The owners can fuck off too in my opinion. Forcing Kenny to apologise for defending our club, and under extreme fire from that pondlife interviewer, is disgusting. Honeymoon over for them I'm afraid.
I spent quite a bit of time writing a lengthy post on this last night, only to find out that thread had been locked by the time I hit the "post" button (there's an hour of my life I won't get back) looking at the situation from the point of view of an American who knows something about the way American sports franchises look at things.
To make a long story short: I can certainly believe that FSG required Suárez to apologize for the non-handshake. I doubt very much, however, that they pressured KK to make an apology to the media.
The one thing that you can count on, in U.S. ownership's eyes, of being close to a cardinal sin, is to have a player disobey, mislead, lie to, or otherwise "show up" his manager or coach. If Luis had been a player in another sport here in the U.S.A., he would certainly have been benched for several games -- and even a cup final -- for such an offense. When Handshakegate erupted on Saturday, I'm sure that was the first thing that crossed the minds of the owners, that Suárez had to be disciplined. It would only have come down on Kenny had it turned out that he
hadn't gotten Luis's promise to shake hands, and had claimed to the press that he had.
In the U.S. way of doing things, you would not come down on the player, and at the same time discipline the manager, because the main message the ownership would be sending is that players need to respect the manager unreservedly. Coming down on the manager at the same time would undermine that.
I really think Kenny's expression of regret was self-generated, and stemmed mainly from his embarrassment in going into that interview while apparently being the only person at OT to not know about the handshake incident by two hours thereafter. I'm sure he thought it made him look like he didn't have control of his team. And, while we probably all enjoyed his ire toward Shreeves, on an objective basis, he didn't handle it all that well, first going off into an irrelevant tangent about the number of bookings, then blaming everything on the media (which was made odd by the fact that he was contrasting it to the cup tie two weeks ago, when the same media noise machine was still going full-blast). Kenny may dislike reporters as much as we do, but he could have handled the questions better had he known what had gone on at the start of the game, and I'm sure he felt like he'd come off looking a bit foolish.
In short, if you're going to blame the owners for telling Suárez he needed to apologize (although I'd be willing to bet KK told him the same thing), or if you thought it was their influence that caused Ayre to issue an overly heavy-handed criticism of Luis on the part of the club, fine. But I think the odds are way against anyone from FSG telling Kenny he needed to himself apologize for that interview -- odds are, it stemmed from his own embarrassment at how he handled it.
