A few months ago, a prominent TMFDer was on Radio 5’s breakfast show, interviewed by none other than Victoria Derbyshire. I’m not a fan of Victoria Derbyshire, she seems to embark on brief breakfast radio interview slots with a clear idea of the point she wishes to make, as opposed to inviting specialists onto the show and reacting to what they say. I’m sure she thinks she’s being challenging, making hard-hitting radio. I’m also sure that the combination of Victoria* and that Campbell fellow have driven me away from Radio 5 in the mornings. Radio 5 had investigative journalism once upon a time, too, remember that? Last night they were asking people to ring in with their pick for the greatest goal ever scored. You can probably imagine what tremendous radio that made. I mean, they even interviewed Archie Gemmill.
So anyway, A TMFDer was on Radio 5 talking about the principle of fans’ participation in the ownership of football clubs. Despite being presented with plenty of evidence to the contrary (Lincoln, Chesterfield, Barcelona, Real Madrid) Ms Derbyshire insisted that fans were too fickle to be involved in the sensible and stable running of a club. A couple of defeats and they’d be off sacking people left right and centre. The implication was that only real actual businessmen could possibly make the kind of level-headed decisions required in the corporate world of contemporary football.
This morning as the news that jittery City creditors demanded the removal of Peter Reid as manager of Leeds while fans’ groups advocated stability and giving the manager time to sort things out**, I wondered what Victoria would make of it. I didn’t wonder hard enough to bother re-tuning my radio, though.
*Imagine how tempting it was to pull my usual trick of resorting to initials here! Happily I’m above all that.
**I hope the Leeds board are decent enough to give PR an actual chance rather than letting him take the hits of the difficult month coming up (Arsenal, Man Utd, Liverpool , Blackburn) then replacing him with another sucker who’ll seem to be pulling things around when the easier ties arrive and congratulating themselves on the instant success of their decisive action’