All Publicity Is Good Publicity...Right?

When Saturday Comes, which modestly bills itself as "the half decent football magazine" (that would obviously never fly in the U.S. and not just because of the term "football") did a small piece on Soccer Source in its January issue. Very small. We're talking three lines. The blurb was nothing but a perfectly justified ridicule of one of my "fearless forecasts," but for a fledgling blog like this one, any publicity is good publicity. After all WSC is very well-respected, so if Soccer Source is on their radar--even as an object of ridicule--it must mean I'm doing something right, right? Right?

Uh, yeah. Well anyway, what was all the fuss about in the first place? You'll remember a Soccer Source poll that asked who should be the starting England goalkeeper. The winner was Aston Villa's Scott Carson (by a pretty healthy margin, too). This led me to rejoice when Steve McClaren choose Carson as his starter for that fateful Croatia match back in November. I had a whole post on the topic, titled (I swear I'm not making this up) With Carson in goal, England cannot fail.

We all know what happened next: Carson was crap (worse than Robinson, in fact) , England lost and failed to qualify for Euro 2008, McClaren was sacked, Capello hired, etc. etc. At this point, I should have done what most smart bloggers do, which is delete the embarrassing post from the archives. But I figured that was intellectually dishonest and besides, at the time I really figured Carson the best man for the job. Instead I owned up, with this mea culpa.

WSC didn't give me any credit for that. And why should they have? The funny thing wasn't that I had owned up, but that I had been stupid enough to make such a ridiculous prediction in the first place. They did, however, give me credit for my "pertinent and courageous headline," though I'm not entirely sure that wasn't tongue-in-cheek. Check out page 11 of the January edition (print edition only, I can't find it on their Web site). They even have a screenshot of Soccer Source. I have arrived!