
Ex-@AFP Qatar Bureau Chief 🇶🇦, plus 🇫🇷, 🇮🇪. Work/worked @thetimes, @TheAthleticFC and plenty of others
Joined August 2013
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David Harding retweeted
Five games, five wins, top of the league. Manchester City, a fortnight after an independent commission found they systematically broke the Premier League's financial rules for nine straight seasons.
So what exactly are we all watching?
Not asking for the season to be scrapped. That's daft, and it punishes nineteen clubs who've done nowt wrong. But I'd like somebody at the Premier League to explain why the table at the top of every sports page is one they already know is wrong.
Because here's where we actually are. The commission has ruled. City lodged their appeal on October 1st. No sanction has been announced. Nobody knows when it will be. Sky are reporting that Premier League clubs themselves don't expect City to even BE in this league next season if the appeal fails.
And in the meantime, the league just carries on. Points are awarded. Positions are published. Clubs are planning January windows around a table that might be fiction.
Think about who that actually hurts. Not City, they're fine, they're top. It's the club that goes down in May by two points and later finds out the table was never real. It's the club that sacks a manager in February over a league position that gets rewritten. It's the staff at a relegated club losing their jobs over a season nobody can stand behind. Real money, real people, decided by a table the league itself can't vouch for.
And the bit that genuinely sticks in the throat. Everton got docked ten points, mid season, reduced to six. Forest got four. Both for single PSR breaches. Both punished DURING the season it mattered, so the table stayed honest.
Eighty charges over nine seasons, plus thirty five for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into it, and somehow that one has to wait.
Carragher's right. Do it this season. Whatever it is, apply it now, to this table, the way it was applied to Everton and Forest. Because every week this drags on, the Premier League is asking us to treat a standings table as real while quietly knowing it might not be.
Due process matters and the appeal has to be heard, I'm not arguing with that. But there's a difference between due process and letting a club sit top of a competition for an entire season while the punishment for breaking that competition's rules sits in a drawer.
The league's credibility isn't damaged by what City did ten years ago. It's damaged by what the league is choosing to do about it now.
Nine seasons. Then three years of charges. Then a verdict. And still, somehow, nothing.
Who's season is this, exactly? 🖤🖤
#PremierLeague #MCFC
David Harding retweeted
Nadhmi Al-Nasr, the Neom CEO who famously threatened to urinate on the grave of a worker, has been sacked. Many involved with the project found his longevity mind boggling.
David Harding retweeted
Today entering Gaza City. The ruins of life. A donkey laying dead attached to a cart with someone’s possessions. Clusters of people crossing to the South, with too much to walk with under the sun and given the length of the journey. A man carrying a white flag in front of his family. Women about to collapse, dragging bags over the ground, walking backwards, stopping and closing their eyes. A man on the ground in underwear, with soldiers near the checkpoint. A woman presumably crossing with him, stalled, distraught, in desperation. They passed by these ruins. #Gaza #CeasefireNOW
David Harding retweeted
Hope Morrissey is ok
BREAKING: A crash between two double-decker buses in Manchester has injured 17 people
Read more ⬇️
news.sky.com/story/crash-bet…
David Harding retweeted
Can’t make this stuff up. Netanyahu appoints a new ambassador to the U.S. who was a member of a U.S. designated terrorist organization.
In his youth, Israel's next U.S. envoy, settler Yechiel Leiter, was active in the Jewish Defense League, an organization founded in the U.S. by extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane and later designated as a terrorist organization by U.S. authorities
haaretz.com/israel-news/2024…
David Harding retweeted
"Petropoulos says that the smell of rotting corpses permeates the entire Gaza Strip. It emanates from the rubble, under which people were buried, and dogs run around with human remains in their mouths." haaretz.com/israel-news/2024…
David Harding retweeted
The horrific reality for people of #Gaza & #Israel since 7 October 2023 detailed in @UNHumanRights report.
Close to 70% of those killed in Gaza are children & women.
Unprecedented violations of IHL give rise to concerns of atrocity crimes. The violence must stop immediately.
David Harding retweeted
Israeli soldiers blow up homes in Gaza this morning, in revenge for the events in Amsterdam the two past days.
“We dedicate this explosion to all the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv. We’ll get to all of you, you sons of **”
David Harding retweeted
This video is exactly why foreign media are banned from entering Gaza.
Two minutes of utter devastation.
David Harding retweeted
Across northern #Gaza, there is no way of telling where the destruction starts or ends.
No matter from what direction you enter #Gaza City, homes, hospitals, schools, health clinics, mosques, apartments, restaurants - all completely flattened.
An entire society now a graveyard.
Qatar scraps major voting reform brought in just before World Cup - lauded at the time as “progress” by Infantino.
#Qataris took to the polls on Tuesday, voting 90.6 percent in favour of replacing #Shura council #elections with appointed seats.
dohanews.co/qatar-votes-90-i…
David Harding retweeted
A usually reliable source tells me that the North Korean soldiers who have deployed to Russia have never had unfettered access to the internet before. As a result, they are gorging on pornography.
David Harding retweeted
‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the tragedy of Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh theguardian.com/world/2024/o…
David Harding retweeted
“But I want you to know and we want you to know we believe you are a vessel. You are a chosen vessel”























