How only Liverpool can inflict the most ‘humiliating’ and unthinkable punishment on Man City

Henry Winter has reached peak earnestness in the eternal quest to find a suitable ‘humiliating’ punishment for Manchester City.

Because expulsion, points deductions and the rest simply won’t do.

Comp and circumstance
‘Man City may face compensation claims from Premier League rivals worth £1BILLION with Spurs worst affected by cheating’ – The Sun.

‘Man City facing £800m-plus bill as Arsenal, Man Utd, Liverpool and Spurs to SUE rivals’ – Daily Mirror.

‘Man City face lawsuit of at least £400m and future chaos as rivals sharpen knives after verdict’ – talkSPORT.

In all fairness, £1billion, £800m-plus and at least £400m can all technically mean the same thing. Seems unlikely, though.

Question, tell me what you think about me
After Andy Dunn’s successful interrogation of Manchester City in the Daily Mirror on Thursday, he returns on Friday demanding some answers from the Premier League, neatly contained within one paragraph:

‘How did City get away with it for so long? How come the Premier League did not smell a rat? Did the Premier League – and other executives – simply turn a blind eye?’

The website headline? ‘The Premier League played their part in Man City mess and still have questions to answer’.

It is not known why the opportunity to publish a second ‘3 questions that still must be answered as scale of Man City scandal emerges’ headline in two days was passed up on – obviously beyond that frankly despicable ‘3’.

Sheikh on it
The Manchester City situation has obviously caused a wonderful and hilarious amount of headloss as people trip over each other trying to concoct escalating punishments and ramifications for an unprecedented level of cheating.

They should be relegated to the Championship. Or non-league. Or just entirely eradicated altogether. The owners should be forced to sell the club. Or imprisoned. Or forced to watch Mrs Brown’s Boys on repeat for the next decade.

Nothing, essentially, is off the table here. Which is what makes this from Jack Keene in The Sun so funny:

‘And what are opposition players going to do? Will teams refuse to shake their hands?’

Probably not, no. It would be a bit silly if someone completely Wayne Bridge’d Elliot Anderson, wouldn’t it? The players haven’t cheated – most joined after the period Manchester City have been investigated for – and they have arguably been misled as much if not more than anyone else.

But those are the thoughts of The Sun’s senior horse racing reporter and columnist. The following comes from Henry sodding Winter of, well, X-formerly-known-as-Twitter and Threads.

‘Spoke to a Liverpool fan going to the City game and wondering whether the players will shake hands of City players. He hopes they don’t. It would be a humiliating moment for City, a sign of the anger felt in the game over the conduct of their owners. Snubbing the handshake always had a resonance in English football. A rejection of the opposition for failing to meet standards of fair play. No suggestion LFC players will snub City’s. But if they did it would be an image to fly around the world.’

And it’s just remarkably unbecoming from one of the nation’s foremost senior football journalists, isn’t it? Just utterly ridiculous stuff. To talk to one partisan supporter and Matt-Le-Tissier-hmm-gif their thoughts into an attempted sincere hot take, with his platform, is absurd at best and – forgive the wokeness – really quite irresponsible at worst.

Manchester City as a club have been found guilty of industrial-scale cheating. But it doesn’t mean every employee past, present and future should be fired into the actual sun.

Again, Elliot Anderson didn’t inflate sponsorship deals by £830m over the course of a decade. Neither did Abdukodir Khusanov. And Enzo Fernandes, for his myriad faults, hasn’t unblinkingly insisted that a body of ‘irrefutable evidence’ exists proving their innocence.

But Manchester City’s owners and executives have been found guilty of cheating, so obviously Dominik Szoboszlai should refuse to shake Antoine Semenyo’s hand. Or something.

It’s just pathetically earnest from Winter to take his Voice Of The People shtick to such frankly daft levels. He ‘spoke to a Liverpool fan’ and so this is now a genuine talking point, even though there is fairly f**king obviously ‘no suggestion’ it will happen.

Relegation? Expulsion? Fines? Points deductions? Trophies stripped? Players tearing up their contracts? The owners forced to sell? They all sound fairly punitive, but Liverpool players refusing to shake hands ‘would be a humiliating moment for City,’ and the only real ‘sign of the anger felt in the game over the conduct of their owners’.

That last word there containing the clue as to how ridiculous Winter’s Just Putting It Out There take is; their owners have f**ked up, so the players must feel the handshake-based humiliation.

Sake.

Eat my poll
Those familiar with the stylings of the Daily Express website will know exactly where this story is headed:

‘Premier League ordered into immediate Man City U-turn as Pep Guardiola wades in’

By whom has this ‘order’ been passed down? This headline from Monday offers a clue:

‘Should Man City be stripped of titles? Vote now after Premier League decision’

The Premier League has indeed been ‘ordered into immediate Man City U-turn’… by ‘ a whopping 74 per cent of the over 4,000 people who voted’ in an Express website poll.

And what’s the U-turn?

‘The result of our poll flies in the face of reports that there doesn’t seem to be any appetite from within the Premier League – both the organisation and the clubs – to retrospectively strip titles.’

That sure isn’t a U-turn. And this doesn’t exactly feel like the ‘new twist in the tale’ that it’s billed as.

Crist alive
An enjoyable dismantling of Cristiano Ronaldo from Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail features this paragraph:

‘The truth is that it is the strength of leadership Portugal has been crying out for. Many believe that Ronaldo has not deserved a place in the starting eleven of the national team for at least five years. He has become an example of a faded star living on his image and the memory of past glories.’

And that is a glorious timeframe for Holt to specify himself, considering these were his thoughts on Ronaldo around five years ago:

As Ronaldo walked down the tunnel after his match-winning performance, the sound of Fatboy Slim serenaded him from the loud speaker system – We’ve come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good, I have to celebrate you baby, I have to praise you like I should

— Oliver Holt (@OllieHolt22) September 11, 2021

Happy to confirm that it remains a generationally dreadful thing to have committed to print.

And also that Rio Ferdinand remains one of Ronaldo’s chief lickspittles. Quite enjoyed someone who never went beyond a quarter-final in an international tournament asking of an entire nation…

“Where were Portugal before Cristiano Ronaldo? What have they ever done? Did they even qualify for tournaments?”

…when they reached the semi-finals of Euro 2000 three years before Ronaldo’s debut.