Villains of the week: Bernie Ecclestone and Dick Advocaat

If you’ve been following the coverage from Syria, where one unwanted dictator is slaughtering the people in an effort to keep his minority’s grubby mitts on the levers of power, then the thought of holding a Formula One race in Bahrain where, er, an unwanted dictator is gearing up to do the same, this time with some help from his pals the Saudis, is morally dubious at the very least. It is good to hear, then, that Bernie Ecclestone, who this week again insisted that the race would go ahead, is able to keep it all in perspective.

Recently questioned about a man in Bahrain who had his fingers chopped off during violent unrest, Bernie seem blithely unconcerned.

“There are probably people here that had worse things happen to them. It happened to me actually,” he said, referring to the day in 2010 when he had his watch stolen in Knightsbridge. Crass doesn’t come close.

Dick Advocaat

On the subject of vertically challenged wig wearers with an empathy deficit and insufficient sense to keep their traps shut, the broadcast this week of the thoughts of Rangers’ former Dutch footballing genius was enough to inspire apoplexy in even the most jaded of Ibrox disciples. Trying to justify the £36 million debt that resulted from his transfer dealings between 1998 and 2002 – a figure which does include the £12m wasted on Tore Andre Flo but which doesn’t include the turbo-charge to wage levels supplied by the little Dutchman – Advocaat said that “my team became champions [so] in that way, the money was worth spending”, adding that “if you sell those players, you get more money back then you spend; that’s the way you have to think”. Clearly wee Dick has been taking lessons in diplomacy from Bernie, but let’s hope he is right when he says that “I don’t think that [the club going bust] will happen – at the end, somebody always stands up to take it over.”