The Sound of silence

The release by Somali pirates of Paul & Rachel Chandler is very good news and it was Sky news who told me the breaking story this morning when I tuned in at about 7.30 am.

As is my way in the mornings I was flicking between Sky News and BBC News and was surprised, if not slightly annoyed, that the BBC had not one word of this happy ending to an horrible ordeal. In fact I thought "well done" Sky for being agile enough to change it's schedule of stories to give this the prominence that it deserved.

I now find that according to the BBC, a quite different  story was playing behind the scenes this morning. This is best explained here.

The BBC blog is a bit pompous, but my overall feeling is that they were spot on in obeying the law (to the letter), while others, decided to follow ratings rather than the wishes of the Chandler family via the injunction.

What happens next? Will the court hold Sky (and others?) in contempt of court, if they have ignored the injunction and who will report on this story? This is why the BBC is so important and the ownership of press and other media by one overall owner is a very bad idea.

Magical mistakes

I'm reading the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries at the moment.

I have just got to the bit where the Pythons are filming the second series and they go off to Devon to film some scenes in and around Torquay.

Palin describes how, in May 1970, they check in to the Gleneagles Hotel just outside Torquay. While at first the hotel seems a bit more colourful and clean than others, it is the treatment given to their group by the proprietor, a Mr Sinclair, that appals them so much that they decide to leave the next day and move to a different hotel.

This is, of course, the incident that also prompted John Cleese the write Fawlty Towers and I expect that as soon as you read the words "Torquay" & "Hotel" in the same sentence, you were way ahead of me, so well known is the story.

What made me think however, reading that encounter from Michael Palin's perspective, is how fragile some of life's success can be? Who, for example, chose that hotel in first place and what if it had been full? What if they had decided to film in Norfolk not Devon? What if it had rained and they couldn't film? One of the finest (if not the finest) comedy series may never had been written.

All irrelevant in the end as they did go there etc but life throws opportunities at you all the time, the trick is, as John Cleese did, to see the chances that it gives you .

Brain damage

If you’ve watched or listened to any football programme or podcast since Saturday, you will have seen or heard various pundits discussing Man Utd’s second goal against Spurs. You can watch the incident here.

Most people seem to blame Gomes, the Spurs keeper, for the resultant goal and as he committed the school boy error of not "playing to the whistle" that's too where I place the blame for Utd ending up with two goals. The referee doesn't stop play, clearly trying to allow Spurs an advantage as the ball is in the hands of their goal keeper. Gomes tries to clear the ball down field, but only when he can't find an unmarked Spurs player does he then put the ball down to take the free kick, that the referee hasn't awarded, 10 yards further forward from where it should have been taken, had it been awarded (which again it hadn't).

The referee, Mark Clattenburg, has come in for some abuse over allowing the goal, much of which has been unjust and in some cases no more than "all referees are rubbish, therefore this was a rubbish decision"!. In my view he did nothing wrong, indeed with less than 10 minutes to play by not stopping the game for an unnecessary free kick he was ironically  helping Spurs make a quick counter attack.

Harry Redknapp, the Spurs manager, has been the most outspoken of his teams staff over the goal, claiming that "it was a farce" and basically genuinely believing that the referee should have given a free kick for the handball (and maybe as some have argued booking Nani for deliberate handball).

To my mind the acid test is this. If Clattenburg had blown for the hand ball and stopped Gomes while he was trying to clear the ball, to bring the play back to the correct place for the "free kick" to have been taken from, would Harry and others have said "good decision ref" or would they, as I suspect, have shouted abuse at the ref "for stopping the game when we're trying to counter attack". Because if they would have then Clattenburg did the right thing and what followed was both legal and Gomes fault.