CARRAGHER IS BACK AT SKY
JAMIE CARRAGHER will continue as a pundit for Sky Sports next season while on a final warning following talks with network bosses during which his TV career was on the line. Carragher has been suspended since March after he spat out of his car window at a car carrying a 14-year-old girl and her father. The driver, who took a video of the incident, had been goading former Liverpool defender Carragher about Manchester United’s victory earlier that day. He will return for the start of the Premier League campaign next month following a meeting with Sky Sports chief Barney Francis last week in which Carragher persuaded his
employers that there would be no repeat of the incident that caused such widespread revulsion.
A Sky spokesman said: ‘We’ve spoken to Jamie and reminded him of the standards we expect at Sky Sports. He has shown remorse, is hugely apologetic for the offence he caused and has taken the appropriate steps to make sure that the incident will not be repeated.’
It is understood that the decision to retain Carragher went right to the top of the organisation.
Carragher apologised the day after the video was made public, calling it ‘four or five seconds of madness’, and has benefited from his immediate remorse and his great popularity within Sky.
But despite his standing as one of football’s most hard-working and well-informed analysts, he can still be considered very fortunate. Being on a final warning demonstrates how seriously Sky took the incident. And spitting is regarded as beyond the pale in football — even worse than an over-the-top tackle that causes serious injury — because of its utter lack of respect.
Carragher will have to cope with a ferocious social media backlash that will keep harking back to the incident, whatever he says from the Sky booth. The 40-year- old has continued to work during his Sky suspension as a columnist for the
Daily Telegraph and for Scandinavian TV.
PENNY for the thoughts of England reject goalkeeper Joe Hart about the players’ daily darts game with the press in Repino that has grown from his refusal to talk about the players’ in-house tournament at Euro 2016 to the latest contest for the ‘Joe Hart Memorial Cup’, involving captain Harry Kane, being shown on the BBC’s News at Six.
THE friendship between FA chief executive Martin Glenn and Gary Lineker (right), forged when Glenn set up the record-breaking Walkers Crisps advertising campaign with Lineker in 1995, is strong enough for Glenn to have taken an early train from St Petersburg to Moscow yesterday to meet up with Lineker before the rest of the FA party arrived by charter plane later in the day.
THERE was mass hysteria on the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow after the hosts beat Spain in the round of 16. But strangely the main meeting place in St Petersburg, the Palace Square outside the world-famous Hermitage Museum, was eerily quiet. The omnipresent government security obviously didn’t want revellers near such a historic site.