FA comedy of errors over Nev
COACH ROLE IS TWEET 'N SOUR
SOMETIMES with the FA, you couldn’t make it up.
Well, maybe a top scriptwriter could. This week’s appointment of Phil Neville as the boss of England’s women’s team is like something out of a satirical comedy. After the controversy surrounding previous coach Mark Sampson’s racist remarks to two of his players and his subsequent sacking for his inappropriate behaviour in his previous job, it was screaming out for a safe appointment as his successor. Granted two of the top candidates – Chelsea’s Emma Hayes and Manchester City’s Nick Cushing – decided to stay with their clubs.
But surely there was someone, somewhere who was a bit less left-field than Neville.
What about the FA’s supposed pathway for coaches? That seems to have led to a dead-end.
With social media such a powerful beast and getting more savage by the day, could not the FA have done their due diligence properly on Neville’s Twitter account?
Chief executive Martin Glenn said they were aware of some but not all of the online comments that have caused such controversy.
Why not?
Bad
They seem to have done okay previously when looking up old tweets for players such as Everton’s Mason Holgate and Watford’s Andre Gray. Plenty, including colleagues in my industry, have leapt forward to speak up for Neville. But joking that he had “just battered the wife” is something that looks bad and is bad. It’s hard to fathom what Neville was thinking when he wrote it in 2011. That it escaped being seized on at the time shows just how much the climate has changed. One spin-off from all this is to consider how fortunate Premier League chairman Richard Scudamore was that his sexist emails in a private account were exposed more than three-and-ahalf years ago. I cannot imagine that it would have blown over as fast as it did if the full content had been made public in the post-Harvey Weinstein era.