Untold Arsenal » “I will kick him; I will kick him” – Alan Green last night

It is tempting to say it has been a bad week for the BBC – looking stupid over totally ignoring the FA Youth Cup Final and now having their lead football reporter threaten violence against a fellow journalist while broadcasting.

But I fear the powers in the BBC don’t even recognise any of this as an issue. Certainly they haven’t mentioned it at all.

Last night was not a good night for A Green. I only heard part of his broadcast while driving, but sometime around 8.15pm he started a diatribe against a fellow reporter, repeatedly saying, “I will kick him”. It seemed the other fellow had stood up and blocked the Master’s view.

Later in the evening he got fed up with people phoning in (despite the fact he was running a phone-in) stating that the listeners were all “speaking tosh” and adding, “I hope we don’t get more calls like this – it is complete nonsense. Complete nonsense.”

Sir Alex F Word also lost it last night. He is of course not used to having any challenging questions put, refusing to talk to most of the media except when he has to under UEFA rules. At one point he said something like, “Why should I have to answer a question as stupid as that?” (The answer of course is that 99.999% of journo questions are stupid – as in “how big a win was that?” and “how do you feel now you’ve won?”)

In fact the overall feeling from last night was that for Green, the F-Word and others, the behaviour of P Evra, rather than being seen as a warning, was seen as a blueprint of how to speak.

Meanwhile the predicted sale of EPL clubs has started. Portsmouth and Sunderland have been sold, and we know that West Iceland Utd must be sold, or will go into liquidation. Liverpool Insolvency’s deadline for finding £350m from somewhere, anywhere, draws ever closer.

The Portsmouth sale is to the man who was involved for a few weeks at Manchester Arab, during which time he said, “Ronaldo has said he wants to play for the biggest club in the world, so we will see in January if he is serious. Real Madrid were estimating his value at $160m but for a player like that, to actually get him, will cost a lot more, I would think $240m. But why not? We are going to be the biggest club in the world, bigger than both Real Madrid and Manchester United.”

This could be the first summer where the sale and collapse of clubs could be bigger news than the transfer window. If that is not the case it will only be because of a lot of patching and mending en route.

(c)Tony Attwood 2009
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