Carl Kinsella | Sports Editor
When it comes to prejudice, Malky Mackay and Iain Moody don’t discriminate. Text messages exchanged by the two men, then manager and sporting director, respectively, of Cardiff City Football Club, revealed a proclivity for pejoratives that left very little to be said in his defence. Since current Cardiff City owner, Vincent Tan, provided England’s Football Association with the texts earlier this week – the consequences faced by Mackay and Moody have been appropriately dire. Mackay, poised to reunite with friend and colleague Moody at Crystal Palace in a managerial capacity, found his job offer withdrawn. Moody, conversely, has resigned his post of sporting director in disgrace. Both men agreed to co-operate fully with the FA’s investigation, and things briefly started to look a lot like justice.
In such situations, there is a pervading sense of inevitability surrounding the eye-roll inducing emergence of the case for the defence of the indefensible. This time that defence was mounted, all too disappointingly, by the League Manager’s Association and last living remnant of the mythical land of Cockaigne, Harry Redknapp, who also happens to manage QPR. Both parties proffered obfuscations so preposterous that one can only imagine they were reacting to the horror of racism (sexism, homophobia, et al.) with the same farcical creativity with which absurdist playwrights regarded the horrors of the Second World War.
Firstly, the LMA released a statement characterising the actions of Mackay and Moody as ‘letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter’. It is prudent, at this moment, to remind oneself of the content of this ‘banter’. Referring to the presence of South Korean footballer Kim Bo-Kyung and his agents in the city for negotiations, Malky wrote: ‘Fkn chinkys. Fk it. There’s enough dogs in Cardiff for us all to go around’. Letting off steam. About Jewish football agent Phil Smith: ‘Nothing like a jew that sees money slipping through his fingertips’. Banter. Jokes pertaining to the stereotypes of different cultures are a sad reality, and while they make for grotesque reading in cold hard print, they do not necessarily suggest a hatred or disdain for the cultures at the butt-end of the joke. Mackay managed to push that potential excuse out his own grasp when he typed: ‘Not many white faces among that lot but worth considering’, referring to group of potential signings. It is this message that jars the most, the final nail in a coffin draped in a Confederate flag. There is simply nothing else to see here besides a man who believes certain footballers might be worth signing, even though they aren’t white. In spite of their race. The LMA offered that Malky Mackay ‘works under great pressure in highly charged situations’. Have you ever stayed so late in the office that you just can’t fight off your feelings of racial supremacy anymore? I would imagine not.
The LMA has since apologised for their initial statement, stating that it ‘had been perceived to trivialise matters of a racist, sexist or homophobic nature’, assuring us that ‘that was certainly not [their] intention’. Stripped of it’s PR veneer, this translates roughly to ‘I’m sorry you feel a certain way about what we said’. For those of you who have never been in a long-term relationship, what this actually means is ‘I’m about as sorry as it will take for you to stop pestering me about this’.
Harry Redknapp’s defence of Mackay strayed further into the theatre of the absurd, reflecting the frantically bizarre heights of the bit in Waiting for Godot where Pozzo orders Lucky to ‘think’. Redknapp, we know, has a particularly bonkers brand of standing up for his friends and colleagues, having this week extended an open job offer to the tragic Paul Gascoigne to come and coach at QPR (much, I’m sure, to the delight of the club’s owners and players). Redknapp proposed several compelling mitigating factors in support of Mackay, reminding us that he is neither a murderer, nor a rapist, nor a paedophile. The court thanks Mr. Redknapp for his strange and wildly inappropriate comparisons, and would remind him that confessed killers, rapists and child molesters go to prison (a point that I fear may become dated in ten years, when ‘banter’ is codified by legal precedent as an excuse for literally anything). Redknapp’s statements have grown deafening over the silence of other managers, reluctant or unwilling to condemn Mackay’s actions.
Redknapp argues that Mackay’s career in football shouldn’t end over these allegations, an argument that seems to be steeped in the frightful, Mike Tyson-esque glorification that ensures all fallen sporting idols are afforded at least one comeback – no matter what it is they’ve done, and it is not for me to rebuttal that Malky Mackay might not earn himself a second chance someday. However, the pain Mackay has caused has been made plain as day by Welsh footballer Ibrahim Farah, who claimed that in his time at Cardiff, Mackay called him the ‘wee Egyptian’ (his parents are from Somaliland) and ‘laugh his head off’. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Mackay has won a champion or two in the form of the union who represents him and a fellow manager who’ll roll down his car window and give his opinion to anybody who’ll listen – but what is surprising is the nature of those justifications. Banter. Racism’s not as bad as-. Sexism’s not as bad as-. Evangelicals thumping on their bedside copy of the The Lad Bible. The LMA and Mr. Redknapp will adamantly insist that they are, in keeping classic footie cliché, 110% behind the movement to ‘Kick Racism Out of Football’. This week, the chance to advocate kicking a bonafide racist out of football landed at their feet in front of an open goal – and they skied it from six yards.
