Attack not the best form of defence for Jack Warner

Attack, as the old adage goes, is the best form of defence and this was a tactic the garrulous Jack Warner employed quite outrageously on Wednesday.

The former Fifa vice-president made an astonishing television appearance, claiming he would reveal “an avalanche of secrets” about corruption within football’s governing body.

Warner, who also said he feared for his life, added that he could link Fifa officials to general elections in his native Trinidad and Tobago in 2010.

Wild and hyperbolic claims, then, but does anyone take them seriously, now that Fifa’s credibility has been obliterated by the farrago of the past week?

Warner, lest one forget, was one of 14 senior Fifa officials charged by the US over alleged corruption, which led to the eventual resignation of Fifa’s embattled president Sepp Blatter on Tuesday after the Swiss had won re-election just days before. He even spent a night in jail as a result and has had an Interpol red-corner notice (wanted person alert) issued against him.

But sitting quiet and waiting for justice to take its course is anathema to this indomitable 72-year-old who instead chose to hurl wanton verbal hand-grenades carrying spurious portents of doom for Blatter and Co in a woefully misguided bid to exonerate himself.

In a broadcast entitled Jack Warner: The Gloves Are Off, dream fodder for satirists due to the title alone, he said: “I will no longer keep secrets for them who actively seek to destroy the country. I have kept quiet, knowing this day might come. I will do so no more.

“Mahatma Gandhi had once said that all through history there have been tyrants, but in the end they all fall.”

The former Trinidad and Tobago minister of national security, who sat on Fifa’s executive committee from 1983 to 2011, said that in the documents he has outlined his knowledge of international transactions, “including, but not limited to, its [former] president, Mr Sepp Blatter. And lastly other matters involving the nation’s [Trinidad and Tobago’s] current Prime Minister [Kamla Persad-Bissessar]”.

Resembling a comedy sketch — and you can be sure when the dust settles, it almost certainly will be recreated to lampoon him — Warner was filmed wearing a shiny shirt and tie in luminous green, the colour of his Independent Liberal Party. He implored viewers to pray for him, his family and his country, while ominous music played in the background. “I reasonably actually fear for my life,” he said. “Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming. The die is cast. There can be no turning back. Let the chips fall where they fall.”

Bribery allegations

Fighting talk, then, but why did he not divulge his ‘avalanche of secrets’ before?

The prevailing suspicion is that this is just empty rhetoric masked by powerful imagery, given that we have seen Warner spew cliched, tasteless and unfulfilled promises of foreboding in the past.

Responding to bribery allegations made against him on the eve of the 2011 Fifa presidential election, he told the Trinidad Express: “I tell you something, in the next couple days you will see a football tsunami that will hit Fifa and the world that will shock you. The time has come when I must stop playing dead so you’ll see it, it’s coming, trust me you’ll see it by now and Monday.

“I will hold my head high to the very end because, I repeat here again, I am not guilty of a single iota of wrongdoing.”

So what devastation did Warner’s ‘tsunami’ wreak?

Well, he lambasted claims against him by Fifa whistleblower Chuck Blazer and revealed an email by Fifa secretary-general Jerome Valcke in which Valcke referred to Qatar having “bought the 2022 World Cup”, to which the Frenchman claimed he had been misinterpreted.

Warner also wrote: “I also indicated that at the Miami Concacaf [Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football] Congress on May 3, Mr Blatter made a gift of $1 million [Dh3.67 million] to Concacaf to spend as it deems fit. This annoyed [Uefa’s] president Michel Platini, who was present and he approached Valcke, complaining that Mr Blatter had no permission from the finance committee to make this gift, to which Jerome replied he will find the money for Mr Blatter.”

Platini responded by saying that it was “a joke”, those accused refuted malpractice, the Fifa election was held as planned and Warner would later resign from the organisation after 30 years. A former history teacher, Warner would do well to eschew past bluster and bullishness and set about correcting his own tainted image.

For, when his reputation has been sullied by a welter of allegations of fraud for years — and he was caught selling World Cup tickets for up to three times their face value in December 2006 — it is high time for him to adopt a sturdy defence rather than unleash wholly unconvincing and risible attacks.