Still think this pair should run our game? You are crackers
IHESITATE to say it lest I too appear to have difficulty judging the appropriate boundaries when engaging in banter, but this is what happens when you put a biscuit seller in charge of the national game.
So let the FA chief executive, Martin Glenn, go back to being Cream Crackers in the obscurity of a business park somewhere. Let him worry about packaging and marketing there. Let someone else run football in this country.
I distrust the calls to sack, sack, sack that emanate from social media these days when a man or a woman makes a mistake or falls short of the highest and most rigorous standards of public decorum, but I do not think it unfair that Glenn, in particular, should be called to account for a disastrous year as the FA chief executive.
I have some sympathy for Glenn as we gaze upon the car crash he has made of his job and the humiliation he has heaped upon the organisation over the Eni Aluko affair. But not too much.
This is the man, don’t forget, who played the leading role in the departure of Sam Allardyce from the England men’s team manager’s job when he was guilty of a whole hill of nothing. Glenn lives by the sword. He can have little complaint if he dies by it too.
There is, apparently, little appetite from within the FA to make either Glenn or the organisation’ s chairman, Greg Clarke, pay for a series of recent rank misjudgments which culminated in what was by turns ash ambolic,arrog ant, ill-informed and half-wit ted appearance before Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee last week.
‘Mistakes have been made,’ an FA board member told a newspaper after the hearing. ‘And the handling of the select committee was not good but we are unlikely to improve on these two individuals.’
Come on. Pinky and Perky would have been an improvement on those two individuals last Wednesday and everybody knows it.
IT is hard to know where to start with the cynical way in which the FA handled the accusations made by Aluko about remarks by former England women’ s team manager Mark Sampson to her and to her international team- mate, Drew Spence.
Maybe with Clarke making excuses about his initial rude dismissal of the issue in a 14-word email because he was working 22-hour days dealing with English football’s sexual abuse scandal. In my experience, the people who work the hardest and the longest tend not to shout about it.
It might be hard to know where to start but it is easy to know where to end. We end at the point where we discovered at Wednesday’s hearing that the FA were still withholding half of an £ 80,000 out- of- court settlement they had reached with Aluko. We end at the point where Aluko alleged that Glenn invited her to a meeting last month and tried to cut a deal. We end at the moment when, according to Aluko, Glenn told her that she must put out a statement saying the FA were not institutionally racist or she would not receive her money.
I mean, what kind of a man asks someone to do something like that? It suggests a desperate need to try to hide the truth. ‘I felt that was bordering on blackmail,’ said Aluko.
That single revelation goes right to the kernel of the problem at the FA. They are more concerned with appearance than reality. They were so petrified of Aluko’s complaints about Sampson d a magi n g the i mage o f the organisation that they chose to try to bury the allegations and forgot about the important thing, which was dealing satisfactorily with the complaint itself. And so, in their desperation not to be damned as racist, they acted in a way which marginalised Aluko simply for telling the truth. They acted in an entirely discriminatory manner. My guess is that the biscuit seller did not grasp the irony of that conduct. One night this week, I saw a snippet of an interview with the South African comedian and television presenter Trevor Noah, in which he was discussing the current political climate in the US. He said: ‘America’s the kind of place where someone can get more offended at you calling them a racist than at the fact they are a racist.’ That is the tragedy of Glenn and Clarke. Right under their noses, some of their highestprofile employees were taunting Aluko about making sure her Nigerian relatives did not bring the Ebola virus into Britain and routinely talking to her in a fake Caribbean accent. It is
GRAEME SOUNESS gave a fine interview to my colleague Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail on Friday.
In the midst of many observations on the English game, he neatly encapsulated one of the problems some of us have in embracing the management ethos of Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho.
‘I don’t know how Jose gets that message across to his players,’ said Souness. ‘You know the one I mean. At the final against Ajax, at Anfield last week. “We’re not good enough to take them on in a game of football. So we’re going to go long and stay behind the ball”.’
Souness is right, of course. Sometimes, negativity wins titles... but it does not do much for the soul. neanderthal stuff. It is a pathetic attempt at bullying, lightly disguised as humour.
It might have passed for acceptable in some quarters 35 years ago, when supporters would throw bananas from English terraces at black players such as Ces Podd without much censure, but it sure as hell doesn’t pass now.
And yet Clarke and Glenn did not do anything about that. Maybe they did not know. Maybe they did not want to know. The FA were supposed to be a champion of the women’s game and yet, when they were alerted to problems within it, they ran for the hills.
THERE was more evidence of their attitude to women when, to general astonishment, Clarke and Glenn said on Wednesday that they did not know anything about the high-profile sex discrimination case won by Lucy Ward against Leeds last year.
The shame of all this is that the FA have done much good work in women’s football in this country. They have helped to raise its profile and laid the groundwork for a burgeoning domestic league. They have done much to advance the cause of anti-racism too.
There are many people I admire who work for the organisation. But until they start to address the real issues facing players such as Aluko, Spence, Lianne Sanderson and Anita Asante, until they start to ask more searching questions about why there are so few black coaches in the men’s game and do something about it, until they deal with the prejudice and ignorance that greets many women in football, then people like Clarke and Glenn will be left alone to fret about image and fiddle around the edges.
Arrogant, shambolic, ill-informed, half-witted — and the FA believe they can’t do any better for leaders!