After the lies came the farce

I have some very good friends in Sheffield. We have a lot in common. We all love our football clubs and we also love English cricket. Sheffield United Football Club is a great Yorkshire institution and I happen to have a lot of respect for its fans. They are passionate. They are not glory-hunters. They support their local club, although admittedly quite a number of locals prefer the other steel city club, who my mates disparagingly call ‘Wendys’. Their corruption of ‘Annie’s Song’ has to be one of great football anthems. I like visiting Bramall Lane because it reminds me of football grounds in the 1980s. It’s a piece of nostalgia.

A few weeks ago, I got a message from Sheffield telling me that the Blades were confident that they had emerged victorious in the arbitration case against West Ham. It seemed hard to believe. It felt like 50% windup, 50% speculation but they were sticking to their story and claiming that their legal team had wiped the floor with ours.

Hitler’s daily paper

The story broke this week after the arbitration decision was formally delivered to the two clubs last Friday. That esteemed organ, The Daily Mail - the paper that lent its support in the 1930’s to the mass bombers of the East End, the German Nazi party - was the chosen outlet for the leaks from the report that were no doubt served up on a plate by sources close to The Blades.

Before we consider what we have learnt from the media this week, let’s just backtrack on a bit of old ground. You may have seen a couple of pieces I wrote for KUMB.com previously - Deceit, Greed and Incompetence (after the FAPL Disciplinary Commission report was published in April 2007) and Post Arbitration Panel Thoughts (after the report of the Arbitration Panel was published in July 2007).

My conclusions at the time of the original judgment were that the previous regime running our club had brought shame upon every West Ham fan in this country with their deceit and greed. They had knowingly and recklessly put our great club at risk with their sordid and underhand dealings. There was little doubt that our club had deliberately concealed the truth from the FAPL regarding the side deals on Tevez and Mascherano and had then gone on to mislead the FAPL when further assurances had been sought.

There is no point in any West Ham fan trying to defend what went on at that time, no matter how much we all want to support our team.

Remember what the Commission and Panel had found – we were not only in breach of the rule regarding third party ownership (U18) but also the rule which reasonably enough requires all FAPL clubs to act in good faith.

Scott of the Antics

It’s at this point that we should perhaps pause and reflect a little on the role in all of this of Mr Scott Duxbury, then our Legal Director, now our Chief Executive and a man whose continued presence in a senior position at our club is not in question according to a statement from the Boleyn Ground this week.

From what can be pieced together from a reading of the reports about the original turn of events, Mr Duxbury maintained that Jane Purdon, Secretary of the FAPL did not tell him on the ‘phone that a deal which involved a third party having the ability to exercise a break clause in a player’s contract was an infringement of Rule U18. Purdon begged to differ.

Further, Mr Duxbury said at the time that he didn’t know anything about the famous Rule U18. Hard to believe as it amounted to an admission that a highly paid legal executive had not acquainted himself with the rules in the context of a highly unusual transfer deal. What do you make of that? Some might say he’s either not telling the truth or he’s incompetent.

Apparently it was our then Chief Executive, Paul Aldridge who came up with the solution to the third party ownership problem - a secret side deal with the modern day human trafficker, Mr Kia Joorabchian. What’s Scott’s take on that? I’ll check the rules, Paul.

Yep, Paul, non-disclosure is acceptable. Really? Do me a favour. How can it possibly be acting in good faith to construct a secret side contract to deliberately get round a rule? What is your definition of bad faith, Mr Duxbury?

The exchanges that followed between Mr Duxbury and Jane Purdon of the FAPL on what happened next were also interesting. Duxbury denies (according to Purdon) the existence of the third party deal or ducks the question when directly asked if there is a side deal with Kia (according to Duxbury). Make your own mind up on what really happened there.

It just didn’t add up, so unsatisfied, the FAPL in the shape of its Chief Executive, then pops the question to Paul Aldridge. Is there a side deal or not with these players, it seems strange you have got them for free? According to the judgment, Aldridge simply does not tell the truth.

