccer might have been something those damn hippies did and therefore was a danger to the children of the Dominion).
It's Called Football big cheese Ben Rycroft often tells a story about an interaction he had with a editor at a major metro daily in this country. Irritation was expressed that TFC had signed Dwayne deRosario because that meant that they would still have to spend resources to cover the team. Forget that there are 20,000 people at the games. Soccer doesn't matter. The editor just knows.
At least TFC games are covered, although we all wonder when that bubble will burst. When the women won the CONCACAF title it wasn't reported in the country’s largest newspaper. That caused at least one reader to complain about gender unfairness. That's probably somewhat true, but the bias runs a little deeper. If the Canadian women's hockey team won a two team tournament, for instance, it would be S1 material.
The indifference allows places like this to grow and that's good for us. However, as much as us dirty bloggers like to rally against the evil MSM the fact is it still matters -- a lot. Most people still get their information through traditional media and much of the traditional sport media still does a really crappy job of reporting on the Canada that those of us not living on a prairie ranch with a frozen pond we skate on eight months a year know and understand.