Tin tack for Adebayor

Good morning,

I’m no saint but the laziness of the football hacks out there is seriously depressing. I’ve just wasted what 40 minutes looking for an Adebayor interview that wasn’t where everybody said it was.

Apart from ESPN who clearly were the only ones who actually bothered to find the original piece and not simply homogeneously parrot the PA. But even they didn’t do the job right.

The quote doing the rounds since yesterday is of course the ‘that’s not what he said to me one:

That is what he said to the press but not what he said to me. There is a difference between what you say to the press and what you say in private.’

You must have seen it. The headlines vary from ‘AVB blasted as liar’ to ‘Chelsea flop sold me a gents bike for £25′.  The actual interview was given to the Togolaise Fédération of Football. The bit that touches on the issue and from where the above quote was torn is:

Question: Andre Villas-Boas said he did not object to your participation in the ACN ?

Answer: Yes, this is normal. In a club there is the coach, the fans and the president. So that’s what he told the press, but this is not what he told me. There is a difference between what is said and what the press says face-to-face. So as I said, I’ll go there, I will discuss with President Daniel Levy and after I get back. No worries.

With the benefit of the whole text it what strikes me is that it’s not so much about Villas-Boas being duplicitous, more about Ade being up to no good. I use the word duplicitous laughingly. The fact that he, like every other sane person in the world may have chosen to keep a niggle ‘in house’ rather than share it with the world hardly makes him snake in the grass.

So what we have here is a player who’s coach obviously said that he’d prefer the player to stay – which given the circumstances seems perfectly logical. And a player who is planning to sit down with his chairman and chat about his jaunt off to Africa …once he gets back.

No worries my arse.

He’s a great player in my book. I was always keen on signing him and just as keen not to fall for the whole, ‘he auditions well but then once he has his feet under the table goes right off the boil’ schtick. But that would seem to be the case. He must now surely be perceived as someone who isn’t rowing in the same direction as the rest of us. He’s doing a good impression of some half wit narcissist who’s away with the fairies.

That business about him having no preseason was his fault. He may well not known for certain who he was going to sign for, but he must have had a hunch that he wasn’t planning to retire, at the very least, no?

The rest of the interview there and another one one AfricaTopSports.com just strikes me as the work of someone who we need to sell. Cut loose so he can go run free with Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and the rest of the Looney Tunes. He met with the Togo Head of State you know. Twice. ‘I told him Togo football is sick and must find medicine.’ Jesus wept. While you’re mixing with the great and the good curing the ills of the world old girl, we’ll just keep that cold hard cash a pumpin’ into your bank account.

This is the same clown who professed to be ‘still haunted’ by the incident where terrorists liberally sprayed him and his teammates with semi-automatic machine gun fire and 3 people died. But hey, Ade… if you can get them to put lay their weapons down by doing some keepy uppys, you crack on son.

This Mickey Mouse tournament runs from the 19th of January to the 10th of February. Adebayor could potentially miss QPR, Manchester United, Norwich, West Brom and Newscastle. This of course is subject all to him neither being shot or injured while kicking a ball about.

If Levy & Co. haven’t okay’d this because they know there is no imminent arrival of a new striker then Adebayor should be binned with immediate effect.