Saturday, September 03, 2011
A FEW of us spent a most enjoyable and rewarding hour in the company of three Irish football heroes of yesteryear on Monday morning as Tony Cascarino, Frank Stapleton and Paul McGrath mixed some astute analysis of the Premier League and Trapattoni’s Ireland with a few entertaining detours down memory lane.
I particularly liked Cascarino’s description of Spain’s Michel standing in the long grass in the middle of the pitch and wailing, "It’s rugby, it’s rugby" as he looked up and watched the ball fly back and forth over his head during Ireland’s 1-0 World Cup qualifying win at Lansdowne Road back in 1989.
That the three wise men were on promotional duty for ESPN was with more than usual significance in the case of Cascarino, since it suggested the broadcaster was standing by its man and holding its nerve amid the outraged fall-out from his ‘holocaust’ remark on Sky Sports News the previous day.
For the one or two who haven’t see the clip or read the transcript by now, Cascarino was monitoring Arsenal’s humiliating collapse at Old Trafford when, in the course of a long spiel, he said the following: "Poor Traore at right-back is having a holocaust because he’s finding himself against Nani who’s literally running him from everywhere..."
Presenter Natalie Sawyer immediately apologised as did Cascarino subsequently, and he was still in contrite mood when we spoke to him in Dublin the morning after, admitting he hadn’t slept much the night before.
"I apologised after if I offended anyone as that was not the intention," he said.
"An inappropriate comment or word was used that I regretted and hopefully an apology will be enough."
In fact, it turned out not to be enough to save his Sky punditry gig, Cascarino promptly being dropped to the bench for transfer deadline day, although that may well have been a blessing in disguise since it’s hard for anyone in that bonkers television production to come out well from an annual spectacle which is nine parts hype and hysteria to one part useful news.
Subsequent reports quoted a Sky source saying the station had no plans to use Cascarino again "in the foreseeable future", which in tabloid speak is an "axing" by any other name.
So it was good to get further confirmation later this week that ESPN are happy to keep Cascarino on board for their Premier League coverage this season, not because he deserves a reward for what was, to be sure, a wildly inappropriate use of language, but rather because he doesn’t deserve any further punishment.
It is understandable that people would have been offended by the use of the word ‘holocaust’ but it would require a mental leap of gymnastic proportions to convince yourself that Cascarino had Nazi genocide in his mind when he applied it to a display of hapless defending.
From what I was surprised to learn, talking to other people in the game this week, the word is actually used more frequently than you might think when footballers are privately talking football.
It only goes to show that those in the media who favour a word like "tragedy" to describe an own goal or "disaster" for a goalkeeping howler, are not the only ones inclined to play fast and loose with the English language.
If there’s an upside to Cascarino’s gaffe it may be its public airing will hasten the departure of the word ‘holocaust’ from football speak, just as you would like to think the furore following Alan Pardew’s ugly description on Match of the Day two years ago of a Michael Essien tackle on Manchester City’s Ched Evans — "he absolutely rapes him" — has made it less likely that you will continue to hear any variant of that phrase repeated in the dressing room never mind the television studio.
To an extent, Cascarino is probably paying the penalty for an increased sensitivity to injured public opinion on the part of broadcasters in the wake of previous controversies involving Ron Atkinson and, more recently Andy Gray and Richard Keys.
In 2004, viewers in the Middle East heard Atkinson’s supposedly off-air comment about Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly: "He is what some people would call a f***ing lazy n****r" (note: some people, but not Big Ron, obviously — which, not surprisingly, resulted in his immediate exit from ITV).
I have no sympathy for any of the three, on the grounds their remarks were not only personally abusive but also betrayed an ugly world view at odds with their public persona.
But, in my opinion, the same simply can’t be said of Tony Cascarino, whose use of the word ‘holocaust’, precisely because of the entirely inappropriate context in which it was used, was clearly much more an act of madness than malice.
It’s never a bad thing, whether in public or private, to think before you speak but it will only serve to trivialise the worst verbal crimes if we fail to make the necessary distinction between putting the boot in and putting your foot in it.
Oh, and by the way, Tony, be careful with that word ‘literally’.
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