Luis Suárez

[Sarb]

Not being funny but they are also representing a player who has been bitten

There is no need to give public interviews openly condemning one though is there. I suspect they take money from both. Would be wiser for him/them to say nothing

[spud_gun]

A Liverpool legend showing sympathy to Thatcher too. Yeah some legend

Sorry i must have missed the memo that instructed all Liverpool players to take out a Morning Star subscription upon signing for the club.

[Norbs]

There is no need to give public interviews openly condemning one though is there. I suspect they take money from both. Would be wiser for him/them to say nothing

I'm not so sure mate. I think they have to come out against the perpetrator of the incident, there's nothing to be said about Ivanovic

[Sarb]

Last time I checked, we lived in a democracy.

Yeah we do. So I'm allowed to state my opinion that he's tweeting bollocks to gain exposure and get himself some tv gigs right?

[Sarb]

Sorry i must have missed the memo that instructed all Liverpool players to take out a Morning Star subscription upon signing for the club.

Yeah, I guess you did

[Sarb]

I'm not so sure mate. I think they have to come out against the perpetrator of the incident, there's nothing to be said about Ivanovic

Not sure really. Issue is whether he needs to give public interviews the way he does. I don't think he does

[MrMichael]

A couple of minutes of vid from the PC on the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/22295309

[Shaggy]

Gordon Taylor:

IT looks as though the key document in the phone-hacking scandal, at least as far as News Corp and James Murdoch are concerned, is going to be the “For Neville” email, analysed here by David Leigh and the inestimable Nick Davies. For the purposes of this discussion this is the key paragraph:

“Neither side disputes that James, without telling his father, agreed to hand over almost £1m of the company’s money for a settlement that was to be kept totally confidential: £300,000 charged by their own outside lawyers, another £220,000 for the fees of Gordon Taylor’s lawyers, and a monster payoff of £425,000 in personal damages to Taylor. This was a sum almost twice the £250,000 that, according to James, outside counsel had advised was the likely damages Taylor could get if he won at trial. On the face of it, the deal made little commercial sense.”

Up until now we have heard a great deal about Murdoch, Myler and Crone but we’ve heard nothing from Gordon Taylor about his case. In 2009 Davies in The Guardian reported that a payout to the PFA Chief Executive included a gagging clause.

Why was Taylor hacked? As the country’s highest earning union leader (Taylor was paid over £1m-a-year by the PFA in 2007, the year before the he received his pay-off) there’s no doubt that his affairs could be, to some extent, in the public interest.

Yet Taylor’s phone messages are also likely to hold information about or directly from his members, some of whom are the most in-demand celebrities in the country. In short, Taylor’s phone was hacked to invade the privacy not just of himself but of those leaving messages – his members, whose interests he is paid a substantial sum to represent.

Furthermore, Taylor’s an intelligent enough man to be able to reason that his phone is not the only one likely to be hacked. Other people in the public eye, again, including his members, would have been vulnerable to exactly the same methods he was.

By accepting the News Of The World pay-off in exchange for his confidentiality didn’t Taylor fail to expose an action which left his members potentially more vulnerable to muck-raking activities?

That Taylor’s members were vulnerable was, seemingly, widely acknowledged. In his highly recommended book Englischer Fussball in 2009, Raphael Honigstein discussed the way in which England internationals were hounded by non-sports journalists and interviewed Henry Winter and Martin Lipton amongst others:

“’They rummage through players’ dustbins, restaurant bills left on tables are pocketed. At a news conference a reporter from the Mail grabbed the microphone and asked David Beckham about his parents’ divorce,’ Winter says. ‘You can imagine how much he felt like discussing the following day’s game with us after that.’ Another favourite, if probably illegal, ploy is to ring players’ mobile phones and hack the pin code to their voicemail. ‘They really don’t care about anything,’ Lipton complains about the ‘Rottweilers’ as they are known in the business. ‘They turn a player over and are never seen again. We have to clear up the mess afterwards.’”

That footballers in this country, especially, though not exclusively English internationals, are hounded due to celebrity they’ve acquired primarily for being good at the game is why Honigstein so offhandedly refers to their phones being hacked.

These are the people Taylor is supposed to represent.

Could it have been different had Taylor refused the out of court settlement and chosen to expose the on-going hacking?

Ed Miliband has recently, in his uniquely woolly way, been discussing the notion of “a responsibility deficit ” among those in the higher echelons of our society.

Taylor is obviously well within his rights to pursue redress through civil action, but this decision to ‘sell’ his ability to speak out is arguably an example of a responsibility deficit. He chose not to report or expose illegal acts of which he had proof.

These illegal acts were primarily undertaken to undermine, among others, those who he represents.

This arguable failure to represent PFA members’ interests has to be addressed primarily between Taylor and those very members.

And with that in mind I would encourage any member to ask Taylor and the PFA the following questions:

Did the PFA issue any communication to members in and around 2007 onwards to members or representatives of members advising them to be aware of potential issues around their voicemail?
What did Gordon Taylor do with the News Of The World’s £425,000 payoff?
Did Gordon Taylor report to the PFA’s management committee that his voice mail had been hacked?
Did Gordon Taylor ask for, and was he given any, assurances that phone hacking had stopped as a practice at the News Of The World?
Has Gordon Taylor requested he be freed from his confidentiality clause to testify in front of Lord Justice Leveson’s public enquiry into phone hacking or to appear before the DCMS Select Committee?

