You have to go with your nostrils.

And my nostrils tell me that The Times and Sunday Times are in a crisis more serious than we thought.

In their latest attempt to stop haemorrhaging readers, the rugger-loving boys and Daniel Day-Lewis-loving girls in Wapping have (with the help of a cracking Puligny-Montrachet, no doubt) forced down one seriously bitter pill.

In desperation, they've decided to target a demographic that is fundamentally anathema to them: the common football fan.

Now with goals

underlines just how serious things have become.

In an effort to stay afloat, the executives at The (Sunday) Times have gone cap in hand to people who did CSEs and went on the YTS.

People called Gary and Sean.

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Shit, what must they be thinking at HQ?[/caption]

Semantic own-goal

The campaign's strap is particularly illuminating.


is the appeal by an educated elite to what it perceives to be the insatiable (translate: bovine) appetite of the common football fan.

But its sleekness is completely at odds with the terraces. It's a semantic own-goal.


are too basic, too guttural, too crude.

(

Slap my back, sister

So who's fronting the big new push?This lot are.

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I don't buy it. Some of these guys would rather be discussing Kierkegaard.[/caption]

Next to the token footballer, Cascarino, we have three guys who, whilethe rest of us were freezing our bollocks off outside and being scythed down by Clarky and Neil, were probably having their backs slapped by sister in the 'san'.

Their instinct, I reckon, draws them to Kierkegaard more so than the Kop.

Thought-provoking debate?

The language in the campaign says it all. What tit came up with the words 'thought-provoking' and since when did football fans 'debate'?

Football fans don't debate, they go over the game afterwards over a pint.

'We won 2 nil, Cottie went off with a suspected broken ankle just after half time, one of their guys was red-carded in the 90th and the referee was a fucking twat' will do.

That's as thought-provoking a debate as we need, thanks.

It's my nostrils

Now none of what I'm saying here is based on any kind of facts or research.It's just my instinct, my nostrils.

For all I know Rod Liddle could have been running around the pitch like Chopper Harris when he wasn't dreaming, during class, of doing TV documentaries on atheism and faith.

And for all I know this Marcotti guy isn't some jet-setting journalist but shivered his arse off on a Tuesday night at some Vauxhall Conference game like everyone else.

They may well be great football pundits but then this is an opinion piece forged in the snout.

... is The Sunday Papers

You know, it's been drummed into us all over the past 10 years or so that The Sunday Times
the The Sunday Papers.

And it's exactly this, in the digital era, that is its biggest problem. Because nobody reads the cocking papers anymore.

The result is that now, in a desperate fight for their lives, The Times and Sunday Times have had to reach out to the common football fan.

But I suspect the common football fan, having undertaken a thought-provoking debate, will tell them to f**k right off.