One of the many good reasons to subscribe to
Rich Cawley's Substack is "The Peter Varney Diaries". In this edition he gives some insights into the 1999 "Floodlight Gang" which saw us nail an Asian match fixing gang - and as Peter relates, the FA trying to take credit for it😡. But the main story is Parker to Chelsea. Peter is very good at revealing some juicy details but leaving it up the reader to draw their own conclusions. So we learn that Parker (and his agent) was insistent that when he had signed a new contract, Richard Murray had "promised" him that if a big club came in for him, he would let him know. But Peter as CEO had no knowledge of this and RM had buggered off to "Bermuda or the Bahamas" to visit his sister, just as the window had opened. That wasn't clever of RM if so; but I'm sure that he was not the only owner at the time to do things like that. Nowadays we are all used to young talented players with "trigger clauses" making such promises part of the contract, and often naming a minimum price a club has to offer, to trigger talks.
But as someone who already hates Abramovic with every fibre of my body, I was triggered by this revelation: "...
they told Scott: ‘If you don’t sign in this window, we won’t be signing you’." WTF? I'm certainly one of those who believed that Abramovic made this move (after the Boxing Day tonking which Parker orchestrated) primarily to "take Charlton out" much like a Moscow gangster would take out a rival with a car-bomb. Otherwise why say such a thing? And of course in the event Parker hardly featured when he did make the move. Probably Claudio Ranieri never quite knew why Scott had arrived there. His career didn't exactly stall but it lost a lot of momentum, whereas if he had stayed until May, having helped us into Europe (as PV discusses) he would have had plenty of better options than that circus.
Great insights. I can't recommend too highly what Rich Cawley is delivering with his new venture, there is plenty of audio (with Louis Mendez) as well as regular news articles. Since he's not even a fan, I'd say we're lucky he's chosen to pick us, rather than the Spanners, for his venture (although I suppose he dreams of expansion at some point...)
Comments
They had the likes of Djemba-Djemba playing that Parker would've been ahead of.
Will still be Mr Moneybags.
Him, Taylor & Defoe can all do one as far as I'm concerned.