Lucky not to have been physically assaulted

I was flicking through New In Chess at half-time in this afternoon's match and the clip above happened to catch my eye. Here's some of the same passage, in Nigel's piece itself (it's from his notes to his game against Li Chao rather than his Short Stories feature).

So far, so very Nigel, with insults over the place. He likes to dish it out, does Nigel, but call him Nosher and you'll see how good he is at taking it. Still, "ginger-haired moron" is small beer by Nigel's standards. There's worse to come.

Here's the rest of it.

He can count himself lucky not to have been physically assaulted.

Now I blame myself for not spotting this before, but in fact this isn't the first time that Nigel has made the same threat.

I say "threat" because that is what it is. If you say that somebody was lucky not to be physically attacked, by you, and you are expecting to meet and work with that individual again, that is a threat. It is an attempt to frighten them, to intimidate them with the prospect of physical force.

And as I say, it's not the first time. Here's Nigel in September.

As I say, I missed it before. Let's highlight it so nobody else does.

Well at least back then he had the excuse that "a glass or two of wine had been consumed". Writing it up a month or so later, he clearly had no such excuse.

You don't do this stuff, not even if you've played for world championship titles. You do not, explicitly or implicitly, make physical threats to the officials who oversee your sport. Nor to anybody else.

I guess people are long since used to Nigel behaving like this, which is why nobody picked up on it before, though another way of saying that is that we have become so used to indulging him that we don't notice that we're doing it. We might also ask ourselves what New In Chess are playing at in printing this garbage, though since that magazine shows not the slightest sign of having any kind of editorial standards where Nigel is concerned, I guess we've got used to that as well.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so used to it. Perhaps we should step back a bit, forget that we are used to him and ask ourselves what would happen if a footballer, a tennis player or a cricket player, after an incident with an official that took place while they were representing their country, said that the official concerned was lucky not to be assaulted.

I think they'd be lucky not to be suspended for a long time. Very lucky indeed.