wouldn't work for them if they paid me.
In this weeks column Clarkeonenil’s Monday writer Graeme Garvey gives his own perspective on our football lords and master’s.
It is heartening to see the F.A.’s moral outrage in the ‘John Terry’s affair’ Affair. They acted courageously and decisively, quickly replacing sex-cheat Terry as England captain with drug-cheat Rio Ferdinand. For that we must all be grateful as sex-cheats are BAD and drug-cheats are therefore GOOD. How quickly did they act? England boss Fabio Capello ‘stripped’ Terry of the captaincy in just ten minutes – which surely is a quickie by anyone’s standards.
The F.A. must have had quite enough of that sex-cheat sort of thing with Sven-Goran Eriksson, the former England manager. The corridors of power at the F.A. were just not safe to walk when Sven was in town, especially if you were called Faria Alam.
It was not until this sad and sorry episode about multi-millionaire Terry hit the headlines that we, the general public realised being England captain meant anything more than simply tossing a coin or shouting, ‘Tails!’ It turns out that it means a whole lot more because the England captain has to also shake hands with the referee, his assistants and the opposition captain and sometimes even exchange miniature flags with him. That is why the F.A. have made the moral choice of swapping which type of multi-millionaire cheat is going to do all those difficult things.
Rio is hilarious. He was the brains behind that hidden camera, practical joke show, Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups that helped the nation to get over the disappointment of failure in the 2006 World Cup. It also showed that an 8-month ban for missing a drugs test and going shopping instead hadn’t dimmed his brilliant sense of humour one little bit. Clearly a replacement England captain in the making, especially with his London accent. Lots of England captains have been Londoners; Bobby Moore, Johnny Haynes, Stuart Pearce, Ray Wilkins, Gerry Francis, David Beckham, Paul Ince, Martin Peters, Tony Adams, John sex-cheat Terry. This is a real advantage at the toss-up because no one understands what they’re saying so they can always pretend they’ve called correctly whether it’s ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.
As soon as he completes his suspension for violent conduct, Ferdinand should be able to manage all of the above captaincy ‘tasks’, no sweat, because, although he is a drugs-cheat, he isn’t on the F.A.’s list as a sex-cheat. Mind you, I do seem to remember a tabloid story involving him, Kieron Dyer, some scantily clad young lasses in a hotel bedroom and a hidden video camera. Nah, can’t be. The F.A. don’t get things wrong. They whacked Leeds for 25 points because that was the right thing to do and they whacked West Ham for no points whatsoever in the Carlos Tevez non-affair Affair because that, also, was absolutely the right thing to do.
How do I know the incorruptible F.A. is always right? Because it is run by good men who want English football to be morally strong. We sleep safer in our beds at night, thanks to them, unless we’re called Faria Alam, Ulrika Jonsson, Vanessa Perroncel…
Wait a minute, wasn’t Mark Palios Chief Executive of the F.A. until he resigned after newspaper allegations about an affair with the over-worked Faria Alam?
Which brings us the point of trying to decipher precisely what F.A. stands for. Some think it means ‘Fornicators Anonymous’, although others say it could be in honour of Faria Alam. A few have even suggested it has been a long-term plot to put the current captain in place and stands for ‘Ferdinand’s Army’. Whichever is true, because of its goodness, to me it will always mean ‘Sweet F.A.’
