One of the drawbacks to any test series – and especially an Ashes series – finishing a day or two early is that, by definition, the press have to find a day’s worth of cricket-related drivel in order to fill up the space. This is particularly true if the England team fail to assist them by going on a bender (which they shamefully omitted to do, unlike the Aussies, who went clubbing in one of London’s less disgusting nightclubs).
Given the cricket news vacuum, it was inevitable that something dull would come forward and fill up that white space. But even by the standards of the silly season, yesterday’s events were simply bizarre. For those of you who had the good fortune to miss it, the spat involved the BBC’s cricket correspondent, Jonathan Agnew and a journalist named Will Buckley.
I shall keep the facts brief, before rigor mortis sets in. Agnew, on Saturday, interviewed the pop singer and serial girlfriend Lily Allen. On Sunday, Buckley wrote an article about that interview which Agnew took offence to.
Agnew, a man who, in his playing days, was not exactly renowned for his sense of humour, was mortified to see his interview derided and he himself referred to as being both ‘pervy’ and jealous of Phil Tufnell. Failing to appreciate the grave insult implied by the latter suggestion, he demanded that Buckley retract his comments.
Buckley, whose previous claim to fame is having a disconcerting resemblence to Paul Collingwood, refused to apologise. Whereupon Agnew decided that the only grown up way to settle this was to tell his Twitter followers that he felt defamed. Yes, that’s right, the man actually asked people to go and read the very thing he felt defamed by. “Go read this, folks, it makes me look bad”.
The argument must have raged for, ooh, at least 12 hours. At which point Buckley posted a comment to his original article, apologising for the content of the article being misconstrued by Agnew (but shamefully omitting to apologise for it being badly written, unfunny and containing references to Lily Allen).
All of which means that, although the Balls can tell you the story, we can’t publish the link, just in case two grown man decide to inflict their playground battles on us. Aside from anything else, it wouldn’t even be worth the effort of telling them to grow up and fuck off.
I blame Kerry O’Keefe. He was supposed to be Agnew’s interviewee that afternoon but was too shitfaced to appear in the TMS box.
He did say before Lily cameon that he had never heard of the phrase “wardrobe malfunction”, which sort of loses him all credibility.
Bah, we missed Kerry O’Keefe, of whom we hear little or nothing in the UK (gnnh gnnh gnnh) and get Lily Allen, of whom we hear far too much.