West Brom: Martin Keown blasted live on talkSPORT as he drops tired cliché amid takeover chat
Action for Albion founder Ali Jones clashed with Martin Keown live on talkSPORT after the ex-Arsenal defender dubbed West Brom a “yo-yo” club that’s been “all over the place”.
On Thursday night (15 February), it was announced that Shilen Patel will become the new chairman of West Brom after a takeover deal was agreed to buy Guochuan Lai out of The Hawthorns.
Action for Albion campaigned against Lai’s reign in charge last year and after discussing the takeover news with Sam Matterface on talkSPORT on Friday morning (15 February, 10:26am), Keown interjected with a question about the promotion race.
He asked Jones: “Do you feel this year they could get promoted? When you look at West Bromwich Albion from afar, you’ve had 13 seasons in the Premier League, you’ve had four promotions and four relegations. It’s a yo-yo team, it’s up and down and all over the place with no real consistency for your fans.
“Two years now where you’ve not made it into the play-offs, it’s really been quite a barren [spell]. Do you feel this year they can do it?”
Jones replied: “Well, I’d just like to point out that we did have eight consistent years in the Premier League so that’s hardly ‘yo-yo’, to be fair, Martin.”
Keown said: “Well, you’ve been up and down a fair amount.”
Matterface then said: “Under [former Albion chairman] Jeremy Peace you were the model of stability. It was quite boring and not much happened.”
Jones replied: “If I’m honest, we’d take that now”.
Martin Keown resorts to tired, outdated West Brom cliché
When you’ve got nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all. They’re words Keown should live by.
The former Arsenal defender clearly has no idea what’s happening with the West Brom takeover situation, which is why he wasn’t able to bring up anything relevant to the conversation other than to ask Jones if he thinks the Albion would go up this season.
And in doing so, he’s brought up the most outdated cliché in the book when it comes to the Baggies.
Can you call a team a yo-yo club when they’ve had just one promotion in the last 13 years? It was true of the first decade of the 2000s and became outdated in the 2010s when Albion spent eight years of that decade in the Premier League.
Yes, we’ve since had two relegations from the top flight and one promotion but you’d be taking your yo-yo back to Toys R Us (Keown probably still thinks they’re around) if it only went up once.
This is the issue with having numpties on the radio who don’t bother doing their homework, they’re given a platform to spout tired old tropes which then leads to the average listener believing that to be true.
Good on Ali for calling Keown out. Maybe he’ll think twice before calling Albion that again.
In other West Brom news, John Percy has said if Carlos Corberan’s job is safe amid the takeover news.
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