Alan Pardew is an ex-footballer. Don't expect him to speak like anything other than an ex-footballer.
Alan Pardew yesterday did something very silly. That silly thing? Use a colloquialism when on a professional job. Yes, he made a mistake. But no, this mistake was not referring to tough footballing challenge by Chelsea player Michael Essien as 'rape' - the source of the current uproar - but rather being naive enough to allow such a colloquial term to enter his diction when being paid to present his opinion on national television.
Most reports of the story currently uphold the image of former West Ham manager Pardew's comment being "bizarre" and "unheard of", saying that he "compared" the challenge to a raping, and often these reports refer to the this weeks' Flavour of the Tabloids, the story of a man convicted of drugging and raping girls in his black cab in London.
Of course, Pardew did no such thing - he simply elaborated on the term 'maul' as his co-presenter Alan Hansen had used to describe the tackle, suggesting that the challenge had more in common with the loose slang version of "rape" often used in informal circles to describe the immense dominance of one entity over another. And while this use quite silly given the context, and quite distasteful on national television given the heightened exposure of victims to the term (especially when such honourable papers as The Daily Mail quite freely print large photographs of the victims on their front page - an act which clearly aids their rehabilitation and garners the support of everyone who will now definitely recognise them in the street I'm sure), his crime was merely one of innocence, of naivety - and neither bizarre nor intended to offend. So calm down.
Twitter
Facebook
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumleUpon