Coote, C**** And Pure Comedy. Plus The Inaugural Cryarsing League Table
A Liverpool column. Ish
A FEW YEARS ago, I was invited to a non-Liverpool game in London. Pitching up in the boardroom, I was delighted to find there were three friends present, all of whom were connected in some way with Anfield.
At half time, we caught up and had a drink and a chat. For some reason, the subject turned to a Liverpool legend. We started telling funny stories about him and were laughing at the tales, which were not overly complimentary.
One of the club’s directors was lurking nearby and eavesdropping. He interrupted us.
“I couldn’t help hearing,” he said. “I thought you all loved him?”
We were a bit nonplussed. “We do,” one of us said.
“But you make him sound like a…”
He didn’t want to utter the word but one of our lot did it for him. “A c***?”
“Yes,” the director said. ‘I didn’t expect that.”
“Yeah,” my mate said. “He is. But he’s our c***.”
The C-word is one of the most overused terms in the game. No one in football was remotely shocked to hear David Coote use it in respect to Jurgen Klopp.
Coote is a silly c***. He made indiscreet comments, allowed them to be recorded and will now pay the price. Coote will probably never referee at the highest level again.
Klopp is most definitely a c***. This description, which some people find wildly offensive, is heard so often in the game that it’s almost lost its power to shock. It’s bandied about with such casual ease that the insult has become anodyne. Anyone who’s dealt with Klopp can see what Coote meant.
There is so much to like about the German. His heart is in the right place, he is engaging company and great fun. But he has one thing in common with other managers. Football makes him irrational. It does that to them all.
Klopp has high standards and can be hard to work for – see the exodus of sporting directors at Anfield who flocked back to the club after the news of Klopp’s imminent departure. People who’ve worked with him, players even, have used the same term as Coote. And they love Klopp.
Coote doesn’t and no wonder. Klopp accused the referee of lying and lambasted him in public. To be fair to the former Liverpool manager – and Coote – the comments refer to a game against Burnley during Covid, a period that Klopp found very difficult.
The 57-year-old hated the isolation and the empty stadiums. He made wonderful efforts in the wider community to alleviate the impact of the pandemic as well as bolstering morale within the club, but the world weighed heavily upon Klopp at that time.
On reflection, that’s bollocks. While it is all true, it does not work as mitigation. Klopp would have roasted Coote at any time in his career because, well, that’s what managers do.
Now Coote has opened the door to the second most irrational set of people in the world behind managers: online fans. Every game he officiated is being scrutinised for signs of anti-Liverpool decisions. Debates are raging about conscious and unconscious bias.
Things are not that complex. Officials never like managers who give them a hard time. During the dominant Manchester United era of the 1990s, referees would call Alex Ferguson and his players all the names under the sun. The Scot would harangue officials on and off camera and the team swarmed referees in bouts of gang bullying.
Yet United still got the decisions. The best teams do. They put the opposition under pressure, provoking more fouls. They camp out in the opposing 18-yard box and draw more penalties.
Rival fans ignored this and believed officials favoured United. Joe ‘The Manc’ Worrall was rumoured to have a Red Devil tattoo on his forearm. More recently, Howard Webb became an early meme for being United’s twelfth man. His nickname remains ‘Webb of Lies.’
However, in private former refs tend to be scathing about Ferguson and his team, even if time has given the memories a ruefully amusing hue. The people that United were supposed to have in their pocket tell different stories.
Coote’s a reasonable referee. Not great but better than average. He has been betrayed and that, frankly, is a c***’s trick. We’ve all said things about people we work with that we’d rather not have the world hear. But of all the bad professional decisions he’s made, this is the worst and he can’t complain too much about the consequences.
Does it make refereeing harder? Not really. The conspiracy theorists are deeply imbedded in the game. Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho – and their accomplices, the TV companies – holed officiating below the water line more than two decades ago.
So enjoy the Coote scandal for what it is: pure comedy. Don’t be surprised he disliked someone who gave him a hard time, and don’t be shocked by the language he used.
Bottom line? Get over yourselves, you pearl-clutching gang of c***s. It’s only football.
Cryarsing League Table
Coote is bound to be martyred so let’s make him the patron saint of cryarsing. And in that spirit, I present you the Cryarsing Table, given its debut for the international break. It will be updated when necessary. This reflects the view of online/phone-in fans
1 Arsenal
There is an argument for Liverpool to go top but the sheer consistency of bedwetting at the Emirates over the first phase of the season has been breathtaking. Everyone has conspired to stop the Arsenal title challenge: Referees, the Premier League, the Deep State, the CIA, the BBC, Doris Day, Matt Busby…
The creative use of statistics to prove that the Gunners should be 10 points clear is a characteristic of the hysteria. If they keep this up, the David Coote trophy will be theirs by Christmas.
2 Liverpool
“Nobody likes us, everybody hates us, we’re going down the garden to eat worms…” This could be the Kop’s new chant. And Coote’s mate who hates Scousers proves it’s right! Coote’s involvement in all this stops Liverpool from going top because, well, there’s an element of truth in many of the complaints. Having said that, a classic cryarsing vignette came when Leon Bailey brought Mo Salah down, Coote waved play on and Darwin Nunez went on to score the opening goal. All’s well that end’s well, then? NO! WHY DIDN’T THE REF GIVE THE FOUL. HE CHEATED US. Yeah…
3 Manchester City
Four in a row? That’s four defeats, mate, not four titles. So let’s sack Pep. Some fella was on the radio on Saturday night – with a southern accent – and he told Robbie Savage it was time for Guardiola to exit the Etihad. Who would you have, Savage asked, reasonably. Xabi Alonso was the answer. That’d be the Xabi Alonso whose team was beaten 4-0 at Anfield earlier in the week? The silence was beautiful.
Dishonourable mention for not crysarsing, just crying: Tottenham, Everton, West Ham
Far Foreign Land, a book about Istanbul and Liverpool’s supporter culture, is available here £10 UK, £15 Europe, £18 Rest Of World. All including postage