Rebekah Vardy’s spectacular own goal

Jamie Vardy is one of English football’s most prolific strikers. But thanks to his wife, his surname will be forever associated with one of the all-time great legal own goals. Rebekah Vardy has spectacularly lost her high-profile libel battle against Coleen Rooney in the so-called ‘Wagatha Christie’ case. 

It’s hard to overstate how damning today’s judgment is of Vardy: Mrs Justice Steyn said that Vardy’s evidence, which she had treated ‘with very considerable caution’, ‘was manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence’ and was ‘evasive’ or ‘implausible’. She also decided that Rooney’s Instagram post – which sparked the bust-up between the two WAGs in the first place – was ‘substantially true’.

Even before today’s verdict, Vardy had lost in the court of public opinion. The war of words between the pair painted both Rooney and Vardy in a bad light. But if Rooney emerges from the case as one of the brighter and more scrupulous characters in the milieu of footballers’ wives and girlfriends, to say nothing of an intrepid amateur investigator, Vardy does not.