Thursday 29 September 2016

Big bullies

Crikey, Jake Humphrey's colleagues in the media turned on him for saying that Sam Allardyce was brought down by a combination of "greed, naivety and our poisonous press". Humphrey retracted that tweet, then rephrased his next effort, saying the press had been "ruthless".

The Daily Telegraph, full of self righteousness, is maintaining that its sting was part of its fight against corruption. Given that the worst thing Allardyce said from this point of view was that the rules on 3rd party ownership could be "circumvented", I'm really struggling to see that this amounts to corruption at any serious level.

In practice Allardyce was damaged goods and had to go because otherwise this story would have kept coming up. Just as the chap I heard on a phone-in saying Glen Hoddle was the only sensible candidate didn't seem to realise that his fruitcake remarks about karma would just keep being regurgitated if he was reappointed, whatever you think of him as a coach.

But, as Allardyce said, it was entrapment and pretty shabby too. I think Humphrey got it right and the bullying that followed - for that's what it was - proved his point; the press can be poisonous. Poor Jake stepped outside the established groupthink and, perhaps acting as naively as Allardyce, told everyone on Twitter.

Having repeated the News of the World's fake sheikh sting but without the robes, the Telegraph obviously aspires to take over the mantle of the defunct Sunday redtop rather than undertake serious investigative journalism on topics of real importance.

Like how corrupt UEFA is, frigging the club coefficents by taking account of ancient historical success to ensure that, from 2018, clubs which used to be good but aren't any longer, like AC Milan, can get a ticket to the group stage for the foreseeable future while also changing the financial distribution to keep teams like Bayern Munich competitive in Europe even though the German league has been turned into a boring perpetual one horse race and is theefore commercially unattractive. Golly, Leicester have got them terrified....


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