England: a national team hiding behind a series of court injunctions « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
But back to injunctions, the UK Parliament (ie Houses of Commons and Lords) has not passed a law preventing the publication of private information or laying down that making private information public is ‘misuse’. But that is because the law doesn’t quite work in that way in the UK.
Of course there are all sorts of important laws made in Parliament, but equally on this side of the Channel, law is made through the rules of the judges.
(Actually I am going to pause here and quote our dear old pals the Daily Mail, who, if you don’t live in the UK, you may not know, follow a political line that makes the National Party of South Africa look like a bunch of left wing loonies. The paper says, “In the past, newspapers, broadcasters and individuals have been free to say what they like as long as it is true.”)
I guess if you don’t know the Mail then “as long as it is true” doesn’t actually have you falling about on the floor, but anyway, having picked myself up, dusted myself down, and shaken it all about, let me move on…
Being part of the EU, the UK has signed up to the European Human Rights Act which guarantee ‘respect for private and family life’. As a result of which, as the Mail joyfully told us, “Mr Justice Eady ruled that it was wrong for the News of the World to publish a story about motor racing boss Max Mosley attending a sado-masochistic orgy with five prostitutes because it was a private occasion and there was no public interest in reporting it.”
Yes well, he would wouldn’t he? You know what these judges are like!!! But hang on, if it were wrong, isn’t it wrong for the Mail to republish the story? And if so, isn’t it wrong for me to mention it? Didn’t this just destroy my own argument? Am I a Tottenham supporter in disguise, as another gentleman suggested in yesterday’s comments?
Who knows. Lots of England players have injunctions or super injunctions stopping the likes of you and me talking about their privates, no sorry their private lives (slip of the finger, as it were).
Does it matter? Does England FC matter? Does the FA matter?
Probably not. Although I do hope Gibbsy, Theo, and Our Jack, don’t get too badly injured falling over all these injunctions that slip out of other players’ pockets in the changing rooms. (Actually, I wonder, for their own protection, do players now bring their lawyers into the changing room with them?)
And thus we have 16 players playing for the land that they may (or may not) have been born in, including the unpronounceable Wojciech Szczesny and the more pronounceable Vito Mannone, both of whom appear to be goalkeepers (although that can’t be right because we don’t do goalies at Arsenal, according to the blogs.)
Armand Traore has had a call up too – which raises a point and a half. Juventus are huge, big, mega, large, and gigantic. And yet they are toddling along to little Arsenal and saying “please can we have one of your boys for a year?”) Doesn’t that start to put things in perspective?
But there’s a good bit of news, in that Carlos V is only down to play one game (this weekend) and so might be awake in time for next week’s Arsenal game, which would be jolly nice. Cesc will be meeting those nasty little creatures from east Spain (I wonder if they do football injunctions overseas or is it just an English thing like sticking five year olds into uniform to go to school and getting headless in very large numbers from Friday lunchtime to Sunday night?) so we can expect a series of stories saying that he has told his grandmother who told his aunt who told a reporter that he is leaving Arsenal in January because he is so disappointed at Arsenal’s form thus far.
Last bit of twiddle (as befits a weekend like this). Did you catch the list of 57 kiddies that Wenger submitted as our Under 21 squad to the League? Bloody brilliant I thought. What a put down for the “25″ list. Oh and those “25″ rules don’t apply to the Carling Cup, FA Cup and of course the Champs League (that has its own list of players).
So there we are. I’m off to see Guatemala under 12s play British West Hartlepool or something.
100 Years Ago it was all very different
Some other strange stuff that you don’t really want to be bothered with.