One of the best strikers in the world, Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney, viciously threatened a fan via Twitter recently. Rooney told the Manchester United fan that he’ll, “put [the fan] asleep within 10 seconds.”
Rooney was responding to a Liverpool fan who wrote to him, “Rooney ya fat whore ill smash ya head in with a pitchin wedge an bury ya with a ballast fork ya fat ugly lil nonse.” Unfortunately Rooney didn’t ignore the tweet and had that harsh response.
Rooney’s irrational doings are causing a stir within the Man U organization. Manager Alex Ferguson couldn’t believe the idiocy behind Rooney’s comments and Twitter as a whole.
”I don’t understand it to be honest with you,” Ferguson said of Twitter. ”I don’t know why anybody can be bothered with that kind of stuff. How do you find the time to do that? There are a million things you can do in your life without that.
”Get yourself down to the library and read a book. Seriously. It is a waste of time. It seems to have a certain momentum at the moment. Everyone seems to want to do it.”
Besides the Twitter ridicule, Ferguson and club officials will look to limit the use of Twitter by their players.
Athletes saying stupid things on Twitter is not something we find surprising. Actually, we were getting used to players deciding to quit twitter entirely rather than deal with abusive fans. Thanks to today’s social media, players carelessly tweet things out without realizing the consequences of their actions (or blame it on someone else). In all honesty, I love it, it’s entertaining for us fans and gives talk radio shows something to discuss.
With all that being said, Alex Ferguson’s harsh criticism towards the platform was out of line. As an adamant twitter user, I feel obligated to defend it’s purpose. Yes, there are some people who waste precious minutes on Twitter. However, many members justify the use of Twitter by bettering their knowledge of news, sports and world topics. Instead of a book, it just happens to be in a 140 character script.
