The folly of uncut Keys and a darker shade of Gray
They have been taken off air by their employers for an undefined period following the furore over their sexist remarks about female officials before the weekend clash between Liverpool and Wolves.
The pair of boyos thought the microphones were not switched on when they discussed the sideline presence of assistant referee Sian Massey in a one-minute exchange before the game. They were wrong. Their mikes were live.
They were caught badly offside.
I’d like to think there was a quiet female engineer somewhere in the background who heard the exchange, instantly bristled, instantly recorded, and passed it onto the wider world. There would be poetic justice involved if something like that happened. I hope it did.
At any rate Keys and Gray have found themselves at the business end of red cards this week and it serves them right. Furthermore remarks like that will follow them forever if they ever get back to work. They will last longer in the memory than any Saturday night stories about the likes of Joey Barton or Craig Bellamy.
Later, to make matters worse for the pundits, 25-year-old Massey went on to play a sideline blinder. Notably she correctly ruled on one of those borderline offside calls at a crucial point in the game. The video re-run showed she had been absolutely correct in her judgment despite the opening remark of the pundits that women know nothing about offside.
Said Keys: “I can guarantee you there’ll be a big one today. Kenny (Dalglish) will go potty.” !
What neither of them knew at the time was that the “big one” had already occurred, that they were in deep trouble themselves, that the English football world generally (and especially the nearly 1,000 registered female officials and referees through the land) would be the ones going “potty” about their remarks before the game.
So last night they were silenced, sitting at home twiddling their sexist thumbs, worrying about the long-term consequences.
They issued abject apologies, of course, as soon as their plight was made known to them, but that has not been enough to calm the storm so far. Their station has groveled and suspended them, the FA has been irate, and Sian Massey comes out of the whole affair with her reputation intact.
Well done to her on the day.
There are absolutely gorgeous ironies attached to the incident.
Earlier in the weekend the West Ham vice-chairman Karen Brady had complained in a newspaper column about the continued problem of sexism in the game.
Her comments were mentioned too by the pair of boyos during their illicit remarks.
There could not have been better proof of the buried truth of Brady’s remarks than that.
The favour was well and truly done.! I would have loved to have seen the famous faces of the shamed duo the first time they heard the fateful tape after the game.
This is a story that will have legs. It will run for the rest of the season at least. The duo will presumably be reinstated somehow at some stage, probably beginning to work at some lowly game and carefully avoiding any mention of anything even remotely female for the foreseeable future. They are surely now in the relegation zone. It is possible they will never work together again but will be attached to other more responsible partners by their Sky bosses.
What will transpire in future will provide at least as much entertainment as most games involving Karen Brady’s own West Ham! I worked in local radio for a few years. There you learn to treat the microphone as a deadly enemy.
I’d say just about everybody who has ever worked behind a microphone has been caught out a time or two and we have heard the results of that from time to time ourselves.
But this one from Messrs Keys and Gray was a classic which will endure for a very long time in the webbed age we live in and the pair of boyos have a long term in Purgatory ahead of them.
It serves them right.
Meanwhile my imaginary lady engineer is smiling away in the background.
* Contact: cormac66@hotmail.com
