Desperate time calls for unity not Karren Brady’s venal self-interest
Henry Winter
Professional football was suspended at the weekend but there was still a humiliating own goal. The aberration was committed by the West Ham United vice-chairman, Baroness Brady, proclaiming that the Premier League should be declared “null and void” and also making a brutally uncaring aside about lower-league clubs.
At a time when the sport needs thought and togetherness, Brady revealed only opportunism and callousness. At a time when the situation confronting the country is one of such gravity it is disgraceful that Brady could contemplate, let alone communicate, such a shameless stance. She attempted to tone down her “null and void” outlook on Twitter yesterday but it was pretty half-hearted.
Plenty of principled people work tirelessly and selflessly for West Ham, altruists who care passionately for their community, for the vulnerable, for other teams and the sport generally. For such altruists at the club to be represented in print and in public by the self-interested baroness must be galling.
Just as Brady’s views were causing consternation and contempt on Saturday morning, there came welcome words of true humanity towards a troubled sport and world from West Ham’s captain, Mark Noble. He invariably speaks sense, considering community before himself.
It is easy to imagine Noble, and his wife, Carly, sitting at home, looking at their children, worrying about their relatives, young and old, thinking of others in the age of the coronavirus, and wanting to get a message out there, practical and reassuring. Noble spoke of the need to put football into perspective, about how right it was to stop playing, saying that, “I am a professional footballer and I take my work very seriously, but I am the same as everyone else in that the health of my family is paramount”.
Noble gives everything on the pitch, and will be hurting at not playing, trying so hard to guide West Ham to safety, but he understands there is only one “safety” that matters right now. The country’s. “Please follow the government advice,” Noble said, “put you and your loved ones’ health before anything else and do not take any unnecessary risks and we can all return to football at the right time for everyone.”
Maybe the release of Noble’s thoughts were timed to counteract damage done by Brady’s objectionable, widely-derided observations and, if so, fair play to those at West Ham for trying to protect their club. The contrasting points of the Brady/Noble moral compass actually signpost how football should be, now more than ever: collaborative, not individualistic. The Noble way.
The ignoble one, the Brady way, insisted that, “There is no dodging the possibility that all levels in the EFL as well as the Premier League will have to be cancelled and this season declared null and void because if the players can’t play, the games can’t go ahead”. Later on in her article in The Sun, a platform loathed by Liverpool fans anyway, Brady softened her rhetoric, asking, “So what if the league cannot be finished?” She then trampled over sensitivities far and wide by concluding again that “the only fair and reasonable thing to do is declare the whole season null and void”.
Brady used a newspaper column to call for the season to be declared ‘null and void’ with nine games remaining
Fair and reasonable? Or simply venal? Espousing such a scenario is so blatantly self-serving, ensuring West Ham stay up, keeping the club on the Premier League gravy train rather than hitting the buffers that could result from dropping into the Championship mass combat zone with a mutinous fanbase, unwanted stadium, unpopular owners and, doubtless, players wanting to jump ship.
It is far too early, as well as far too cynical, to consider freezing the season. Even if Brady is not alone around the top table in her “null and void” beliefs, then Thursday’s latest Premier League emergency meeting needs commonsense, not rushing into any decision to scrap the season. If Tuesday’s Uefa telephone con-fab with stake-holders goes as expected, and Euro 2020 is delayed a year, the leagues have some room to breathe, to use the summer months to complete the 2019-20 season. It may require longer, given predictions from government medical and scientific advisers, and if that means each club’s final nine games being played in August, then do it. You cannot start a new season until the old one, with all its ramifications, joys and heartaches, is properly resolved.
The obstacles are obvious, including sorting out contracts that run until June and affording some time for players to train and regain their edge, but this season has to be finished. It would be wrong on sporting grounds, be legally catastrophic and costly, to void the season. Liverpool, Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion would surely be amongst the first to scramble their lawyers. Sheffield United would be rightly furious about being denied the possibility of Champions League involvement. (They are currently two points behind Manchester United with a game in hand, and fifth-placed United should go into the Champions League because of Manchester City’s European ban). Would Sheffield United consider legal action? They have history with West Ham.
The Premier League, dutifully followed by the EFL, should proceed step by step, absorbing the scientific advisers’ predictions about the virus’s rise and prayed-for fall, and make the next decision in the run-up to April 3, confirming further continuation of the suspension.
Arguably more offensive, although less reacted to, was Brady’s dismissive comment about the smaller professional clubs. She writes, initially with apparent sympathy, that “further down the EFL, right down to the pyramid, the greater the threat to future existence”. Ignoring the reality that it’s all a pyramid, Brady revealed either naivety or heartlessness when adding, “But I suspect that by hook or by crook most will survive”. Leaving aside this was not the most tactful choice of words, Brady betrays an absence of empathy to clubs already existing on the breadline. Now more than ever, football could do without Brady’s arrogance and own goals. It needs unity to fight this threat.
