"What, me, Richard Scudamore, hanging around ################################### at three in the morning, with my reputation. What were they thinking of? Has no one thought of the consequences?"
Yes, Our Great Leader is planning another Great Leap Forward in Beijing, where the eagerly awaited betting event known as the Premier League Asia Trophy begins tomorrow.
This biennial benefit for the bookies brings together four sides in the usual format - one team managed by Harry Redknapp, ##################################
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#########################################################, a powerful team in financial distress receiving a pre-season earner from The Boss and a local team to pull in the punters.
Three dodgy teams, Our Great Leader, some carefully selected match officials, a sprinkling of AFC officials and members of the local trading community undertaking the Premier League's version of Davos.
In China...
As The Boss said yesterday: "We are in Beijing to pass on some of our knowledge and expertise, not only in running a successful competition that has grown to be internationally renowned, but in other areas of the game too."
Really...?
Scudamore's bloated opinion of his dominion goes before him...
A week ago (the Premier League will not release the latest figures), only 20,000 of the 120,000 tickets had been sold for the tournament, and most of these were for the cheap seats.
Local interest is non-existent as it is rumoured that the local team, Beijing Guoan are fielding a team of reserves as they have a Chinese Super League match on August 2nd.
It is worthy of note that 70,000 tickets had been sold by last week for the match between Internazionale and Lazio at the Bird's Nest Stadium.
The biggest league in the world?
Of course, on the last occasion when the jamboree descended on the Far East, Mark Clattenburg was 'introduced' to Thaksin Shinawatra, and we all understand where that little relationship ended - ###################################################
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With his reputation?
And Our Great Leader is a happy boy at the moment after his political masters, the Murdochracy, picked up the rights to Scottish Premier League games for just 60% of the fee they had offered a year earlier, plus the Community Charity Mall Entity, with the usual opaque bidding process already being tabled for Setanta's FA Cup contracts.
Meanwhile, back in the land of "forlorn back gardens, grey shopping malls, and so forth", the FA have taken action against the five players from Bury and Accrington Stanley who were involved in a little insider trading on the final match of the 2007/08 season.
The players have effectively been fined their winnings and banned for various periods.
We look forward to similar punishments being handed out to members of the Fulham and Wigan Athletic teams and their cohorts, who conspired to rig the match at Craven Cottage last October.
All of the relevant information is in the knowledge sphere within the loop, and the betting patterns are available.
We could itemise literally hundreds of other Premier League matches where market makers and insiders have influenced the outcome for private financial benefit, but the Fulham versus Wigan match is equivalent to the one selected case that lawyers choose in mass-action cases - you pin the most evident 'atrocity' on the abuser.
And the primary abuser in the Premier League remains the Murdochracy and its entrails around the media.
If anybody understands the Murdochracy, it is John Pilger.
So we'll finish today with some proper journalism on the Digger Deviant himself...
"I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub, overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96 Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on 15 April 1989. Eddie's son, Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The "main reason for the disaster", Lord Justice Taylor subsequently reported, was the "failure" of the police, who had herded fans into a lethal pen.
"As I lay in my hospital bed," Eddie said, "the hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can be worse than that. But since then I've had to defend him against all the rubbish printed by the Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry, no blame was attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it in his life."
Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie, Rupert Murdoch's "favourite editor", sat down and designed the Sun front page, scribbling "THE TRUTH" in huge letters. Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines: "Some fans picked pockets of victims" . . . "Some fans urinated on the brave cops" . . . "Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life". All of it was false; MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice. When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his platform. The "sarf London" accent that was integral to MacKenzie's fake persona as an "ordinary punter" was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted Radio 4. "I made a rather serious error," said MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a very different mood, aggressively claiming that the Sun's treatment of Hillsborough was merely a "vehicle for others".
When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie and Murdoch with a dignified anger. So did Joan Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin, whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie's photographers even though Joan had asked for her family's privacy to be respected. The picture of her sons' coffins on the front page of a paper that had lied about the circumstances of their death so deeply upset her that for years she could barely speak about it."
I think I'll be giving the Premier League Asian Trophy a miss this year...
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