Blog: For pity's sake, it was just a comment

Blog: This Richard Keys and Andy Gray saga, talk about a storm in a teacup – actually am I allowed to say teacup or does it infer that I am suggesting a woman's place is in the kitchen and she should be making a brew?

It was two middle-aged men talking about football. Clearly the Sky Sports duo shouldn't have said what they said given their position as broadcasters, but does it really warrant all this media coverage and the pair possibly losing their jobs?

No.

The duo should have learnt that nothing said goes unheard in this day and age – ask Big Ron Atkinson or Gordon Brown.

But the same thing will happen at every football match up and down the country ever single weekend – whether it be directed at a female official or simply a woman in the crowd.

Is it sexist? Yes, probably, but this is a football match – the one remaining theatre where a man goes to escape the opposite sex.

We have lost the pub – now a family-friendly affair – the working men's club is long gone, and so we crowd at football grounds.

The Sky pair joked that women don't know anything about offside - it's a joke that has been in place since the offside law itself – I saw it as harmless banter.

It's the same harmless banter as when a member of the opposite sex will say to me that I can't multi-task.

Almost every football-loving male has, at one stage or another, probably explained to a girl the offside rule using bottles of tomato sauce and the salt and vinegar shakers.

The fact that Assistant Referee Sian Massey got the one major call in the Wolves v Liverpool game absolutely spot-on proves that she is good enough to officiate at a Premier League game – whether she be a girl, Black, Asian or an alien. If you're good enough, you will make it regardless of what people say about you.

So let's all move on with our lives and leave Sian to get on with her job and messrs Keys and Gray can get on with theirs.

Now where are we on that tea?

By Alex James