Daily Mirror

Kenedy’s not the precedent

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IT’S hard to sympathise with Kenedy for being sent home from Chelsea’s Asian tour after posting offensive comments about the Chinese people.

Even less with Chelsea, who face a backlash from the most populous country on Earth, which further sets back their then CEO’s 2006 pledge to make them “internatio­nally recognised as the world’s No.1 football club by 2014”.

On the bright side, this editorial in the China Daily could have been worse: “It is regrettabl­e that Kenedy has said such nonsense. He has created an incident that has humiliated China, an incident that so many fans simply cannot tolerate. His absurd comments are not only impolite, but also uneducated.”

Back in 2005, Professor of Racial Harmony Ron Atkinson said this at an after-dinner speech in Sheffield: “The Chinese people have the best contracept­ion in the world – but I can’t understand why there’s so many of them because their women are so ugly.”

The response in the outraged Chinese media was violent, with the country’s veteran striker Hao Haidong telling the China Daily: “What this guy said really shows how unmodern he is. This kind of person should be beaten black and blue and made to thoroughly shut up.”

Had Chelsea’s young winger (above) posted his abuse back then, maybe a new generation would have been able to remember where they were when Kenedy was shot.

PREMIER LEAGUE supremo Richard Scudamore has defended the knowledge and commitment of foreign fans while out in Hong Kong.

Indeed, he believes many paying to watch the Premier League Asian Trophy could go up against traditiona­l fans in a pub quiz about their club and give them a run for their money, even though “they haven’t walked through terraced houses, smelt the hot dogs and onions... or stepped in the police horse crap on the pavement”. Scudamore (above) may be right. But he’s missing the point. Traditiona­l fans aren’t half as peeved with foreign fans, who tune in on the other side of the world, as they are with the corporate suits and freeloader­s the PL ushered into the game.

Because it is those people – not the fans in Asia – who have priced many of them out of grounds, meaning they can no longer afford to smell the hot dogs or step in the horse crap.

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