Can you tweet something like, something like me?

It’s a couple of months since I last opened one of these blogs with a classic Simpsons reference, so here’s another. At the start of Season Five, episode Cape Feare, Lisa receives a letter from a penfriend, Anya, who lives in an unnamed country. As Lisa reads the letter, the narrator’s voice-over changes, jarringly, mid-sentence.

“Dear Lisa. As I write this I am very sad. Our president has been overthrown and replaced by the benevolent General Krull! All hail Krull and his glorious new regime! Sincerely, Little Girl.”

Not that it’s my place to draw comparisons between repressive Soviet-style regimes and whichever agency runs Kalvin Phillips’ Twitter account, but I’ve noticed a similar shift in the tone of his tweets over the years. Not a particularly sinister one, it should be said, but it doesn’t feel like he’s the one hitting ‘send’. Yes, I know that’s how it works these days. Victor Anichebe sort of gave the game away when his account posted the infamous message, ‘Can you tweet something like: Unbelievable support yesterday and great effort by the lads! Hard result to take! But we go again!’

In a 2013 interview, social critic Charlie Brooker described Twitter as a video game. “It’s a massively multiplayer online RPG (role playing game) in which you choose an avatar and you act out a persona loosely based on your own in order to gain followers,” he said. There’s some truth in that, at least as far as I’m concerned. There’s a definite disparity between the ‘me’ that I present on Twitter, and the one I present to work colleagues or family.

I had a scroll through Kalvin’s account, right back to its earliest days in 2012. I did this in search of a particular tweet in which the teenage Yorkshire Pirlo complained about the rising cost of a child day rider bus ticket. The tweet seems to have been deleted — maybe it didn’t survive the scrutiny of General Krull’s acolytes — but the surviving tweets from that era feel authentically ‘Kalvin’. There’s one declaring Jason Statham ‘a boss’, one praising his gran’s Sunday dinners, and a retweeted photo of a furious Wayne Rooney, captioned, ‘WHAT ARE YE DOING IN MY SWAMP’.

In the nine years since, the tone of his tweets has changed. Now there feels something stage-managed about them. They’re mainly banal statements like ‘the lads never gave up’ or ‘can’t wait to be back’ or ‘the feeling’s always the same getting the call-up’. Most of them could have come from any random footballer, or from a random footballer quote generator. There are other moments where the real Kalvin shines through, such as the touching tribute to Sarah Emmott, the young Leeds fan who recently passed away from a kidney condition.

Most of the time, however, you’re left with the impression that Kalvin doesn’t have a great deal of input into his own account. Which is a shame, because there’s so much to like about him as a person. Each time the account tweets I feel as though I can see wheels turning and pistons pumping behind that professionally airbrushed picture of him in an England shirt. It’s C-3PO in a Kalvin Phillips mask.

On one level, whoever is running his account is playing the Twitter game very well. They’ve amassed almost 200,000 followers, and brands like Hypebeast are seeking Kalvin out for fashion promotions. They don’t need advice from someone like me, but speaking as someone who would happily superglue myself to a road to ensure Kalvin Phillips remains here for the rest of his career, I’ve no interest in following the Twitter version of him because there’s simply not enough of him in it.

I was prompted to write this blog by some tweets that popped up on my feed in the aftermath of the Norwich win. ‘Wasn’t pretty but who gives a shit! Happy Halloween people,’ Liam Cooper tweeted. ‘We give a shit, Liam, great win but plenty of scope to improve,’ responded one fan, tersely. ‘Won’t be knocking on yours for trick or treat,’ Cooper snapped back with a laughing emoji and a pumpkin.

That’s what I want to see from Premier League footballers on social media. Some might question whether a club captain ought to be engaging with fans like this, but I’m all for it. Snide replies to footballers’ tweets are a good way to score Twitter points, as most of them won’t reply directly to you, meaning you can be as rude as you like to them. On occasion, though, they will respond, devastatingly, like Gulliver flinging an annoying Lilliputian over a rainbow. At this point the fan generally realises, like a certain ginger Manchester United midfielder, they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

Kalvin needs to start doing this. It’s not like he’s not getting the opportunities; every time he’s called up by England a gaggle of Villa fans quickly assemble to let him know he’s not good enough. I want to see him put his dry Yorkshire wit to good use. There are very few consequences for acting like a dick online, but being put in your place by someone with considerably more clout than you is a lesson every troll needs to experience.

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— Leeds United (@LUFC) September 14, 2021

I do get why social media managers don’t like this kind of thing. Some footballers get wound up and make poor decisions, one example being Aldershot’s Marvin Morgan, who tweeted, ‘I hope you all die,’ after his own fans booed him off. So maybe I’ll add a small caveat to my plea: let footballers be their true selves online, unless their true self is a bit of a pillock.

And if that’s too much to ask, just let Kalvin be Kalvin. Kalvin doesn’t wish death on anyone. Kalvin’s a smart, down-to-earth professional with an impish sense of humour. When Kalvin talks, you see these things instantly. When he tweets, you don’t.

Here begins the campaign to give Kalvin full control of his online persona. General Krull must go. Sincerely, thirty-something Yorkshire bloke. ⬢