ThreeMatchBan
By the spring of 2011 half the country seemed to know the identity of the footballer the courts called CTB. He had taken out an injunction stopping the press from reporting an alleged affair with Imogen Thomas, a former reality television contestant, and the rumour had spread across Twitter faster than any lawyer could keep up.
The papers knew too, and were furious that they could not say so. For weeks they hinted and goaded. Then, in the last week of May, it all came out. It was Ryan Giggs, and it produced the most unusual week in headlines of the season.
Before the name
The Sunday Herald goes first
It started in Scotland. The Glasgow-based Sunday Herald, arguing that the English injunction did not bind it, ran a picture of Giggs with the thinnest of black bars across his eyes and a long piece explaining why it was publishing. It was not the funniest front page of the week but it was the bravest, or the most opportunistic, depending on your view. Either way it gave the rest of the press the opening they had been waiting for.
Poking with a stick
South of the border the tabloids could only goad. The Sun condemned the footballer's reported attempt to take legal action against the thousands of Twitter users who had named him, and still found room for a rhyme that Tennyson might have been proud of. The People splashed a headline that bore a striking resemblance to the name of a certain Manchester club. The secret was fraying by the day.
The last day of the season
On Sunday 22 May United beat Blackpool 4–2 at Old Trafford on the final day of the season, a result that relegated Ian Holloway's side, and the away end spent much of the afternoon letting Giggs know that they knew. Anyone watching on television who had somehow missed the story was briefed within minutes. The Sun made the same point in print.
Parliament and the front pages
Hemming in the Commons
The next day the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege to name Giggs in the House of Commons. “With 75,000 people naming Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it’s impractical to jail them all,” he said, and with that the injunction was effectively finished. The Speaker was unimpressed. The papers were ecstatic.
Tuesday's papers
On Tuesday morning Giggs's face was on the front of almost every newspaper in the country. The tabloids had clearly had their headlines drafted for weeks, and the Daily Mirror won the battle of the front page with a play on the Private Ryan film title, before carrying the theme through the inside pages. The mix of legal analysis, gossip and football writing was odd, with sports reporters suddenly asked to comment on privacy law, but nobody could fault the headline writing.
The Independent, normally sniffy about putting sport on the front, led on the legal significance of the breach in its usual minimal style, with a knowing nod to everyone who had read the name online. Its cheaper, compact sister paper the i sat between broadsheet and tabloid: a straight headline with a quietly effective double meaning beneath it.
Gotcha
The Sun has never done subtle. Its own effort borrowed from its most notorious headline of all, and its overall approach to the story was the bull-in-a-china-shop treatment its readers expected.
Why the week mattered
Beyond the puns, the Giggs case became a landmark in the argument over privacy injunctions and social media. Judges and politicians spent months afterwards debating whether a court order could mean anything once thousands of people online had ignored it. The tabloids took it as a famous victory, and in the short term it was. How differently the press could treat two footballers caught in similar stories is explored in a piece on Rooney, Beckham and the tabloids, and the role Twitter was starting to play in players' lives is picked up in how Twitter brought footballers closer to fans.
On the pitch Giggs kept playing for United until 2014, three more seasons, and the title he had helped win that May was the club's 19th, a story told in the week United took the title as red. Blackpool, the side relegated on the day the chants started, were back in the Championship that August.