He said: It’s all very well for the fat cats on the board who are going to line

He said: “It’s all very well for the fat cats on the board who are going to line their pockets, but why would United supporters want Rupert Murdoch to run their team?”It was a bravura performance of the sort that often leads to a disrepute charge. I see figures bandied around like pounds 18m for Alan Shearer, a player who still hasn’t found his form after coming back from injury It’s a joke. I’m not having a go at Shearer but if people want to pay that they have more money than sense. And when you see some players on the pitch you think: `For Chrissakes, you are earning so much money and you are strolling around’. They can’t pass a ball, can’t tackle and get sent off on a regular basis. I wouldn’t want it, it is a thankless task being England manager and working for that lot [the FA].

I remember when I first became chairman [in the late- 70s] and went to Football League meetings I thought: `I must have so much to learn’. Then I got there and thought: `My God, these people are running football’?”He did not feel it had got any better “The Premier League has spiralled out of control We see very mediocre players going for pounds 2-3m. I thought England played well in the World Cup, they were one of the most inventive teams, but I thought the overall competition was appalling and France the most boring team ever to win it.”Sir Elton added: “Hoddle would not be my choice as England manager but there is no one else Only Terry Venables seems to revel in it. I can promise if you do the results will come.’ I am very proud of Paul for what he is doing at the moment – just as I am proud of Tony Adams and Paul Merson.”Sir Elton also said he felt Hoddle “shot himself in the foot” during the World Cup “with all that nonsense about Michael Owen International football is dire and boring,” he added “I don’t see any point in it Everyone is so negative. You are a genius, you have such skill, this is a great opportunity to prove to everybody, including the England manager, that you are a great footballer.’”I said: `You are going to have to knuckle down and do some hard work and do as you are told. It is a very hard thing to do to give up that addictive lifestyle. You need friends, people with a bit of experience, to help you.”I wrote him a letter when he was in treatment saying: `We are the same kind of person, self-destructive in lots of ways I wasted a lot of my time doing blah blah blah.

“I spoke to Paul [Gascoigne] on the phone a couple of weeks ago at Middlesbrough to see if he wanted any help and to say if he did I would be there for him. He has seen what his girlfriend has had to cope with and she does so very well. The Spice Girls work their balls off – if you’ll pardon the expression.”I do like to help anyone with special talent and if there is anyway I can help them cope with the pressures I try and ring up and offer.”Thus the call to Gascoigne. I think he is one of the most talented players England has produced I think he will eventually go abroad and cope with it. Maybe he wasn’t as successful as David, he had a great career but he didn’t have a great England career.

I think he resents that and he resents that he has a nice girlfriend and is famous.” On a more conciliatory note he added: “I think a couple of the things Glenn Hoddle said are right, David does have to learn discipline on the pitch.”Beckham and Adams, who is better known as “Posh Spice”, stayed at Sir Elton’s house in the south of France after the World Cup and, he added, “love each other very much I keep a close eye on David. Speaking at the First Division’s club’s Vicarage Road ground, he also said he felt the Premiership had “spiralled out of control” with “mediocre players being transferred for pounds 2-3m”.Many would agree with that, but his remarks about Beckham are sure to cause controversy “I felt for Becks at the World Cup,” he said “He was very shabbily treated by the England manager I think it is resentment on Glenn Hoddle’s part. Were he anything else, he wouldn’t have stood up to punches that caused him to spend a night under observation in hospital after undergoing a brain scan. If it was any consolation he at last had the respect of his peers In bloody defeat he was more endearing.. SIR ELTON JOHN yesterday launched an astonishing attack on Glenn Hoddle, accusing him of “resenting” David Beckham’s fame, ability and relationship with Victoria Adams, Beckham’s pop-singer girlfriend. The Watford chairman also revealed he had been in touch with Paul Gascoigne and was helping the Middlesbrough midfielder in his fight against alcoholism, an addiction the millionaire rock star has suffered from himself.
The 52-year-old made his remarks in a rare interview to mark his return to active service at Watford, after two hectic years personally and professionally had limited his involvement.

He had never been in such pain or looked more ring-soiled.Drawn to boxing by the glitz of television presentation, conditioned by Naseem Hamed’s comparatively bloodless dismantling of carefully selected opponents, women in the audience averted their gaze from Eubank’s mangled features.Admitting that he had thought more than once of stopping the contest, the referee Roy Francis said, “It was a dilemma. Chris took so much punishment that I was only a second away from stepping between them, but I had to give him every chance because he kept coming back with punches. It makes me feel like weeping; he’s a guy I like so much.”The former heavyweight champion, George Foreman, who was working for American television on Hamed’s defence of the WBO featherweight title, thought Eubank’s performance heroic. “Did you ever see such guts? “People told me that Eubank has made a mockery of boxing, but he fought tonight as though his life was on the line.”Others would speak about the lifeless glaze that came over Thompson’s face when Eubank put him down in the fourth round; about the heavy blows Thompson fired in return to secure his title, the immense will shown by both men.Eubank is a creature of ego. What else could you think when you saw shock on the faces of people who had never realised how much a boxer gives of himself?
The occasion was Eubank’s unsuccessful attempt to wrest the World Boxing Organisation cruiserweight title from Carl Thompson last April in Manchester.Until then, despite proving in hard contests against Nigel Benn, Michael Watson and Steve Collins that his heart pumped nothing but high-octane courage, Eubank’s reputation had been formed by ludicrous, if profitable, showmanship.What the challenge to Thompson made clear was that in choosing to shape his career at middle and super-middleweight around a series of contrived defences, contests that did not require him to train diligently, Eubank had sold himself short when he could have been the British fighter of the 90s.Giving away more than half a stone, Eubank showed a warrior’s mettle, fighting with such spirit that a left hook in the second round brought the prospect of a remarkable victory until he chose to stand off the visibly-stunned champion.Eubank, who also dropped Thompson in the fourth, paid dearly for this perverse decision, finishing the contest with one eye completely closed in a mass of brutalised facial tissue and spitting blood. MAYBE THERE was no other way for Chris Eubank to confirm a true fighting heart than engage in a contest so brutal that even hardened ringsiders called for him to be spared further punishment. From the perspective of an aspiring professional trying to make his way – so far having missed 10 cuts out of 10 and failed to gain his player’s card on the European tour – it is a glorious memory May it not become a millstone..