The Wrong Page of the Football Diary: When Sports News Reaches the Wrong Address

Sitting on my rooftop in Sylhet, I was reading news about London's Young Vic theatre, while my hand rested on an old notebook—a 2026 Kolkata tape. There I had written about Phil Foden's footwork and the roar of the crowd. But the story that landed on my desk today was about a documentary play concerning the Gisele Pelicot trial. Rosie O'Donnell is performing, with Julie Hesmondhalgh and Adjoa Andoh on stage. The production is at County Hall in London. Yet my file says this is a football report. This is where my sixty-year-old journalist's mind began to doubt. There is no team, no player, no match. Only a legal battle, a theatre stage, and a 20-year prison sentence. Where is the football? I closed my notebook. I remember in 2026, when stadiums were empty, I used to write 'Empty Stadium Diaries.' There, sound was my only companion—a player's breath, the squeak of boots. But the sounds in this news are the silence of a courtroom, the voice of a woman's protest. This is not the sound of football. I understood that the file sent to me came from the wrong place. It is time to think about how serious this error is. Those of us who have worked in football for a long time know—a piece of wrong information is not just wrong information. It spreads like a disease. If a theatre story ends up in a football report's place, it is not just a problem for this one article. It is a problem for the entire system. In my 44 years of experience, I have seen that the foundation of football journalism is reliability. When a scout report has a wrong name, when a transfer news story has a wrong figure, the whole story becomes fake. What happened today is even more alarming. This is news from a different world, forced into a football wrapper. I was thinking, what if someone had published this as football analysis before it reached me? Perhaps someone would have written, 'Rosie O'Donnell is a goalkeeper' or 'Young Vic is a football club.' While this sounds ridiculous, the root of such errors lies in our weak information management. Football data, transfer records, tactical analysis—today's entire industry relies on these. A wrong tag takes root right there. I remember writing about Enzo Fernández's breakout at the 2026 Qatar World Cup. There I tracked his journey from River Plate to Chelsea. But every piece of information there was verified. Because I know, behind football romance lie facts. Today's incident is an example of the absence of that fact. This is not football, it is a theatre production. But the file sent to me carries a football label. Now the question is, what should we do? In my rooftop adda, young journalists often say, 'Sir, you know everything.' I laugh. No, I don't know everything. But I know that what I don't know, I don't write about. In the case of this article, my clear statement—this is not football. It is a play, a legal battle, a mirror of society. If this is written in the football diary, the credibility of the entire diary is questioned. The football diary is a sacred thing. Every page there is a witness to a match, a player, a story. If a wrong page enters that diary, the reader is confused. In my 60 years, I have seen many transfer rumors, many false stories. But this kind of error—passing off news from a different domain as football—is a new kind of crisis. My final word, this article is not for football fans. It is for those who believe football is not just a game, it is a search for truth. Walking the wrong path in that search for truth means spreading confusion. Tonight I sit on my rooftop. In my hand is that Kolkata tape. There Foden is still running. I know, the real football story is there. Not this play's story. The final question remains. Can we make our information system strong enough that news from the wrong domain will never again knock on football's door? Or will we just keep looking at the wind's direction, while wrong stories take their place in our notebooks?