The blunder-prone chief executive at Eastlands is almost beyond parody, except that he is also the perfect embodiment of the Premier League
I imagine Garry Cook can't move for people trying to quote The Picture of Dorian Gray at him. (Incidentally, trivia fans, it is Stuart Pearce's favourite novel). So forgive me for adding to the current City chief executive's literary load. But there is a point in Wilde's classic story where it is said of the eponymous antihero: "You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found."
And so it has long seemed with Garry, a man for these crazy footballing times, who would quite simply have had to have been invented had he not already existed. In him was distilled the very essence of the modern football executive ? the Nike heritage, the mad expansionism, the sense that a major part of Manchester City's future lay in energy drink retail, and of course the laserlike focus on "the product" that resulted in him occasionally saying Manchester United when he meant Manchester City. He was the Premier League's most bungling Sith.
I do not mean to speak of Garry in the past tense. At time of writing, he was still chief executive of Manchester City football club. Indeed, piecing together the story of that allegedly hacked email appearing to ridicule the cancer-stricken mother of Nedum Onuoha is likely to be an extremely complex process ? I expect City internal affairs investigators have codenamed the probe Operation Sent-From-My-iPad ? and none of us should dream of pre-judging its findings. And that is before we take into account the vagaries of whatever disciplinary procedure the Abu Dhabi ruling family may have put in place at the Etihad.
My hunch is that a mysterious impostor hacked into Garry's email and sent missives ? or rather just the one we know of ? in the character of an amoral boor, whose cringeworthy attempts at blokey chat with his mate are eclipsed only by his arrant stupidity. It is quite obviously too cruelly parodic to be real, and this should be Garry's first line of defence. If he doesn't speak out, where will the phantom impersonator strike next? He might infiltrate Rio Ferdinand's Twitter account and make the Manchester United media mogul look a complete arse. I believe police are already investigating a tip-off that he has been filing Ian Wright's Sun column since its inception, filling it with such contradictory and quarterwitted claptrap that Wrighty believes his reputation will never recover. Then again, perhaps this email is the first of many missives to come to light from football's Henry Root, a shadowy figure who has decided to satirise the cut and thrust of the Most Bestest League In The World TM, and is even now preparing to unleash his next bombshell.
These are clearly matters for the authorities. Our concern must be for the City chief executive "going forward", as he would doubtless put it. I have no idea how many City fans could live with losing Garry. Or, indeed, how many would kill to keep him, given that when I wrote in this space teasing him for his preposterous bleating in the wake of failing to sign Kak�, I received the first of four death threats before I'd even left the house for work. To show such demented loyalty to one's club suit is quite remarkable ? even the famously adorable Peter Kenyon never kindled such passion ? and perhaps this is what is meant by the repeated assertions this week that Garry is an inspirational figure to his staff.
In recent months, Garry had been denied the chance to inspire the public after a series of critically misunderstood outings. Apparently City's owners had decided he was not a front-of-house man, but you can't keep a blunderer down, and I'm glad to say this comeback had all the inevitability of another Barbra Streisand farewell tour. He now exists as a living tribute to what the Olympian heights of the Premier League have become, a bungling buccaneer who is just as at home sounding off about his vision for a line of City Cars produced in association with an Indian automobile manufacturer as he is serving as prompt for the little football jokes that help us through the day. Frankly, my Monday would have been the poorer without a deadpan Yahoo Sports headline reading "Did City Hacker Buy Santa Cruz?"
So instead of willing Garry's demise, all those who find the money trenches of top flight football occasionally emetic should be celebrating his return to the stage ? with the obvious exception of poor Dr Onuoha. He serves a grim sort of purpose, for those of us who have not drunk his heavily branded Kool-Aid.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/07/garry-cook-manchester-city-email
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