Friday, January 9

Kafka in trial at West Ham

How many times are we going to be tried for the same offence? First there was the £5.5 million fine from the Premier League, then the Griffiths committee finds in favour of the Whingeing Blades and we may have to pay them £30 million, and now a new inquiry has been launched by the FA and the Premier League.

At least the Mirror has the affair in perspective, its back page screaming “THE END? West Ham face being first big club to go under after Prem League and FA launch new Tevez probe.”

Whatever happened to the principle of double jeopardy, where you can’t be tried for the same offence twice?

And it seems the main point of dispute is what Scott Duxbury and Eggert the Egg Man said to Kia Joorabachian’s solicitor Graham Shear over lunch at West End club Les Ambassadeurs. Apparently they were given some Clintonesque sounding "oral cuddles" by WHU's men. There’s no recording of the conversation, and no written record, so surely in law that means that nothing can be proved?

Besides, in business, people often say what the other person wants to hear. Over the years I’ve been reassured that “the cheque’s is in the post”, “our accounts people are just about to process your invoice”, “yes, you’ll will get a kill fee if we don’t use your piece”, “there’s no chance of us folding” and “we intend to build you as a brand”, without any real hope of fulfillment. If it’s not in the contract it’s worthless.

Could we be in The Matrix and discover that this is all virtual reality? In fact it’s all like a scene from The Prisoner where Patrick McGoohan thinks he’s finally escaped to London only to discover that that nice dolly bird who helped him is in fact number 8. Soon we’ll all find gas coming through our keyholes and wake up in the Village with Richard Scudamore as the new number 2. West Ham fans will not be stamped, filed, indexed, briefed debriefed or numbered. Our lives are our own. Carlos Tevez resigned!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

David Conn in The Guardian today (Jan 14) has the best article on Tevezgate I've yet seen, confirming what I've long suspected, that West Ham's original 'offence' was utterly trivial, and easily remedied, but somewhow the club officials managed to make things worse at every turn, leading to the current dire position. As they should have learned from Watergate, it's never the original crime, it's always the cover-up that sinks you.

Pete May said...

Yes, good piece by David Conn. Seems like our original contract wasn't that different to the loan deal Man United currently have but the crime was in the cover-up and then giving Joorabachian's man oral cuddles, ooh er...