Gordon Taylor should now feel able to speak about what went on.

That Taylor was reluctant to expose what was occurring doesn’t make him unique.

What has become clear is the impact News International as a whole has had upon public life in the country. Examining the failures of this country’s elite in almost every area over the last 30 years, it is accurate to argue Taylor is small fry.

Interestingly though, Rupert Murdoch argued at the select committee that this country’s MPs are underpaid and discussed the expenses scandal in the context of this.

Broadly speaking, I’d possibly agree with him though he went far further than I would, arguing they should be paid a million pounds, like Singapore, and they’d be independent, incorruptible and feel able to act in the interests of the people.

In 2011 this year Gordon Taylor said he was “worth his hire”. He’d make an interesting case study of Murdoch’s theory.

[dom9]

A Liverpool legend showing sympathy to Thatcher too. Yeah some legend

Yeah we do. So I'm allowed to state my opinion that he's tweeting bollocks to gain exposure and get himself some tv gigs right?

You can hold whatever opinion you like. As can he. But to bring his political views into it is frankly ridiculous. You seem to be suggesting that he's a socialist pretending to be a Tory so that he can get more work on Football Focus? Ok...

[BrooklynRed]

Not being funny but they are also representing a player who has been bitten

Yes, but the bite left no mark vs leg breaks , seizure inducing elbows, victims of racist language etc. The standard and process are the issue here.

[Sarb]

You can hold whatever opinion you like. As can he. But to bring his political views into it is frankly ridiculous. You seem to be suggesting that he's a socialist pretending to be a Tory so that he can get more work on Football Focus? Ok...

Not at all. I just think his tweets are geared in a way to get more exposure. My opinion. Maybe I'm wrong

[Shaggy]

I've no problem with people thinking Hamann is a dick. Loads of our ex players, legends in fact - have shown themselves to be dickheads in retirement. Souness, Lawrenson, Houghton, WHELAN....and more. Didi will always be an LFC legend as a player. As a person in the public eye/pundit, I think he's a bit of an attention seeking idiot who talks one hell of a lot of ****.

[Sarb]

I've no problem with people thinking Hamann is a dick. Loads of our ex players, legends in fact - have shown themselves to be dickheads in retirement. Souness, Lawrenson, Houghton, WHELAN....and more. Didi will always be an LFC legend as a player. As a person in the public eye/pundit, I think he's a bit of an attention seeking idiot who talks one hell of a lot of ****.

[Shaggy]

Simon Kelner

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-tenmatch-ban-for-suarez-is-further-evidence-that-we-have-turned-into-a-nation-of-hysterics-8588084.html

Simon Kelner

Thursday 25 April 2013

A ten-match ban for Suarez is further evidence that we have turned into a nation of hysterics

The Liverpool club, who mistakenly stood by Suarez last season when he was guilty of racial abuse, are right in this instance to feel outraged


Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. And man bites man is a national scandal. As soon as the Sky cameras caught the Liverpool footballer Luis Suarez sinking his teeth into the arm of a Chelsea opponent, you could be certain that the reaction among football people, the media, and the public at large would not be considered, measured and proportionate. Not a bit of it.

The pundits at the match talked about the incident in the sort of grave tones reserved for personal tragedies, and instantly the nation's hysteria index was off the scale. Make an example of him. Ban him for a season. Throw him out of the game. The clamour in the kangaroo court of public opinion was deafening. I was only surprised that David Cameron didn't feel the need to weigh in with an unreserved condemnation of Suarez.

In citing this episode as further evidence that we have become a nation of hysterics, it is as well to examine what actually happened on the pitch at Anfield last Sunday. Suarez, a man who has some previous in this respect and is not a wholly loveable character, bit - in anger - Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic on the arm. That's it. He didn't break the skin. No blood was spilled. The match wasn't stopped, and although Ivanovich complained to the referee, he was no more incensed than if he believed a corner had been erroneously awarded.

Suarez wasn't punished at the time, but, against a background of demands for the most severe of sanctions, football's governing body, the Football Association, banned him for 10 matches. To put this in context, Roy Keane was banned for three matches when, in a premeditated attack, he effectively ended the career of an opponent with a tackle that, had it been perpetrated on the street, could have resulted in a GBH charge. John Terry was given a four-match suspension for racial abuse. But Suarez, a dastardly Uruguayan, came up against an FA - that most English of institutions - whose resolve had been stiffened by thousands of column inches calling for tough action.

I can see that there is a qualitative difference when it comes to biting, which, unlike a brutal tackle, is way outside the game's normal rules of engagement. Nevertheless, the Liverpool club, who mistakenly stood by Suarez last season when he, too, was guilty of racial abuse, are right in this instance to feel outraged by the FA's punishment (Suarez, for the uninititated, is the club's best player, and is on the shortlist for the Player of the Year award).

A former FA compliance officer, Graham Bean, gave the game away when he said: "There is a degree of window dressing [over the 10-match ban] - the FA trying to send a message." But what message might that be? Zero tolerance for biting, something that happens on a football field extremely rarely? Or a message to Suarez himself? We don't like your sort in our game. Either way, it is difficult to avoid the impression that theirs is a response manufactured in a climate of hyperbole and extremism, when everyone is searching for a new Public Enemy No. 1.

[McDermotX]

The PFA eh ?

With support like that, who needs enemies.