If there's one thing I hate about this whole "Ryan Babel tweeted a picture of Howard Webb in a United shirt and now he's been fined £10k by the FA" situation, it's that the picture Babel used was just hugely disappointing.
I mean, it's one that's been floating around the internet for at least a year now. Probably more. Everybody's seen it. Every site with the slightest interest in football has posted it. It's old news. And it's really only an average effort at best. Unless it was done up in MS Paint, in which case it's actually a fucktardedly fantastic effort. But since it probably wasn't, it almost certainly isn't.
Really, though, if you're mister big shot rap artist bench warmer footballer who likes to 1337 7\/\/337 'til the cows come home, it's just a lazy effort to put up such an old and overused image. I mean, you're paying £10k for the privilege--the regular-person equivalent of a rather hefty speeding ticket--at least make it worthwhile and go with something new and edgy instead of some tired blandstrosity half the world's already seen. And that doesn't even get into the way that some people have been calling it "Twittergate," because that's just really annoying, too...
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Right. So: If there are two things I hate about the whole "Ryan Babel tweeted a picture of Howard Webb in a United shirt and now he's been fined £10k by the FA" situation, one, it's the way Babel himself used a 700 year old Photoshop, and two, it's the way people are calling it "Twittergate." Because seriously, we don't have enough idiotic faux-outrages getting tagged as -gate this and -gate that? Hell, I bet there was a Twittergate just last week. It probably involved Justin Bieber and more people than know who Fernando Torres is losing countless hours of their lives hanging on its every 140 characters. I mean, any -gate is tired enough at this point, but this isn't just any -gate--it's the 37,093th "Twitergate" in the history of Twitter's last six months of existence.
But that's not as bad as seeing some people claim this proves there's a grand FA conspiracy to go after Liverpool...
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| The Tweeted picture, included for any archeological interest. |
Okay, so there are three things I really hate about the whole "Ryan Babel tweeted a picture of Howard Webb in a United shirt and now he's been fined £10k by the FA" situation. There's the picture, there's the people calling it Twittergate, and then there are the daft claims it's a conspiracy. Because really, when's the last time the English FA has looked competent enough to lead a grand conspiracy to crush Liverpool Football Club? This is the fucking english FA we're talking about here. They still think it's 1966. Unless they think it's 1866, that they're blue-blooded lords and barons, and that the Empire is still at its peak. Hell, did anybody see the way they just lost their World Cup bid embarrassingly Qatar? Unless they lost it to Russia. I can't remember, but either way they spent millions to get two votes and finish alongside the Marshall Islands at the ass end of the whole damn party.
I know it's bizarre and annoying that Rooney can curse out officials and Walcott can admit to diving and Mr. Alex can berate officials from his soapbox with impunity any time he pleases, but the FA's scattershot approach to punishment doesn't show intent--it mostly just confirms their status as largely incompetent dinosaurs. There's a decent chance they reacted more strongly this time around because they don't actually know what Twitter is and the idea, as put to them by some lackey, frightened them. I mean, imagine telling your grandmother that you Tweeted a link to an old picture of her head Photoshopped onto a stripper's body that your aunt's cousin's son had whipped up three years ago. Now imagine that the FA is your grandmother.
Besides, if they were really out to destroy Liverpool, Ryan Babel's barely a part of the club. So the joke's mostly on them. And on Ryan Babel.
Though I suppose that as with just about any of the major sports regulatory bodies (Hey, Sepp!) there probably are a lot of individual members who are as corrupt as fuck...
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Amongst the things I really hate about the whole "Ryan Babel tweeted a picture of Howard Webb in a United shirt and now he's been fined £10k by the FA" situation are the picture he used, people calling it Twittergate, people claiming it's part of a larger conspiracy, and that the English FA is generally incompetent and likely has a number of individually corrupt members. And I really fucking hate that part where they're still stuck in 1966, too. And no matter the details, £10k is a ridiculously large fine to levy on somebody for sharing a link to an old Photoshop, especially when the English FA has so many real problems they could be dealing with. It's just stupid and petty and procedural, the work of useless idiots more concerned about the rules and regulations of their old boy's club than in actually doing anything vaguely worthwhile as the governing body of English football. So I do hate that, too.
I also hate it when Howard Webb officiates Liverpool-United matches.
But that's another story entirely...