Article from Marina Hyde's blog on Cook below if it's not been posted yet:-
Does anyone know where we are on those Manchester City-branded energy drinks proposed by Garry Cook, the club's mesmerically ghastly executive chairman? Mr Cook caught his new owners' eye with an 83-page thesis entitled A New Model for Partnership, a sort of footballing Das Krapital, wherein he predicted City's full-spectrum dominance of planet Earth, within the structure of a Premier League of 10 to 14 clubs, with no promotion or relegation.
Among his many brainwaves was the creation of three City energy drinks – City Powered, City Energy and City 24/7 – and one could not help but feel that Garry might have drunk deep from an experimental sample of one this week, when he fumed that Milan had "bottled it" over the Kaka transfer.
How else to explain his being reduced to such emotional language? How else to explain the needy blitzkrieg of post-Milan briefings, in which he detailed the venal and amateurish nature of his adversaries – and the lack of pastries in their lawyers' offices – while attempting to occupy the moral high ground? It all seems most out of character. After all, until this week's fiasco, Garry had cultivated the air of the type of affectless sports executives grown in petri dishes in Nike's Oregon labs.
It was Nike whence he came, of course, where he was in charge of Michael Jordan's brand, another chap – how to put this? – who has never allowed himself to be held back by the dead weight of principle. When the segregationist Republican senator Jesse Helms ran against a black Democrat in his home state of North Carolina, Jordan famously declined to take sides on the basis that "Republicans buy sneakers too".
And no sooner had Garry been lured to Eastlands by the erstwhile owner Thaksin Shinawatra than he revealed himself to be a similarly gifted fence-sitter. Asked how he felt about working for the former Thai PM, condemned by Human Rights Watch as a "human-rights abuser of the worst kind", Garry replied: "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can't worry … I worked for Nike who were accused of child-labour issues and I managed to have a career there for 15 years. I believed we were innocent of most of the issues. Morally, I felt comfortable in that environment."
Alas, there isn't the space to wonder what handicap some of history's less-alluring leaders played off, or indeed to speculate whether they'd have stood their round in the clubhouse. But what we can say is that Garry has been looking distinctly less comfortable this week. Quite understandable – without the figleaf of a big-name signing, the big-talking chairman must feel a little exposed in front of his owners. (That his earlier scalp, Robinho, should choose this very moment to go awol from City's winter training camp is an instance of curious synchronicity.)
Less understandable is the manner in which he has chosen to "move on" from it all. For a while, the role of cretinous lightning rod at Eastlands was taken by Sheikh Mansour's deal frontman, Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim with comments about the imminent acquisition of Cristiano Ronaldo. But with Dr al-Fahim now stood down from jester duties, it seems to have fallen to Garry to step into his shoes – and what a quick understudy he has proved.
Your ears did not deceive you. Following the collapse of the Kaka "deal", the club chairman really did return from Milan in high dudgeon, affecting distaste that money had been mentioned so often. He really did gabble something semi-intelligible about City's emphasis on "humanitarian potential factors". He really did synthesise confusion that Kaka should have chosen to miss out on the opportunity to come "on a journey". And he really did suggest Milan lacked dignity. This would be disingenuous were it being spouted by Ron Manager. Coming from a man whose public credo has hitherto been bowdlerised Nietzsche, it begins to look like a demented form of self-parody.
Of all the poses Garry Cook should now choose to adopt, that of a gentleman ambushed by cowardly vulgarians is easily the most preposterous. Is this how real big hitters behave? When he eventually comes down off his City Energy high, the City chairman would do well to admit that for all its vaingloriousness, and for all its farce, nothing about the entire Kaka saga has made the club look more amateurish than his charmless bleating about it afterwards.
marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk
