Ronay is a knobhead. Nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is.
Would agree but he certainly isn’t stupid, as the article is quite carefully constructed to appear balanced - and the conclusions contained in there are superficially plausible.
He presents three scenarios. The first being that we are found guilty - because we are guilty and that the club will engage in ‘vengeful’ retribution following it. The second scenario is the we are cleared but it’s inevitably qualified on the basis that it could be a just outcome, but by implication may very well not be. And the third scenario, and one he posits as the most likely, is a middle ground and one that crucially involves an admission of guilt on our part.
There is a common theme running through those three scenarios, namely that the club has done something wrong, a view that is underpinned by his description of the emails as ‘compelling’ despite them manifestly not painting the full picture (how could they?) juxtaposed against his derision at the club’s deployment of the word ‘irrefutable’ to describe the evidence we have/had in our possession to rebut these charges, through the prism of a gratuitous and grossly exaggerated reference to the hourly rate of our leading counsel. Along with, of course, the obligatory and misleading reference to the time-barring of the UEFA charges.
And he finishes off the article to remind everyone of the wider geopolitical consequences of a finding of guilt - a worthwhile point but plainly designed to bolster the inference of that gult, given its location at the end of the article.
It’s a carefully constructed, but wholly specious work of sophistry, and whilst conspicuously better written than most of its ilk, is still consciously designed to project the unwavering position that the club must have acted dishonestly.
Maybe it has, it’s perfectly plausible, however unlikely, but it’s the absence of any suggestion at the possibility that the club has not, and what the consequences are that would flow from that (rather than us simply getting away with it) that has marked this wholly dishonest species of article for the last two and a half years.
