Define ‘Family Reasons’

Maybe. The readiness of some to, for example, accept diving in their own ranks as professional realism, but deride it in their rivals as the cheating it is, suggests that game’s relationship with honesty is fragmented beyond repair. Perhaps this is simply the natural consequence of a sport growing up in a sad and broken world, a helpless, hapless morphosis from ‘game that people played and watched because they liked playing and watching it’ to ‘desperate exercise in money, power and status’. If lying is generally a bad thing done by bad people — moral philosophy ain’t complicated, kids — then football is a twitching, scrabbling rat king of interlaced, mutated, and shabby untruths, and we’re expected to pay a fortune to watch it squirm.

Back to Comolli, and his “family reasons”. What Liverpool should have done, perhaps, is issued a statement saying “Damien Comolli has been sacked because he’s a chancer and failure, and we’ve done it now to take the pressure of Kenny Dalglish until the end of the season”. True or not, nobody would have believed a word.

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