BBC Sport’s Chief football writer, Phil McNulty, might have caused what could be called one of the all-time great Twitter moments.
Phil McNulty, an Irish Liverpool-born sports journalist, has been working for BBC since year 2000. He has written over 450 articles for them and has covered all sorts of events ranging from World Cups, European championship to club competitions like UEFA Champions League and FA Cup.
The incident in question happened less than 24 hours ago when a tweet from McNulty popped up on followers’ Twitter feed. It was a reply to a story posted by the official Mail Sport Twitter handle regarding Curtis Jones’ goal.
Liverpool played in the FA Cup vs Fulham yesterday, and at the 68th minute Curtis Jones’ effort took a weird deflection and ended up in the back of the net for an equalizer. They went on to win the game.
Speculations are that McNulty being a self confessed Toffees supporter couldn’t watch rivals get this lucky and had a moment of weakness.
In response to the tweet, McNulty’s Twitter handled had replied, “Absolute c*nts.” The tweet was deleted very soon after but in this day and age of Internet, nothing remains hidden.
Twitteraties took a screenshot of the tweet from their feed and started posting it online for everyone to see. They found it hilarious and wondered what had happened.
McNulty has been known for his fair and balanced opinions in football and this kind of bias with foul language is unheard of, for him.
Fans started making fun of the situation ponder over the idea that McNulty had finally broken down or that he forgot to switch to his alternate account before posting. Evertonians and Liverpool critics, both started sharing it as a validation of their own bias.
A few hours later though, Phil posted a tweet apologizing and mentioning that the mishap was a consequence of his Twitter account being hacked. He even mentioned a quick change of password to avoid further issues.
Internet is however too smart to fall for such half-baked story and they started questioning as to who, why and how got access to his account just to post this one single reply.
The detectives even questioned the time frame as to how he got his account recovered within minutes after getting hacked as it usually takes a long drawn process to get things normal in case of hacking incidents.
Making light of the circumstances, users even said nobody is going to waste their precious middle of the week Wednesday night just to hack McNulty out of all the people.
McNulty statement makes sense if you consider he has to think of his career and image is an all important aspect for a journalist.
To those questioning his integrity, McNulty in a reply to a separate tweet said: ‘You have to ask yourself why I would actually Tweet that and use those terms.
‘Been on this platform more than 14 years and I suspect you would not find a single swear word used.’
He has been posting retweets since his apology, mostly Liverpool favoured, probably to cover the unfortunate scenes under the rubble.
This much is for sure, hacked or not, this tweet made for a great source of entertainment for us all.