Monday, 14 September 2009

You Can't Keep A Good Man Down... #

... and John Colquhoun keeps popping up again and again and again, so he does.

Being a humble imbiber of sporting journalism, you will not realise that this is taking place, unless you are a regular reader of this blog.
In which case you will understand that we are onto Mr Colquhoun's case.
A tatty little man...

So where shall we start?

Aaron Lennon's overperformance for Engerland had that Butterfly Effect thing going on, in that it guaranteed that Colquhoun would lever one of his Guardian cronies to produce a major Saturday piece extolling the virtues of his client, Theo Walcott.
Just how many times in a year do we have to put up with this 'Walcott Promo Journalism' in this one paper?

This type of Colquhoun Experience is entirely legitimate.

Readers of the Guardian will also have noticed Calamity James fortnightly ghost-written tosh and the repeated focus on Steve McClaren in that really really interesting Eredivisie in the Netherlands.

Again, all good stuff.
Unless you fancy reading some actual news.
Rather than the PR disclosures of the Colquhoun Experience.

Perhaps The Guardian should be more explicit and openly display a banner informing readers that these columns are advertorials for Key Sports.

A similar example was the amount of media space given to the David James 'will he, won't he?' transfer extravaganza on the final day of the transfer window.
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When you select to sail close to the wind (my initial report to my colleagues after meeting the Colquhoun Experience was that "#####################################
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So, nothing peculiar about that very peculiar deliberate handball by Craig Fagan against Sunderland on Saturday. The "daft handball" (as called by The Sun; The Guardian didn't comment) gave Sunderland an early penalty and set the mood on the game.
Mr Fagan is a client of the Colquhoun Experience.

Or in more tragic territories, Calum Davenport who was under threat of leg amputation after the August knife attack at his home, has entirely disappeared from the news as have any of the causes of the assault.
He is one of Colquhoun's too.

And from the serious to the ridiculous.
When, in a pathetic effort to boost sales of his own particular ghost-ridden tosh, Matt Le Tissier decided to 'own up' to being behind a 1995 betting scam on the 'time of the first throw in' markets offered by the spread betting firms, the media collectively threw up their mock convulsions.

Should the police be brought in?
How should we feel about a BSkyB employee being involved in the corruption of betting markets?
Why so much fuss about something which is so triflingly minor when there are billion pound betting markets out there on certain Premier League games?

And, this was one of Colquhoun's too.
This was his ice-breaker, his 'hey, I'm just one of the lads' attempt when we first met - his 'disclosure' that he had been involved in a 'time of the first throw in' scam was supposed to make me feel warm towards the man.
As, presumably, was his description of how he had managed to write off half a million pounds worth of music industry debts using a legal loophole.
Good business, sir...

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And, when we think of these mid-nineties roots of their current 'business strategies', we should remember one of those useful bits of Latin in reference to this sprouting of corruption, concordia res parvae crescunt.

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