What it wasn't

You know how much interest I have in sport!

Nevertheless, there is one aspect of the Andy Gray affair that does interest me. First, for those who don't live here in the UK, let me tell you what that affair is. Two sports commentators, Andy Gray and Richard Keys who thought they were not on microphone made some sexist remarks about a female official at a football match - remarks to the effect that she couldn't possibly understand the offside rule because she was a woman. Unfortunately for them someone did record them and release them to the press.
One of them has been sacked. The other one has, I understand, resigned.

It has created a bit of a mediastorm of comment.

Now here's the only bit I find at all interesting.

The comments were certainly sexist.

They may well have been offensive - they definitely offended some people.

They - the comments - were a rather stupid variation on an old joke.

They - the commentators -were rather stupid to make such comments anyway.

They were doubly stupid not to make sure that nobody was recording them

There are, apparently, prior instances of sexism from Andy Gray.

What there words most definitely were not, at least in any sense that I understand the word, is a rant.

Several newspapers, including our ever-beloved Daily Mail, have described them as such but saying it doesn't make it so. Not even when it is repeated on television news programs.

rant (n) : violent or extravagant speech or writing (AHD)

rant (n): a long, angry and confused speech (Cambridge Advanced Learners' Dictionary)

rant (n): loud excited speech (Collins Pocket Dictionary)

The remarks in question lasted in total about thirty seconds, were said in the jocular, flippant tones that good friends use to each other and were perfectly straightforward, if straightforwardly stupid and wrong. I don't know if the two men deserved to lose their jobs and, honestly, I don't care one way or the other but whatever they were guilty of, it wasn't a rant.