Media Fakery...

Right, remember when that fan burst into the England dressing room after the lamentable performance against Algeria? Well, as it turns out, the whole thing was likely orchestrated by a journalist from the Sunday Mirror. Cue cries of "surely not?", "how awful" and "actually, now that you mention it, it does make sense and the 'I was looking for the toilet' excuse was a pretty fucking see-through one now, wasn't it...".

32 year old Pavlos Joseph apparently bumbled into the locker room while searching for the facilities. To be honest, the moment I heard this story the alarm bells were ringing. Supposedly he burst into the room full of dejected England players by accident and, rather than continuing his search for the men's room, he proceeded to inform them that their performance was 'woeful and not good enough' (to be fair, he's right about that one) and then 'had a word' with David Beckham. That basically makes the whole sorry experience a more downbeat parody of this already existing parody.

It seemed a classic 'woops, wrong room' *leaves room* *re-enters room* 'actually while I've got you, you're not fit to wear the shirt' *leaves room* kind of situation. The kind of thing that definitely only happens for Sport Relief comic parodies. Joseph, who has clearly been waiting for this kind of exposure to launch his Stavros Flatley tribute act, Pavlos Flatley (an already depressing indictment of modern celebrity), faces the ignominy of a court charge for trespassing and can now add conspiracy to that.

What's perhaps even more unsettling, is that this could signal the dawn of a new type of football hooligan. The kind that takes a bung from the Mirror or the News of the World and goes covert ops instead of the good old days of the Firms kicking the shi... oh, hang on. I'm not entirely sure which of those two is more depressing.

Soon no-one will dare talk to anyone who leaves their bag on the table in a coffee house for fear that they might be some kind of tabloid hack looking to exploit their idiocy. Yup, it's 'hell in a hand basket' alert time again.

I'm not going to say explicitly that we're all going to hell in a hand basket, but we're definitely all going to hell in a hand basket...