I spent the back end of last week and the weekend in the lovely City of Rome, basking in the sun and the sights and relishing the joy that 9 points from 3 games brings, then as I return to this cold, wet and yet wonderful City on Sunday evening something has to happen to destroy the positivity, why is this always the way?
I will hold my hands up and admit to not exactly being Garry Cooke’s biggest fan in the past but over the past 12 months or so he has really won me over. As noted in a brilliant piece by Daniel Taylor in today’s Guardian, the clubs CEO is not adverse to some pretty ridiculous cock ups, but at the same time he has done some brilliant things for the the side, for every ‘bottled it’ there is the millions poured into local regeneration for the community.
Now though comes his biggest gaffe to date, the story has now been played out to death so I wont go through it again. Clearly any ‘joke’ or remark about cancer is massively insensitive, and Cooke should be ashamed of his comment even though he never meant it to be in the public domain. Perhaps his second biggest mistake though is his ridiculous lie to try to cover his back, does anyone believe for one second that his email was hacked? If you were an employee at City and had managed to hack the email of the clubs CEO you wouldn’t just send one email with a lame and insensitive joke to a high level colleague.
If the former Nike boss hadn’t lied he would have a much better chance of coming out of this unscathed, clearly still a remark in bad taste, but a genuine mistake, now though there is the mistake wrapped up in lies and that makes the whole situation so much worse than it already is, of course though, there are other issues at play here and the man at the centre of it is Kia Joorabchian.
Quite what this snake does I am unsure, as we all know he is not a licensed agent so therefore he cannot act as one, yet he ‘represents’ several of our players. Carlos Tevez is probably the highest profile, but he also supposedly works with Nedum Onuoha and Nigel De Jong and this is where problems arise. He also represents Mark Hughes and he was very comfortable with City under the reign of the Welshman, the hiring though of Garry Cooke changed all of that, one of the most sensible things he did was force Joorabchian out of the club and now he is trying to make him pay.
The email regarding the health of Dr Anthonia Onuoha was sent 12 months ago, and yet hasn’t come out until this week. Supposedly City refused to sanction a loan deal which would have seen her son move to Everton last week, this has angered Joorabchian and Onuoha, it seems therefore that the timing of this story hitting the papers is hardly coincidental. If it costs Cooke his job, Kia will have got his revenge and will no doubt try to involve himself with the club again in order to further line his pockets.
With all this internal drama,how does city hope to compete with utd?