I know we've been over this before but it still astonishes me that outside of Martin Samuel and our local hack Stuart Brennan, none of the other fuckwit journalists ever paid any attention to City's repeated statements that we weren't guilty and would prove it at CAS, or to the likes of Stefan and the other knowledgeable blues who clearly knew their stuff. The fact that we got more support from the likes of Neville and Souness speaks volumes for me. Even Alan Brazil of all fucking people highlighted what City were saying one morning on Talkshite when he had Martyn Ziegler on the phone in the wake of UEFA banning us. I consider Ziegler to be one of the better ones out there but when Brazil said to him "What about City's statement that they have irrefutable evidence that they're not guilty - surely that counts for something?", Ziegler didn't even bother addressing the question.
And it's not just limited to Ziegler and the WhatsApp group. A mate forwarded me a very long-winded article from The Athletic about the upcoming CAS hearing, and how City might go about presenting our case, showing a variety of different scenarios. To be fair, a lot of work had clearly gone into it but it missed the target so many times it was untrue. I can't remember all the details but one example they used was that we might simply go down the route of whataboutery - that PSG never got sanctioned when UEFA were investigating them (the occasion when UEFA missed their own deadline for action) so why should we? Or that we might try and get off on some vague technicality or other, with accompanying comments from lawyers as to how likely or unlikely we would succeed. Yet at no point until the very end of the article did they focus on City's statement regarding irrefutable evidence of no wrongdoing (the one thing that the article should've been built around), instead focusing on several hypothetical scenarios that had no relevance to City's statement. Laughably, when they did get round to that it just looked like it had been tagged on as an afterthought: "Of course, City have said they have irrefutable evidence of no wrongdoing and we will have to wait to find out what that evidence is, so none of the above may apply anyway"