Bang to rights

This is why at the end of the day, we are bang to rights. These senior members of our club’s management team behaved in a highly dubious and questionable fashion because they were desperate to secure the coup of signing two world class players.

Let’s just forget for a moment that we want our club to act honestly and transparently. After all, the other FAPL clubs are just as dodgy in their business dealings with their tapping up and their ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ not to play loaned players in certain fixtures (like Steve Kabba in that game against Watford eh Mr McCabe? How do you define ‘third party control of other clubs, Mr McHypocrite?). Why shouldn’t we pull a fast one?

The answer for me even in that situation is that the decision to bring the two Argies to the club was not actually based too much at all on a footballing decision. It was a commercial decision linked to Mr Terry Brown trying to do a multi million pound deal to sell the club that he had picked up for a song. The potential consequences were clearly not that important to him as he hoped to be off to his caravan park in a gold plated baby Bentley.

I’ll come back later to the extent of the disruption on the pitch which followed. It was the wrong decision, a deeply flawed mistake that we will be paying for both in terms of financial outlay and reputation for a very long time.

It’s important to go back to this, because it sets the context of where we are now. Although I am quite comfortable saying that our club behaved dishonourably and maybe we should have been punished more (despite the fact that the situation was without precedent and there was no tariff set for any punishment), I think that this latest so-called arbitration has seen the whole affair descend into a farce of monumental proportions.

What does the judgment say?

A word of caution, first. We really do need to see the full judgment. We have been getting selected highlights so far and these have been leaked with the intention of causing West Ham the most damage. We have seen the other two previous judgments and the Daily Mail has got its copy. It’s time we the fans were allowed to see full chapter and verse. There’s a number of unanswered questions.

Let’s focus on the reported main conclusion of the learned Judge Lord Griffiths, no doubt an avid football fan with an encyclopaedic knowledge and long-term understanding of the game:

"On the totality of the evidence, we have no doubt that West Ham would have secured at least three fewer points over the 2006/07 season if Carlos Tevez had not been playing for the club.

"Indeed, we think it more likely than not on the evidence that we heard, that even over the final two games of the season, West Ham would have achieved at least three points less overall without Mr Tevez. He played outstandingly well in the two wins that West Ham secured in those last two games."

How convenient. 3 points less. Nothing to do with the fact that the difference was exactly that between West Ham and Sheffield United. Why not 4 points? Why not 6? Come to think of it why not 2 points given that if Tevez hadn’t scored at Old Trafford we would have still got a draw, which would have been enough to stay up?

A game of opinions

Football as we know is a game of opinions. It’s also about hypothetical situations. What if Lenny Scaloni had shielded the ball out in the FA Cup Final rather than hoofing out for a throw? The point is this. No Judge, no matter what expensive school and elite university he went to, no matter whether he can read Latin, do big sums or play Beethoven’s 5th without a music score, no Judge can convince anybody that he knows exactly what the contribution of an individual player expressed in points can be.

By the way, Your Honour. Just in case that your posh school concluded that ‘Association Football’ was NOCD (‘not our class darling’), points are won on a football pitch by not conceding goals as well as scoring them. It is a team game which involves a goalkeeper, defence, midfield, attack and manager who makes tactical plays and substitutions.

Who kept us up?

I was at every one of those final nine games that year home and away. I’ll tell you who kept us up. It was Robert Green at The Emirates. It was our magnificent defence at just about all of those games except when the blue filth humbled them at the Boleyn Ground and we got slaughtered at Bramall Lane – irony of ironies – with Carlos Tevez on the pitch. It was our midfield, battling for their lives. It was even a linesman at Ewood Park who gave a goal when Tevez should have really cost us a goal by getting in the way stupidly of a goal-bound shot.

Another small point, Your Honour. Have you actually thought about whether Mr Tevez and his pal Javier might have been at the root of why West Ham was struggling in the first place? This is the point made earlier – the deal was not related to football, it was related to our Chairman getting sweaty palms about selling our club. I was at the game when Tevez first scored. It sent me radio rental as it was against the renegade outfit now at its rightful level at the foot of the league table. A game that we lost, in March 2007, 7 months after Tevez arrived. But the reality was that like the situation which led to the recent departure of Kevin Keegan and Alan Curbishley, these players were dropped in out of the ether into our club and it totally disrupted the team. Your Honour, these two players were a negative force for a large part of the season, you are making the schoolboy error of just looking at the end of the season.

