WHEN the world first learned of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s decision to erect a giant statue of the King of Pop outside Craven Cottage, you could almost hear the noise of thousands of W, T and F keys being simultaneously worn out by baffled Fulham fans.
“Haven’t we suffered enough?” they cried in unison. “We’ve already got Lily Allen claiming she’s a fan. Surely it can’t get any worse?”
Apparently it could. When the statue was officially unveiled it proved so ugly that even families deemed “too chavvy” for the Jeremy Kyle show were forced to cover their burberry-clothed children’s eyes on grounds of taste and decency.
Jaws were dropped, gobs were smacked, somewhere in the middle of the Vietnam war Marlon Brando glimpsed a vision of Fulham’s future and enigmatically whispered “the horror, the horror…” as Martin Sheen killed him.
That canny shrew Al-Fayed then tried to woo fans back onside by basically telling them to fuck off and support another club if they didn’t like it. Smooth.
And while the local outrage was somewhat predictable (70 percent of Guardian readers rate it as the “ugliest statue in Britain”), it seems Al-Fayed’s lunacy has even offended Tinseltown stateside with the LA Times saying: “I thought we had some crazy sports owners here [America] but not one of them would have been so unaware and obtuse as to erect a giant statue of a man accused multiple times of child molestation. What’s next? A huge bas-relief of Gary Glitter on the walls of Craven Cottage?”
But if Andriy Schevchenko, Ray Wilkins and Fernando Torres have taught us anything, it’s that no matter how much money they have, chairmen are still capable of fucking things right up…
