Sky sexism was no surprise but prejudice needs punishment
I don’t think anyone in football was surprised to hear the comments made by Richard Keys and Andy Gray about the lineswoman Sian Massey on Saturday. Any woman working in the game will have heard it all before, and probably worse – although I must say it was surprising just how serious they sounded on the audio clip.
How could anyone in this day and age honestly believe that a woman who is FA qualified to officiate a game might be can i wash my canada goose coat unable to understand the offside law? Hearing the audio – rather than just reading the transcript – convinced me that the conversation wasn’t just banter, because if it was just a bit of a laugh, then where was the laughter?
It will never happen of course, but if we take the Ron Atkinson buy canada goose jacket london incident as a precedent and apply the same principles to what Keys and Gray said about Massey’s ability to run the line, it is quite clear that Sky’s premier football figures should lose their jobs. Don’t agree? Then try explaining the difference between an expletive filled rant concerning the colour of a player’s skin affecting his ability to do a job, and canada goose coat 1000 calorie an expletive filled rant about a person’s gender affecting her ability to do a job? Both situations are about prejudice – not facts – informing a judgment.
Indeed both Keys and Gray admitted they had never heard of Massey before the match, despite it being her second Premier League game on the line, and canada goose coat 1000 bulbs lamps embarrassingly for them – and brilliantly for Massey – the 25-year-old went on to give a superb performance, nailing a difficult decision which best canada goose jacket style most of us watching in our sitting rooms needed TV replays to be sure of.
Many will question the fairness of leaking a so-called «private» conversation to the press. Let’s be clear here, this was not a private conversation. As anyone in television or radio knows, the very definition of «private» is stretched to its limits when you are on the job speaking into a microphone shortly before a live broadcast. Even a first-year journalism student could tell you the first rule in broadcasting is to treat a microphone with respect and always, always behave as if you are being broadcast live to the nation.
Let’s not forget, too, the number of people who would have been able to hear that feed – women included – as everyone in the Sky gallery would have been able to listen to their comments.
Refreshingly, the football world has largely come out in support of canada goose coat – hybridge lite Massey, a number of current and former high profile figures in the game – from Rio Ferdinand and Graham Poll to Sir Alan Sugar – ridiculing Keys buy canada goose jacket australia and Grays’ comments. For women in the game their support – and, frankly, commonsense – is encouraging. Not because we fear anyone saying we can’t do our jobs because we are women, we’ve all heard that a thousand times, but because we know there are far more serious cases of discrimination and abuse taking place at all levels of the game from boardrooms to broadcast centres, club corridors to backroom staff.
These are incidents that are can you buy canada goose jacket online rarely made public precisely because women are so good at shouldering the burden clearance, keeping quiet and just getting on with their jobs. Should Keys and Gray be disciplined – and they have been stood down from covering tonight’s Premier League match between Bolton Wanderers and Chelsea – it would surely send a clear message to everyone in the football pyramid that discrimination in any form is not acceptable.
One buy a canada buy canada goose parka cheap goose jacket online thing is for sure, we should be grateful to have talent like Massey coming through at a time when the FA is struggling to recruit match officials because even the men feel they get too much abuse in the job. Let’s hope this incident moves things on a bit and creates a path for a brighter future without bigots like Keys and Gray.
