Sky caves in on football's mysogynists

It's easy to see why somebody as hairy as Richard Keys should harbour neanderthal views about women in the 21st century - but I'm shocked about the normally liberal and open-minded Andy Gray*.

Maybe they've forgotten, but Margaret Thatcher came to power in this country in 1979 - 32 years ago. Surely that is the ultimate bastion of male dominance overthrown there? Why do men persist with such misogynistic 19th century views?

What reason is there to suggest women can't understand the laws of football as well as a man? I admit that the level of football played by women is not as good as that played by men but that is down as much to physical factors as anything else.

The argument that women have 'never played the game' is specious as many men choose to go into officiating simply because they know they'll never be able to play the game at a decent level. And it's easy to pick them out even in the Premier League.

Regular readers of this blog - those in prison or who have to read Bunky's Musings as part of a community pay-back scheme - will know I spend most of my live-football-watching time at non-league level now. And the best refereeing performance I've seen so far this season was by a woman - and this in front of an assessor who had previously been heard to say there was 'no place for women in football'.

Sian Massey - proved 100 per cent correct

What seems to have been largely overlooked in Linogate - as it has been dubbed on Twitter - is that Sian Massey gor a very tight call absolutely spot on in the Wolves v Liverpool match. I didn't see the Sky coverage but I'm pretty sure that the commentary team's initial reaction - like mine while watching Match of the Day - would have been that it was 'miles offside'.

That it wasn't and that Massey correctly kept her flag down allowing Liverpool to score is all credit to her as an official, in the same way that we should have applauded had it been World Cup Final linesman Phil Sharp.

So let's be realistic about it. Men of a certain generation may not like it but women are here to stay in our national game. Let's face it, they surely can't be any worse than Lee Probert...

*I was being sarcastic...

Downloads aren’t on the up

A new report* shows that Britain is 31st in the world when it comes to the quality of our high-speed broadband connections.

Yes, that’s right … 31st, behind such technical luminaries as Lithuania, Romania and Latvia.

The study splits the results of its tests into five categories:

• ready for tomorrow - with super-fast connections and low latency;
• comfortably enjoying today's applications;
• meeting needs of today's applications;
• below today's applications threshold; and
• leapfrog opportunity – which is a strange one because that’s what we all used to call that moment on the school sports day when the girls’ sprint captain bent over to do some stretching exercises

The quality of the high-speed connections available here in the UK is apparently only ‘meeting the needs of today’s applications’ the report says. And I’m not even sure that’s true.

I struggle to use the BBC iplayer as I do not have ‘the necessary bandwidth’ and attempts to join the digital tv age by signing up to Virgin have been balked because we do not have the prerequisite fibre-optic cables outside our house.

And I find that particularly bizarre as the house is only about 15 years old. Houses further up the street, which are twice as old, do have access to such cables.

Maybe our end of the street just considered itself ‘too posh’ to allow working-class people in vests to dig up the road outside the houses.

I would say that’ll teach them to be so bloody short-sighted, but it hasn’t, because everybody else other than us seems to have Sky.

So subsequently, in a microcosm of Britain’s digital age, we’re probably the 31st best-connected house on our street … out of 30.

* The report was carried out by Oxford University's Said Business School and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics, and sponsored by the networking company Cisco. You can see why I didn’t mention it earlier…

Giggs takes it on the chin

Super-sub Ryan Giggs was the catalyst for Manchester United’s win at Stoke on Saturday – and he was rewarded with a starting place last night as Fergie’s men laboured to a 2-1 win over German champions Wolfsburg.

The fact that at 35 Giggs is still going strong and still able to influence matches at the top level is credit to him. When I was 35 I had the knees of a 70-year-old – and he always wanted them back at weekends.

But it’s not Giggs’ longevity I admire most about him. No the one thing I’ve always been in awe of is his five o’clock shadow. He has the most impressive and immaculate stubble this side of Don Johnson – and he’s been like that since he was about 17.

Last night he looked like Naval Action Man so superbly tidy was his facial hair. But what’s most galling was that he was probably clean shaven when he turned up at Old Trafford that afternoon.

You can see the difference in him between kick-off and the final whistle – as smooth as a baby’s bum in the warm-up, David bloody Bellamy at the post-match interview. Just how virile is the guy?

I’m sure if you locked him overnight in a small studio for an interview with Sky Sports equally hirsute front-man Richard Keys, you’d need to hack your way through hairy undergrowth to find them again next morning.

It takes a week for anything to notice on my chin. It’s just not fair.