Hypocrisy appears next to the name of a relegated Premier League club almost as quickly as the bold 'R' in brackets.
The media, through distinguished columnists and much-decorated ex-players, has stuck an extra boot in on George Boateng following his decision to pin the blame for the drop squarely on Phil Brown.
For as much as Boateng was incorrect to hark back to Boxing Day 2008 as a starting point for where it all went wrong, the media is more than a bit rich criticising him for this when it has been at pains to bring up that wretched incident time and time again every time anything slightly went awry at the KC.
However, their main issue - that yet again a player was again trying to deflect blame for failure from other players - was observed correctly. Boateng has let himself down.
This blog loves Boateng. He has been an awesome presence in a team of misfits and malingerers over the last three months or so. But this outburst, controlled and articulate though it was, does him no favours at all.
He unwisely held court with any hack he could find to offer support and praise for the Iain Dowie regime while claiming, without any room for misunderstanding, that Brown's ego and inability to get on with certain players prompted unrest that lasted for many months.
And, of course, he took it all the way back to the team talk at Manchester City on that Boxing Day, claiming the players were unable to play for Brown effectively after he chose to dress them down for their 4-0 half time deficit in front of the travelling fans.
Boateng, whose dogged performances of late have at least enhanced any compulsion he felt to start pointing fingers, was quite wrong to wash quite so much dirty kit with the hacks. Evidently emotional and angry, he nonetheless owed it to his team-mates to keep his opinions to himself, especially those fellow senior professionals, like Nick Barmby and Andy Dawson, who have long claimed that the notorious alfresco lecture had no bearing on the subsequent slump.
His argument doesn't hold up for so many reasons. Without wishing to go through it again at any length, City followed the Manchester City debacle with a gritty performance against Aston Villa which was lost only thanks to a very late own goal. Boateng himself was not party to the team talk, having been substituted as part of the tactical shake-up just half an hour into the game. Paul McShane, on loan at the time of the game, didn't lose enough faith or respect for Brown not to sign for the Tigers permanently in August. And Boateng himself was one of the players enthusiastically seated on the same stretch of Mancunian turf this season when the scene was satirically re-enacted in celebration of Jimmy Bullard's penalty equaliser.
Opening up this can of worms again does not do justice to Boateng, a player and man of intelligence and experience. The automatic assumption was that he was still smarting, with justification, at being on Brown's 'naughty step' this season, along with other professionals, following differences of opinion on their form and roles within the team. He pointed out that he took a wage cut to come to the KC Stadium and was treated shabbily afterwards by virtue of that decision by Brown to scapegoat him as, one by one, the Manchester City goals flew in. Boateng too was incorrect to praise the attitude and activities of the Dowie management team, given that a meagre four points from 21 available, including defeats in shocking circumstances against the two sides below us in the table, does not remotely represent a breath of fresh air or an upturn in fortunes.
Those whose thoughts are dominated by conspiracy claim that, with Adam Pearson in the dismal position of being publicly unable to rule out Brown's return from gardening leave in the summer, Boateng was making the effort to show willing for the club in order to make Brown's already unfathomable return even more pointless and backward an exercise.
After all, Boateng has little to lose unless he is genuinely keen on staying with the club in the Championship. He is out of contract this summer and, although pushing 35 years of age, should receive at least one offer from lower-ranked Premier League outfits like Bolton Wanderers or Wigan Athletic to maintain a long-running and illustrious top-flight existence that began when he joined Coventry City in 1997.
Yet his on-pitch passion and seemingly ageless existence in recent times has suggested, through actions if not yet words, that he would like to maintain his connections with City next season and in these circumstances, knows that Brown's mooted, implausible return would severely hamper that aim.
Even if relations had improved between Boateng and Brown leading up to the Arsenal game (during which Boateng was sent off and after which Brown was handed his spade and shears by Pearson), clearly there was still ill-feeling there. Boateng had been cast aside earlier in the campaign by Brown and the Dutchman is obviously in possession of a long memory. His comments at the weekend would make his future with the Tigers untenable, even with Pearson acting as mediator, were Brown to return.
It should be a pointless argument, of course. A manager on gardening leave has never, to this blog's knowledge, returned to a club afterwards. Gardening leave was, in this instance, Pearson's chosen course of action simply because he couldn't afford to pay Brown off under the terms of his contract. That means he would have willingly sacked him on the spot had the financial position of the club been healthier. There is no grey area here.
Boateng therefore seems to hold the aces, even though he has been heavily criticised by pundits and columnists for what he said, while supporters have also accepted he made a bad judgement while also holding back on severely admonishing a player whose recent displays had at least done justice to the Tigers shirt.
It is tiresome to hear players blame anyone but themselves when things go pear-shaped, and while Brown has to take his share of the flak, so must Dowie, but most of all so must highly-paid and vastly underperforming members of the first team squad. Boateng can at least say with a clear conscience that he has done some good talking on the pitch, even if his talking off it has added extra fuel to a fire already roaring out of control.
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