Silly People, those Englishman « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

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By Walter Broeckx

First about the title: this is a somewhat own version of the famous quotes that are used in the comic strips series Asterix and Obelix from the hand of  René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.  A comic series about a village of indomitable Gauls  that resist Roman occupation. One of the ever returning lines in this series is that one of the Gauls says about the Romans and their (at times somewhat strange) behaviour : Silly people, those Romans.  This explanation just in case some take the title too serious.   And feels insulted or so.  If so, sorry.  Because I do think some have just played being silly.

Well a lot of waves have been made in English football yesterday. At times like this you would need a real Englishman to give his thoughts on to those matters. But as Tony still is finding himself standing upside down for the moment you will have to do with the Untold foreigner view on things.

First let me start with Harry Redknapp.   I don’t know how the rules are in England but I really don’t think that I can go to the bank and open an account on my dogs name. And as I don’t have a dog I never really tried to do it so maybe I could be wrong  on this. But as I did opened a few accounts on the name of my children I know from those days that I did have to give some kind of evidence that they existed. So opening a bank account and name it to a dog is well something that sounds do(d)/(g)gy to me. A normal person would not do this. Unless he maybe has something to hide for someone.

Opening a bank account in another country is something that I am perfectly allowed to do in my country. I could go to Monaco and open an account there. The only thing that the Belgian tax law is saying about it, is that I must let this know to them. So the opening is perfectly legal but hiding the account is an offense. Each year we have to declare (and this is literally the last thing we have to declare on our tax form),  if we have an account in another country or not. It is a declaration of honour as it is called in my country. So if you lie about that you are not an honourable person anymore. Apparently Redknapp didn’t tell about the account so according to Belgium tax laws he is a person lacking any honour.

Something that I found very strange in this trial is the fact that it was a jury who had to decide on this. In my country such behaviour is sentenced not by a jury but by the judges themselves. I think in such cases it would be 3 judges who decide if there was any guilt or not. And well most of the time those judges are not that easily influenced by people who can talk nice and make jokes and are a bit famous. They look in the files, try to see if laws were broken or not and then judge accordingly yes or no.  Mind you not many cases come to court as far as I know in my country as most of those cases are settled with an agreement outside the court room.

I certainly liked the way how the defence pleaded that Arry was not as smart as people thought he was. The shameless way he tried to believe the people that he could hardly read or write is something that will follow him in the future. And this for a man that is supposed to write (or has written?)  a column in The Sun or whatever newspaper it was. This shows that he is a liar to the public or that he doesn’t write the column himself and this makes him a pretender. Oh, yes he is the great pretender….

But the verdict of the jury was ‘not guilty’ and so Harry can go free. The question that I now have is : will the court go after the dog now and try to put him on trial?  Because did Rosie fill in her tax from in the right way?

Moving on to Capello although this is only one small step on the Tax mans ladder. Because as Tony in earlier articles pointed out this Capello was not a totally unknown man to the Italian version of the Tax man himself. So who better to come after Capello then a not found guilty tax evasion person himself. Maybe this is somehow written down in the job description to become an England manager? Maybe you must have had troubles with the tax man before they take you serious at the FA?

Now about the sacking of Capello itself. I really cannot understand the whole idea unless it was a set up. Just imagine if the FA wanted to take the armband away from Terry. Ok, if you would be on the FA-board how would you work this out?

Would you just go and make it public like the FA did or would you first call Capello and make it a joint statement? And suppose if Capello for some reason did not agree with the taking the armband away from Terry. Wouldn’t it be smart of all parties involved to sit down in a meeting room and discuss about it and to find a solution that is acceptable for all parties.

But by acting like they did, the FA made it look as if Capello had nothing to say about the national team at all. And so I can understand him being angry about it. And all this could have been avoided if they would have gotten the wisdom to first talk with each other, take the same point of view on this matter and then come out with a joint public statement. Everybody, except maybe Terry, would have been happy. And for Terry it would be business as usual because it wasn’t the first time he has been stripped of the armband before.  So in a way he is used to it.

So I do think that the whole thing was just a set up to make Capello angry and to force him out of the door. Maybe the FA had hoped that Capello would have stayed on until after the European championship but the Italian didn’t want to play that game. I think the idea was to make sure that Capello would stop after the European championship and then get Arry in place. But the Italian preferred the money right now and let the FA choke themselves with the problems they have caused themselves.

The main thing for the FA would be to learn from those things. But can we really expect people in charge of football to learn anything at all? Because if they would have had the capacity to learn anything at all…then why would they be in football?

So who will be Englands next manager? I put my money on a dog called Rosie and his assistant The Anfield Cat. No better duo to run the English national team after the silly way the FA  acted. And besides the dog has already a bank account it seems. Somewhere in Monaco. Arry and Milan know the details…