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First up, lets get this Wenger/Pardew thing straight The incident was unsavoury, unnecessary & probably inevitable. Arsene Wenger SHOULD have shaken hands at the end of the match. Why? Because he should know fine well that by not doing so he ceded the moral high ground which, lets be clear, was his. He should have known what the reaction would be. The media and all the other morons would have a field day laying into Wenger. After all, if the outcry about something that didn't happen, the booing of Thierry Henry against Everton, was talked about and used against Arsenal for several days, then what chance does Wenger have when everyone sees the heinous crime of not shaking a disrespectful persons hand shown over & over again?
If accusations are being thrown by the little Englanders then one thing has to be clear - Pardew acted like he was in the stands as a West Ham fan (which he isn't) or one of his players. If he wants to reduce his status as a manager of a Premiership club to the level of jumping in a colleagues' arms with his legs wrapped around the persons waist, running up & down the touchline pumping his arms with clenched fists & then encroaching on the opposing managers technical area, then he is demeaning himself whilst diminishing the position of a Premiership club manager.
Instead of suggesting a 20 metre gap between technical areas, the League Managers Association should perhaps spend their time more wisely by reminding managers of their responsibility to act like managers & not the shop floor workers (the players) or punters with a few pints inside them. If nothing else how could Pardew or Mourinho (against Barcelona) do their jobs if overcome by hysteria?
Now for the reason I say that it was probably inevitable. Let me ask you this question: Do you think the FA, the FA Premiership, UEFA or FIFA run football? They may make most of the rule changes, hand out the disciplinary fines & suspensions, decide what trophies are to be competed for and appoint the referees, but little else. In fact even a couple of those aren't totally under their control. In this country Sky television & to a lesser extent the BBC largely decide what incidents merit maximum coverage & which should be swept under the carpet according to their club & player prejudices.
Is it any surprise that ManU have received so little publicity for the theatrics of van Nistelrooy, Giggs, Neville, Rooney (more of which later), Ronaldo, Solskjaar et al over the years plus the thuggery of Keane, Neville x 2, Scholes, van Nistelrooy (remember him punching Ljungberg a few years back?) & others or the racism of Schmeichel against Ian Wright? No-one questions Ferguson's insulting interpretation of events like saying that RvN was going for the ball when even a complete idiot could see it was a deliberate attempt to cripple Ashley Cole at OT a couple of years back. Or saying that the Keown/RvN incident was 'the worst thing he had ever seen on a football field' when he was just yards away when Keane launched his sickening assault on Haarland. A British manager and a number of British players is the reason the minimum of fuss is made about them by Sky & BBC.
Even the refereeing appointments are influenced by clubs. Perhaps not always as drastically as Mourinho's actions against Anders Frisk, but if clubs complain loud enough the governing body are compelled to make the change for fear of the complaining club being proved right, however fair & correct the referee has been 99% of the game.
Who tells us when to turn up to watch our club or when to switch on the TV or go down the pub to watch? Is it Saturday lunchtime or evening? Is it Sunday sometime or maybe Monday? BSkyB decide. Who decides which clubs get the high profile with managers & players never off the screens or off the back pages? WHO TELLS US HOW IMPORTANT FOOTBALL IS IN OUR LIVES? Sky & the Murdoch Organisation newspapers such as The Times, The Sun & The News of the World do. Associated radio stations like TalkSport with a huge listenership (so they say) do. Or the BBC.
It's Sky who dictate how much you really want to watch football by monopolising football and so ensuring you are compelled to buy their packages. In turn this means more advertising revenue which means Sky can make the football authorities & clubs an offer they can't refuse, which they don't.
This incredible wealth has spawned the mega rich, untouchable player & manager. How else would Wayne Rooney be able to get away with acting like a thug & a spoilt little brat both on & off the pitch if it weren't for the complicity of TV, newspapers radio & his fans? How else would Ferguson be able to ban or refuse to talk to 13 news organisations (including, laughably, MUTV) & get away with it? Or Mourinho come out with lie after lie about referees & other managers (causing death threats to Frisk & his family) or calling Wenger a 'voyeur' & then having the brass neck to want Wenger to apologise when Wenger was perfectly within his rights to sue for slander? Or lying about his whereabouts during the Cole tapping up affair? Or both sticking their noses in and coming out with complete nonsense about business that doesn't concern them?
Ferguson gets away with it because he manages the most powerful club in Britain & is British. Mourinho get away with it because he is supposedly good looking, charismatic and above all makes good copy every time he opens his mouth. The fact that it is sometimes slanderous, even dangerous, often factually incorrect and are often the ramblings of an egotistical fool doesn't matter in this day & age of the public lapping up any old crap they are fed, because they are too stupid or lazy to question it.
The right-wing media can make up any untruth or exaggerate minor incidents concerning Arsene Wenger, or Arsenal (for some reason perceived as a French club - another piece of rubbish perpetuated by the media), and it is believed and used against us, because all English hate the French don't they? If Mourinho was French he would have been hounded out of British football by now, but he is Portuguese and what harm have they ever done us? Would a Man United or Liverpool player or manager been subjected to disgraceful & pathetic innuendo & songs about paedophilia or hanging from a tree or HIV as Wenger & Sol Campbell were? Not for long if at all because the outcry would have been long & deafening. Would Robin van Persie being hit on the head by a coin at West Ham been met with almost total silence if it was Rooney, Lampard or Gerrard who had been hit?