You have also forgotten something else. The small matter of how every other club played during that whole season. A huge amount of permutations. Have you thought about the contributory negligence of Sheffield United in playing like a bunch of tw*ts in the run in? 8 points out of 33 in their last 11 games. Who cost Sheffield United three points more directly, Carlos Tevez or Mr Neil Warnock in fielding a below strength team in their game against Manchester United? You tell me.

Perverse

Although I believe this judgment to be perverse, it is increasingly looking like we will not be given the opportunity to challenge it. Sheffield United have been given more than one chance. There was the original Commission. We were fined £5.5 million.

At that time they did nothing as they thought that they would be staying up. Then there was the Arbitration Panel where they were right in there arguing their corner after they'd bottled it at home against Wigan on the last day of the season.. They didn’t like the outcome of the Arbitration Panel. They went to the High Court. They lost that. Then they forced arbitration, a hearing that West Ham, despite being punished and scrutinised on previous occasions could not refuse. They appear to get a result, but we have nowhere to go.

Mr McCabe, the great seeker of justice and paragon of virtue and fair play seems strangely reluctant in going to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, given his apparent affection for quasi judicial proceedings. Why not? If you’re so sure you’re right, why deny us our opportunity to have our say? We are now the victims but we have no natural justice of a right to appeal. The man is a hypocrite of the highest order.

The arena for battle now is apparently quantifying the order of damages to Sheffield United. It could go on for a long time and surely the real contribution in points by Tevez coupled with the contributory negligence of The Blades will define any damages. Trying to establish that should involve the re-viewing of a lot of Premiership football games in the 2006/07 season. As for the Sheffield United players joining in the legal jamboree - face the facts boys you played like a pile of s***e and got your just rewards. Call me old fashioned but I don't think you should reward failure.

Scott of the further Antics

I’ve said a few things about Mr Duxbury based on what came out of the previous judgments and I want to finish on another important revelation which apparently came out of the Arbitration. It is the evidence given by Kia Joorabchian’s lawyer Graham Shear that Duxbury privately told him that although West Ham had repudiated the ‘side contract’ with his client unilaterally in writing, in reality this deal still stood.

The main point about this is there is no indication that Duxbury was interviewed about this. It is clearly one person’s word against the other, a bit like what happened between Duxbury and Purdon early on in the process. The difference is that there was the letter tearing up the side contract - the only physical evidence available.

I am really struggling to understand under what circumstances Duxbury would say this to Kia’s man. Remember this was just prior to the Wigan game that we had to regularise the contract with Tevez. There were three games left, Wigan, Bolton and Man U. Why would he have said that except to try and convince Kia not to pull Tevez out in a contractual dispute? But would Kia have pressed that particular button? Pulling Tevez out would have left him in the spotlight and taken his asset out of the shop window. The summer transfer window was approaching. No, the reality was that although the contract was against the league rules, English law no doubt would have been on Kia’s side. Don’t forget, too, that Kia actually commenced a High Court action against West Ham in July to enforce his legal rights over Tevez. It does seem to me strange that Duxbury said what was alleged by Shear, but nevertheless it is damaging to our cause. It is also damaging to Scott Duxbury. So we are all waiting for you, Scott, to come out fighting on that one. What do you say about this?

Despite the disappointment with the decision in Sheffield United’s favour, we should take some strength from this latest bizarre twist in a saga which we needed like a nine inch nail in the scrotum. I don’t know about you, but I have moved on from feeling embarrassed and ashamed about the antics of the administration of our club to anger at what appears to be a very perverse ruling which has subjectively attempted to apply points to the efforts of one individual player in our 2006/07 squad. It has also fundamentally changed the nature of football in this country, although a new culture of litigation was bound to take off with the obscene levels of money now in the modern game. The Rubicon has been crossed in the Tevez saga.

Come on you Irons.