One dictionary definition of magpie is “idle chatterer”. That probably sums up Kevin Keegan quite well. But Pete Sixsmith, writing before news broke that the circus was coming back to toon, found plenty for scope for fun at the expense of KK’s long line of predecessors
There’s a classic Fawlty Towers moment when Basil is having a dialogue with O’Reilly, the useless Irish builder, and O’Reilly says to Fawlty: “Calm down, Mr Fawlty. There’s always someone who’s worse off than you.” Basil replies “Is there? Well, I’d like to meet him, I could do with a good laugh.”
Now, things are not great for us. We are in our traditional relegation place, some of the players we have brought in this summer are clearly not good enough and there are a few people beginning to have doubts about the manager. But there at least 50,000 worse off than us and they are all wearing Black and White as the Great Mag Fiasco Show rides into town again.
For here is a club for which the word Fiasco might have been invented. The owner thinks he is a fan and wears a (Sports Direct bought) shirt to prove it. But he isn’t really; he’s from deepest Manchester United territory – Hertfordshire.
The chairman looks like someone who has wandered in from the accountant’s office and been given the job of speaking for his reclusive master without having any ideas of his own. The late lamented manager had an issue with the BBC, had never won anything in the top flight and played a brand of football that was an anathema to the cultured, educated shirt twirlers who make up the crowd. So he has to go.
