Monday 24 January 2011

More Gray footage digs the hole deeper

The Andy Gray/Richard Keys scandal has been impossible to miss in the last couple of days. While some have made light of their remarks, I have to say listening/watching them again, one is struck by the fact that these two men seem to believe all their own hype, they are obviously not used to listening to criticism, they have lived in Ivory towers for far too long as Paul Hayward makes clear in his Guardian piece:

"Television does this to people. It raises them to a plane of imagined grandeur."

Andy Gray and Richard Keys are idiots. Their comments were not jokes or banter, they were unpleasant and disparaging. This is clear when you listen to it all again, and even more apparent when one sees it in context of Gray's expletive comments concerning the very same female official from earlier on in the very same day.

I am no fan of Gray and Keys as you might have guessed, and this is partly down to their rank lack of objectivity when covering football related matters, their tabloid style coverage encourages stupidity and bias, rather than an intelligent and impartial understanding of affairs. Gray is always happy to condone certain players diving, but not others, certain players being reckless, but not others et cetera.

The point about all this for me is that these comments were not jokey, they are not light hearted banter, the tone of them is beneath that, they are offensive and significantly below the belt. People would probably have had more sympathy for them if they weren't such arrogant obnoxious twits at the best of times. Sexism of this kind is simply not acceptable. Andy Gray and Richard Keys need to come out in the open and start eating some large portions of humble pie, delaying the inevitable will certainly not make their portions smaller.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Apparently we are gonna go from bad to worse, if Andy Gray is fired then Jamie Redknapp becomes the senior analyst. You must be joking.

Anonymous said...

Then you read Graham Poll's tale of how Keys phoned him up and threatened him, after he had criticised the Sky presenters; it just gets worse.

Anonymous said...

gray and keys have been standard bearers for Ruprecht Murdoch's media empire for how many years... 10, 15? and today's 'news' is that these two gents exhibit unashamed, (thicko) 'sexist' opinons...!?

ok yah, like, stop the presses!

you know, whales can have a vagina and an anal sphincter too. but no-one ever talks about that. life is so complex!

Anonymous said...

sadly as much as i would like to see the back of them i feel there will be lots of public apologies from them both and a very public disciplining of them both but behind the scenes they will still be given the full backing of sky and more than likely the soundman/whoever leaked it will take the real punishment. shame really as i hate gray's face.

Rupe said...

They're both rubbish, I so hope this see the end of them.

Can't help wondering if this only came out in the first place because Sky want an excuse to get rid of Gray and Keys. It'll freshen up their coverage and presumably save them a bit of cash too.

I dare say they're looking at the model used in their cricket coverage where there are a lot of regulars who share the load pretty evenly, and an anchor man who's a pundit too. Someone in the Ian St John mould.

Incidentally, nice line in the Fiver yesterday: Richard Keys puts the "W" into "anchor".

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Keir said...

But what a way to end a two-decade long spell; being sacked for speaking privately and unaired to someone else. Talk about loyalty. This reminds me of Sir Paul McCartney being criticised for setting a bad example to the youth of Earth for using drugs- "it's not me telling people what I do; it's you [the media] spreading it across the papers."

Anonymous said...

Funny thing is i bet there are a lot of pundits out there who are sweating now. there is bound to be more of this about sort of so called banter in the archives. Lets see who hates who enough to LEAK more vids !!!!