Paul Merson’s Manchester City rant is the anecdote to pundit fence sitters
In a world of pundit non-answers, Paul Merson’s emphatic speech on Manchester City‘s cheating is the kind that we all wanted to hear.
The weekend’s return of the Premier League saw pundits and managers alike fielding the question of what to do with City.
While it is understandable, if a little disappointing, that managers dodged the question, even pundits who are paid to have an opinion steered clear.
Merson did no such thing.
The Soccer Saturday panellist, who is not a stranger to saying what he thinks even if it goes against the grain, launched into a tirade about City’s owners and how their cheating robs others of moments.
“Ask yourself one question: Would Man City have won the Premier League if they didn’t do what they were doing?” he said. “Absolutely no chance. No chance, because they wouldn’t have been able to.
“They would have been so far behind everybody else because of the revenue they were bringing in with the PSR and all that kind of stuff. They would have been left behind.
“So all of a sudden, what they’d done made them win the league. Because of them upstairs, they’ve won the league. They’ve won the league because they just put all the best players together.”
At this point, Clinton Morrison offered the rather boring retort that the players still had to go out and play and Merson was having none of it.
“Oh come on! They didn’t have to. They had all the best players. They had the two best players in every position, in every position, and they dominated.
“I’d have a sour taste in my mouth [if I was a player]. It’s not about medals, it’s the moments.
“You’ve taken moments away from other people. Look at that one with [Phil] Jones and Sir Alex Ferguson, and they’re waiting at Sunderland. You’ve taken it away.”
Compare this then to the bizarre take of Joe Cole, who suggested financial doping your club so that you have the best players on the planet is not as bad as taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“Like Lance Armstrong, performance-enhancing drugs, that’s abhorrent,” Cole said. “That’s cheating, right? Match fixing like the Juventus team. That’s cheating.
“This is not cheating. This is something where they brought the club, and then these rules come in place.
“It’s not on the same level. There’s levels of cheating. You go from drug doping, and you go to trying to influence the referees.
“Because what about Pep Guardiola, Kevin De Bruyne, all of them great players? Them boys, the only pure thing with football is what goes on on the pitch. And we’ve seen what’s happened. They’ve changed football.”
Give us strength.
