There's a story doing the rounds at the moment about a Premier League footballer who's had an affair with some classless bint keen to tell everybody about it. Using the legal power of the super injunction (like a normal injunction except it's mild mannered and wears glasses when it isn't called upon), said player has kept his name out of the popular press to avoid his wife cottoning on and the whole bally lot going up like a tinderbox.
There's a small problem however. Some blabbermouth politician used his legal right to mention that Ryan Giggs was the footballer in question. The speaker of the house went up the wall, as it may have been legal, but it was a bit on the snidey side, not least because of the whole super injunction caper. But his chagrin was too late, as the press went into absolute meltdown.
The politician's outburst gave them the loophole they were looking for, as they could now say that Giggs' name had been linked with the scandal, rather than holding their tongue when everybody knew who it was anyway. Thanks to the Scottish Sunday Herald publishing a laughably poor censored photo of Giggs (using the fact they were Scottish to get around the England-only injunction), the rumours which first circulated on Twitter last week took on a whole new level, as people could stop guessing (and finding a player's name to fit into the redacted black boxes on the various tweets) and start passing judgment on the Welsh wonder.
I personally think it's a real shame, as Giggs has been a fine ambassador for the game and good role model for most of the 20 years he's been a player. Yes he had dalliances with the likes of Dani Behr in his youth, but he was a single and much sought-after young man due to the explosion in popularity of top-flight football thanks to the Premier League's inception. Alex Ferguson kept his hand on the tiller with Giggs in a way that no other superstar had been controlled before, drip-feeding him to the press and ensuring his playing career was the only thing in the public eye. And given the fact Giggs just picked up his 12th league medal at the age of 37, you can probably argue that he had a point at the time.
Skip forward and now Giggs has been pursuing some nice-looking if morally misguided piece of crumpet, who couldn't wait to start gobbing off (no pun intended) to the press, although he got to the court in time to shield his name. He probably thought that was the end of it, but the dynamic in news consumption has altered a lot in recent years, and the Twitter feeds caught fire with suggestions who the player might be. As his name appeared more and more frequently, the press starting picking up on it, bringing the story to the attention of the masses without actually mentioning who it was. More and more rumours abounded, with various tweeters making thinly disguised references to him, safe in the knowledge that the law hadn't caught up with social networking yet, so they could say what they liked without fear of reprisal.
So where next? Giggs' arse is in the chopper at the moment, not least with his wife I should imagine, and we might see a Tiger-esque fall from grace in terms of sponsorship deals and general consensus. You probably know my opinion on adultery, so anything which happens to him now serves him right. All this after he had the cheek to parade his kids round Old Trafford during the end-of-season ceremony. The bigger story concerns Twitter though, and how to police it, when nobody appears legally liable for the stuff people put out there. Nobody has been censured or even banned from Twitter for naming names, and Twitter aren't about to carry the can. At this stage it looks like a better bet to approach every single famous person in the world to ask them politely to keep it in their drawers. Either that or shag someone who isn't looking for fame off the back of it. There must be someone like that out there somewhere...
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