So now we know the truth about Football Association chairman Greg Clarke. He really wasn’t that smart. Racist, sexist, probably not. He used some very outdated language wrapped up in crudely stereotypical attitudes before a committee of politicians on Tuesday and paid a high price.
Clarke rightly apologised when corrected but, in the current climate, it was never going to be enough. He could not continue heading up an organisation that is supposed to be in the vanguard of equality issues while talking like a caricature of a retired colonel in the bar of a Home Counties golf club.
Even if his allies inside the FA – there appear to have been fleetingly few come to the end – did not see this as a resignation matter, it was never going to end there. Given Clarke’s clumsy language and the horrified reaction to it, how was the FA ever going to move forward with him at the helm?
