Now everyone knows that Aston Villa and Birmingham are not exactly the best of mates - at least their fans aren’t. But there’s a real pig of a war going on between the two boardrooms.

As someone who supports neither team, it amused me to read that Blues chairman David Gold is furious that Villa director Charles Krulak called him a pig.

Well, that’s what Gold thought. The reality is that Krulak, a former US Marine Corps commandant and Villa owner Randy Lerner’s right-hand man, was merely providing an analogy of why he wouldn’t get into a war of words with the Blues chief.

'Could it be that David Gold is just a tad sensitive about the fact that his personal background is, shall we say, a little muddy?'


According to The Sun, Krulak was responding to a post by a Villa fan asking how Birmingham’s decision to charge fans £45 to watch Saturday’s Premier League game with Manchester United fits in with Gold’s call for clubs to cut ticket pricing by 20 per cent.

The question followed Birmingham’s decision to reduce prices to just £15 for the Bolton match last weekend - and Gold’s call for admission prices to be slashed across the board - and the fact the £45 price hike will also apply for the Blues v Villa derby game on November 10.

‘’I’m not sure what Mr Gold is after other than publicity,’’ said the General. ‘’When you get down in the mud and wrestle with a pig, the pig loves it and you get muddy. I think I will just let him continue to talk.’’

Gold retorted: ‘’I am very aggrieved. To use my name in an analogy about pigs and mud is insulting.’’

Now I would have thought it was pretty obvious that General Krulak was talking about the situation rather than Gold as an individual - and the fact he did not want to get involved in a murky verbal war with the Birmingham chief.

As he explained: ‘’The pig is the situation, not the person - and wasn’t aimed at David Gold.’’

Could it be that 70-year-old Gold is just a tad sensitive about the fact that his personal background is, shall we say, a little muddy?

After all, a large proportion of his £500m fortune was made out of soft porn - and his business association with the seedy David Sullivan and the UK’s tackiest ‘newspapers’ (with apologies to the proper ones) is not something a respectable entrepreneur would be proud of.

Apart from that, £45 to watch a Premier League match is a pig of a price.

And it’s really rich for a guy whose club is charging as much for big games as any of the profiteers to say: "The greed in football means we preclude the very people who made the game great.

"Clubs keep getting money and giving it to agents and players but fans get nothing. That's obscene. The average bloke and his two kids can't afford to go to matches.

"If the whole league agrees to reduce prices by a certain percentage - say 20 per cent for two or three years - no-one would be worse off. If they all have £1million a year less, at least they all have it.

"Cutting prices will not make a dot of difference to clubs but it will to fans. At present, we are treating them like mushrooms - keeping them in the dark and feeding them manure."

That sounds like where the pigs came in…

Was Charles Krulak out of order in making his pig analogy? And is David Gold being hypocritical in his talk about ticket pricing? Post your comments below or submit an article with your own views to Sportingo.

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