joke was made didn't make a complaint and wasn't a witness. Sounds like a third party complained and the police and CPS ran with it, while Gascoigne's lawyer told him to plead guilty rather than fight it.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but the day you and everyone else reacted like fúcking princesses who'd been interefered with because BFR made a slip of the microphone, I told you we'd end up here. I got shouted down by your whole generation of virtue-signalling snowflakes.
You're 10 years late to this party.
Alright, Cassandra, less of the told-you-so, thanks.
Besides, I think it's a bit of a leap from saying that it is probably right that a presenter on a national broadcaster who is caught referring to a widely-respected footballer as 'a fùcking thick lazy nígger' be sacked to saying that someone who makes a joke that is very mildly racial in nature ought to be prosecuted. All a bit post hoc ergo propter hoc, wouldn't you say?
He never said dem fings.
He suggested that the player in question might be referred to in some quarters as {terrible words redacted}. He wasn't calling him that himself. And he did more for black footballers than the society of black lawyers will ever do. Fact. Well, opinion, at least.
My recollection was that he said 'that Desailly is a right lazy <racial slur>'
And if I'm honest, and as much as I miss Ron, that probably does merit the sack. We can't on the one hand criticise the racism our black players experience in parts of Spain and Eastern Europe (to use but two examples) and then claim that a statement like that can just be shrugged off.
You have to feel for BFR after losing his job and then his son Dalian.
At a time when the racist consensus was that black players couldn't cut it on a wet wednesday in Stoke, he refused to believe the lies, treated them as equals, trusted them, and sent them out to play. Calling them the three degrees might not have been great PR, in retrospect, but they succeeded and it helped open the door for so many black players to make careers and fortunes in the decades to follow.
It shows the difference between language and action. He might have used racist language, but his actions were to treat people equally, and to be one of the first to do so.