Today another lie out of Ibrox has been exposed, as Joleon Lescott has signed for AEK Athens.
When does the media ever call them on their crap?
Lescott was allegedly on his way to their club.
It was a done deal, if you believed the papers. Indeed, the very fact the guy travelled north for a medical was enough to make even hardened cynics nod their heads and conclude that he would soon be unveiled in a Sevco shirt. But that didn’t happen, and almost as soon as the deal was called off the excuse making started.
The BBC has still never said who told them Lescott had failed a medical. That could have endangered the remainder of the player’s career. Someone fed them damaging and untrue information and they ran with it as if it was gold plated. They never apologised either.
The story Sevco itself put out was that the player had turned the move down for family reasons, which oddly had never materialised at any stage in the talks before he came up to Scotland for the final stages of the deal. That we were expected to believe this litany of nonsense was insulting. When Aston Villa confirmed it had collapsed over money there was not a soul outside of Murray Park who thought that sounded like anything but the truth.
But Warburton denied that explicitly.
He accused Villa of being the one’s who’d told lies. Since no-one in our media is going to get on the phone and ask him this, I’d like to know whether he was the one lying or whether someone inside his club is lying to him.
Because I’m not ruling that out, the possibility that someone at Sevco isn’t being straight with him over what happened in this deal. Neither am I ruling out the possibility that Warburton himself is just a moaning faced git who doesn’t like the facts here, and knows he’s talking to a media gullible or lazy enough that it will swallow anything.
But it’s clear that Lescott is fit, if not terribly mobile or worthy of a big contract. It’s equally clear that any familial reason that would have stopped him signing for Sevco would, equally, have certainly prevented him from moving to Greece. Both of those excuses have collapsed entirely on the back of today’s news, and that confirms Villa’s version of events.
So what actually happened?
My information is that Lescott arrived in Scotland thinking the deal was straightforward only to find out that the ground had shifted beneath his feet. When he got here he was presented with a very different contract than the one he’d thought he was coming north to sign, and he and his advisors pulled the plug at once.
What was the thinking at Ibrox? That they’d get away with it because other clubs would know he’d come up here and wouldn’t want to be his second choice? Or did they subtly insinuate that if he didn’t sign they’d leak the “failed medical” story to one of their press lackies? Or was the problem even worse than that; that Warburton had made promises he wasn’t in a position to keep, in terms of salary and conditions, and his own board blocked it?
It could be any of those, or a combination of all of them.
What’s now 100% clear is that no-one at Ibrox has been telling the truth about the collapse of that deal, and the media, as per usual, didn’t bother to question it properly.