Why was Arsene Wenger accused of being a bad loser when he once again made the perfectly sensible suggestion of using video replays on crucial decisions following that ridiculous call by the referee in Moscow against Henry; which cost us a draw and still may cost us a place in the last 16 of the Champions League? He was called this despite the referee being the only one in the stadium to manage to see a non-existent handball. The moron who dismissed it as just Wenger being a bad loser was Adrian Durham on TalkSport. Does the fact that TalkSport is a rightwing tabloid radio station & has a presenter who exhibits this type of racism against Arsenal's French players & manager on a regular basis surprise me? No. And several of the other presenters and pundits are cast from the same mould.
What have Gerrard, Rooney, Neville, the two Coles, Terry, Lampard & Owen all got in common apart from being English internationals? They are all proven divers & cheats. You wouldn't know it though would you from the lack of attention they have received. However, whenever the subject of diving is brought up you can be sure Robert Pires will be mentioned very soon, even though the incident brought up ad nauseum occurred over 3 years ago.
Talking of Rooney, Lampard and Gerrard plus Ferdinand & Ashley Cole, what size of ego must they have to produce 'autobiographies' of their limited & narrow lives when they have achieved very little except astronomic bank balances way in excess of their true worth as players and in the case of Rooney & Ferdinand absolutely nothing by way of success? In fact Rooney is best known for his brothel antics and getting sent off in a vital World Cup game & Ferdinand is infamous for 'forgetting' his drugs test and then demanding a pay rise having come back from the subsequent 8 month ban.
What cowards are they that instead of taking the blame for their abject & lacklustre performances in the World Cup they choose to shift the blame on to a 17-year-old squad player. It's not as if he played and then f*cked things up so badly like they did.
What sort of ego has Lampard got to demand that the media put an end to criticism of the Lampard/Gerrard partnership? HE could have ended it by saying "I'm playing like a complete c*nt which is closer to my true ability and I am going to ask Sven to be dropped." I might then have had a bit of respect for him. Tosser.
And we as a general public are so taken in by these English players who by and large are so inadequate as people they can't even change a tyre or a plug, but have a talent (?) for playing football or managing, that we put them on a pedestal. Half of the players can barely speak English, have never read a book & can hardly write anything except their own names.
The power that is exerted over a large chunk of the population is epitomised by Rooney's recovery from the broken bone in his foot taking precedence in news bulletins over Iraq, the Middle East, civil war in Africa and may other more newsworthy stories. Disgraceful.
And then the girlfriends of these obscenely rich players are actually paid to give lifestyle advice in magazine columns to gullible young women as if they have something to offer because they were fortunate enough to be on the arm of a Rooney or a Gerrard when they made it big and have a talent for spending their boyfriends' wages on Gucci handbags & Jimmy Choo shoes. When in reality, if they were on their own they would barely be earning enough to afford a blouse from Top Shop each week with enough left over to buy the magazine in which they now give shopping advice to mentally challenged airheads.
What sort of state is English football & English players in this country in that on top of dickheads like the players mentioned, the FA decide to give a pay rise to a greedy little conniving shyster like Eriksson when they are presented with evidence of an illegal meeting with that snide little other shyster, Kenyon? Do they sack Eriksson when they hear of him arranging his future with a bunch of 'Arabs' on a Dubai junket paid for by the FA? Don't be daft. Arrange a date for him to leave and continue paying him millions of pounds after he has gone. Good work, well done. W*nkers make Ridsdale look like a miser.
So why was the incident we saw between Wenger & Pardew, or Mourinho & Bryan Robson last year inevitable? Why has the attempts to influence how a match is refereed at their Friday lunchtime press conferences by the likes of Allardyce, Mourinho & Ferguson become so commonplace? Or the smug self-justification at post-match press conferences and interviews of successful bullyboy, negative tactics become part and parcel of the game?
Because a Premiership football gravy train started 14 years ago and has got faster & faster, bigger & bigger, richer & richer. Every club is desperate to get on. Some stay on for a while & then fall off, some hang on for dear life, some sit comfortably, while a select few travel in the first class carriage which continues on to places like Madrid, Barcelona & Milan in the Champions League. One club doesn't have to worry about the money accrued from the gravy train because a sugar daddy keeps throwing it at them so they can keep buying more & more - players, coaches, titles & fans. In fact, anything they want except class, style & respect.
So, the money that now is awash in the English game means Chairmen, under pressure from fans and shareholders strive for success, for the place at the top table, and so sack with impunity for a run of bad results, hounding managers out of the game because the pressure takes its toll on their mental & physical health and employ younger managers like O'Leary or Roeder who are not up to the job.
Or managers like Pardew, who has one good season and thinks he has the right to spout his little Englander rubbish about foreign players at Arsene Wenger and then under pressure because he is being found out, gets a couple of poor decisions going his and ends up a winner against a great club with a manager Pardew could only ever dream of being half as good as. He goes hysterical and thinks he has a perfect right to show as much disrespect as he likes towards the opposing manager because he has gained the "victory". Any sort of behaviour surely has to be excused in the all important scoring of an 89th minute goal at what must of course be the most vital activity, Premiership football, on the planet, doesn't it?
No matter that he apologised for it afterwards. He shouldn't have behaved like it in the first place, should he? That's what I tell my boy when he behaves like an idiot and upsets someone. But my boy is 6 years old and you can sort of excuse it sometimes. What's Pardew's excuse?
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