as bad as Hearn is to listen to you can't be looking at that shirt for too long either.To be fair, his Dad was Chairman of Leyton Orient for a number of years, so he'll have some inner knowledge of how football works.
I will watch the episode but what you point out is spot on - you can't distinguish the sporting achievements from the way they have gotten there, and considering the narrative that Sky has been pushing for those clubs, it's at the very least highly hypocritical of them.
Find it really funny Neville is having a go. For years he’s salivated over city, praising them to no end about how well they’re run, how great their recruitment is and how good they’ve been for Manchester and the Pl to the point of nausea. Now it’s turned out they’ve basically just cheated for years….and now city are bullies and part of this lawless enterprise.
He is a gigantic fool.
I mean.. doesn't that make sense though? Take Lance Armstrong as an analogy, he deserved praise and looked great until it was found he'd cheated, then people reassessed their view on his achievements. City have been playing really well and until the cheating stuff came out deserved praise. Now that it's highly likely that they cheated, people reassess their praise.
It’s little different though because it’s not really a big surprise that city have cheated. There’s been murmurings of it for years. The Uefa ffp incident, the Mancini payments. It’s been obvious they’ve been cutting corners and being dodgy for years but Neville was always quick to talk about how great everything they did was and how they set an example and how rubbish the Glazers are at everything. All that bullshit about how much they’ve done for Manchester too, when again it was obvious that was just a smokescreen for something more sinister. Basically Neville should have known better. Fancies himself as quite knowledgeable on all things ownership and club running related yet he couldn’t see for the trees the shite city were up to.
They were saying this after UEFA found them guilty.
Imo it doesn’t make sense, on any level. Even Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher should be well aware that Manchester City aren’t where they are today simply because of hard work. Their path to success is a result of a method that normally operated clubs can’t possibly follow as it’s operation is completely based on being state funded. Look at Chelsea and the debt, which was interest free, they owed Abramovich when he fecked off. Praising the way Manchester City is being run is bizarre.
He wasn't going to publicly criticise the owners for chucking loads of money at the club because that's exactly what he did with Salford to get them climbing through divisions. It was only when City were charged with cheating that he changed his stance, which is fair enough.
While the last sentence is somewhat true, in this case it's an entire hypocritical one he's expressing. What City have been doing has been clear for years now, since the leaks, and it's impossible to be working within the industry without knowing it. It hadn't changed his or Sky's agenda for ages, he hasn't had a sudden epiphany.
You can’t completely remove it from the equation and pretend it doesn’t exist, pretend Manchester City is a shining beacon for how other clubs should operate, simply because you’ve been funding Salford to the extreme and you’d look like a hypocrite. Also, the leak which prompted UEFA to act, was well known at the time, so Gary should’ve been well aware of the situation.
When working as a high profile football pundit, I don't think that a leak carries enough weight to do a full u-turn and start publicly scorning the way City operate. Even if he was privately confident that the leaks were ultimately going to lead to charges, he'd still get slated for coming as very bitter.
Why not? Also, there's a world between "publicly scorning" and "praising them to high heavens" which might just have been to stop sucking them off on air once very clear emails were leaked highlighted how illicitly their operations were being run - notwithstanding a ludicrous CAS decision based on a technicality.
Because he's a pundit, not an investigative journalist. I'd assume pundits are briefed by their employers to work on so-called facts rather than leaks. Every other pundit was doing the same thing. It's hardly as if all of his peers over at the BBC or BT Sport were commenting on the leaks whilst Neville was turning a blind eye to it.
A leak can absolutely be a fact - which it was in this case.
Once you cross that white line, you still have to go out there and perform. Or something.
We all have the same 90 minutes plus stoppages
Tbh I didn't really listen to Gary's stuff much so I don't know how blinkered he was, it just sounded like the guy I replied to was saying it was daft to praise them for playing good football before the charges were made public, but I realise now that I read his post wrong and he was talking about how well run they are etc. The point about the previous UEFA/CAS rulings is fair - it was pretty clear they were dodgy even back then, so that should be taken account of when praising how well run they are.
What now? This was well known at the the time, so why would he have to do a full u-turn, the leaks is fecking years and years ago.
Pretty much this.
You're not wrong about state ownership creating an uneven playing field but, as I already said, pretty much every single pundit has failed to criticise City for this, so why aren't you holding them to the same standards as Neville? It just feels like he gets way more stick than anyone else working in punditry because he dares to show a modicum of intelligence from time to time.
Disagree tbh. Yes, the owners have put us in this position but there are many factors in the report which have been dismissed unfairly (which I've spoke about in the main thread), the 10 point deduction is incredibly harsh as a punishment, and there are definite questions to be asked of the independent panel and the PL which will hopefully be put forward in the appeal.
Yup, every single time without fail. I love the guy but he really does dig himself unnecessarily large holes at times.
Them breaking rules is just the tip of the iceberg, really.
