Sexism in Football - Should Andy Gray make a permanent return?

By Simon Wright – Follow me on Twitter @Siwri88

There was a familiar voice back on UK football commentary a fortnight ago but a dark past still remains. With a new video recently published of more sexist behaviour, should BT Sport make the bold move in signing up the ex-Wolves, Aston Villa and Everton striker Andy Gray?

The channel has made a strong start to its broadcasting life. It has already snared some top Premier League matches from rivals BSkyB and secured the coveted rights to live and exclusive UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League football from the start of the 2015-16 campaign. To get an experienced voice into the team alongside Darren Fletcher and Ian Darke would seem like a logical move.

Andy Gray made a strong return two weeks ago but should he be forgiven?

In that way, Gray (pictured above) fits the bill. Should he be forgiven for the viral videos three years ago that destroyed his reputation as the leading sports commentator in this country?

Three years on

It has now been three years since the sexism in football scandal that left Sky Sports with bad publicity. Long-time presenter Richard Keys and commentator Andy Gray were caught making insulting comments about females in football in an off-air conversation that was taped on a mobile phone.

The comments were made about female line assistant Sian Massey, who was about to take the line for a Barclays Premier League match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Liverpool, indicating that women know nothing about the offside rule. The West Ham United chief executive Karen Brady was also criticised by the pair for her comments to a newspaper about females in the game.

It was Massey who would have the last laugh and made Keys & Gray look like idiots. She got a potential game-changing decision spot on by judging Raul Meireles to be in an onside position when he squared the ball for Fernando Torres to score the first of his two goals in a 3-0 Liverpool win; Torres’ last two as a Reds player before his £50m move to Chelsea nine days later.

It is fair to say that the reaction to the comments made by the Sky duo was a real talking point. This writer on his previous site did several pieces on the scandal at the time and it was difficult to find any defence for them.

As more videos leaked onto YouTube in the days afterwards, Sky sacked Gray and Keys ultimately resigned, feeling he couldn’t go on without his long-term colleague.

As for Sian Massey, she has not let the incident deter her at all. This afternoon, she was one of the line officials at the Premier League game between Chelsea and Newcastle United and has since become one of the best at her job. Being a line official is not easy and they get criticised quite often by fans – sometimes it is deserved if an offside call is blatantly wrong but no-one deserves the abuse or derogatory comments that Massey got from two supposedly knowledgeable and respectable broadcasters in football.

Redemption and remorse

Within three weeks of their acrimonious departures from Sky, Keys & Gray turned up on talkSPORT, presenting a regular morning sports show for the next two years. In the summer, the pair moved to Doha to present live Premier League matches again for the Al-Jazeera network in the Middle East.

It has given them the chance to redeem themselves. Two weeks ago, commitments abroad meant Michael Owen missed BT’s coverage of FA Cup fourth round weekend. Andy Gray was called in to co-commentate on Everton’s impressive 4-0 away win at League One side Stevenage.

Watching the highlights that night, I’ll admit it was nice to hear such a familiar voice back. Gray put his usual thoughtful and precise analysis into his job and it seemed like the general public were impressed too. There has been talk that his role could become a more frequent position in the future.

Keys has also appeared on the station as a guest on Des Kelly’s show Life’s A Pitch and went into slightly further detail about what happened. As the video below shows, he talks about dark forces which suggest there was more towards the pair’s departures from a channel that they had represented so well since the birth of the Premier League.

However a week ago, another video emerged which might have finished them for good on UK screens. The video involves the pair making inappropriate comments to Claire Tomlinson – a female Sky reporter before a match at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.

This latest video must have taken place at least seven years ago, so you wonder why this came out. Was it a tactic by Sky to hurt the competition? Was it worth revisiting such an old issue?

Unprofessional

I would say that even though the video looks quite old and slightly unnecessary to make public given the timing, there was always going to be a reaction once the new content was leaked to the media.

No-one and I mean no-one should have to put up with that. In a job, if you’ve done something wrong in your profession, then you should be criticised constructively. This has happened to me both in my current full-time position and when I was on my University degree from 2009 to 2012. If you can’t take criticism, it doesn’t make you a strong enough person to succeed, especially in the profession I’m in (media and publishing).

However, anyone who suggests you can’t do their job with derogatory comments that are racist, homophobic or sexist is just not on – no matter how old it might be. You would be hurt if that was the case and feel like you’d want to speak out against such gross behaviour.

For me, if I was BT or any other employer, I would therefore be thinking twice before you employ Andy Gray. Make this judgement on this old Sky video from 1998;

He is still one of the best at football analysis but with a history of videos that show an opinion of preferring the game to be totally male dominated, I think it puts Andy Gray in an uncomfortable and untenable position when it comes to being employed by a UK sports broadcaster.

Categories: Andy Gray, BT Sport, Commentary, Football, Offside, Richard Keys, Sexism, Sian Massey, Sky Sports, UK