CHRISTMAS WITHOUT THE COOPERS
When the reboot of laddish Friday night TV staple Fantasy Football League rose like a Phoenix from the Flames on Sky last year, it was largely well received even if one sketch lampooning Nottingham Forest met with opprobrium in the back pages of your invariably po-faced Daily Mail. In a segment gently mocking the newly-promoted club’s influx of 29 summer signings, one of the presenters did an impersonation of Steve Cooper that involved little more than him talking in a slightly cartoonish Welsh accent and half-closing the lid of one eye. He was subsequently excoriated by the Comedy Police for the heinous crime of “significantly altering his appearance” to belittle the manager in a skit deemed “cruel, crass and incredibly ill-judged”. Football Daily can only speculate over how cruel and crass this very gentle take-down might actually have been if the Welsh comedian responsible for it was not a diehard Swansea City fan whose well-documented love for Cooper is more powerful than 10,000 suns.
