The Stranglers in Battersea Park, 1978 before you ask. It was either this or John Terry…
It’s Friday, so here’s this morning’s instalment from Birdkamp
Before you read this week’s blog, please be aware that it was written from scratch in an hour-long window at the end of a long, frustrating day. I try to tackle a tricky topic so I apologise if I don’t cover it with the amount of tact and precision it probably needs.
Anyway – here’s something I’m sure you didn’t already know – as a rule of thumb footballers shouldn’t be held up as role-models in any sense beyond their feats as professionals at the top of their game. And even as pros doing what they’re best at they’ll fail us sometimes.
What’s interesting about sportsmen is that their career before they hit their late-teens is obscure and private. When we think of other celebrities it’s likely that most enjoyed the public eye and were prepared for it. Actors, musicians and TV stars are personable from youth, used to audiences and capable of moderating their behaviour and persona to make it more palatable for the crowd.
Little of that for professional footballers, who wouldn’t have played in front of more than a couple of hundred people until they were young adults. We shouldn’t expect them to be adept at, or enjoy, living under our glare. And neither should anyone try to force them into it.
Fun example was Jack Wilshere, who, a little giddy after winning the FA Youth Cup in 2009 before a decent crowd, said of his 17-year-old teammates something like, “All these players should be starting in the first team”.
This came at the end of a difficult season for the first team, in which the fans had first started to grumble about the management. The boo taboo had been broken just a few months before, when Eboue had been jeered off against Wigan by a section of the fans.
Smiling warmly, Steve Bould brought him down to earth as gently as possible a couple of minutes later, while not belittling his achievements that night. Jack had a lot to learn about about football, and plenty to learn about what the media would do with that kind of comment.
By the time they need to work out how to deal with cameras they’re pretty much developed human beings, and as much as people might warn about the added pressures of fame, I doubt anything can prepare anyone for the real thing.
It makes you realise that Paul Scholes, tight-lipped and famous for guarding his privacy, had it right all along. I can barely remember seeing him in a TV interview, and I know that despite having a 20-year career at the top of the game, he’s never tried to cash in on what marketers might call his defined “brand values” and “brand awareness”.
It’s because he’d be inviting a rabble to his door, and he knows he won’t be able to handle it. Only a few can – Thierry Henry looked and talked like he’d been on TV his whole life when he made those Clio ads. People realised long ago that David Beckham’s best when he doesn’t talk, but beyond his conventional good looks he does seem to emit a whiff of charisma. Ian Wright too, who’s made a decent media career. I think we’ll see more of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain off the pitch – he’s lively, genial and knows how to talk.
Extroverts all, too.
But what makes footballers good at what they do – what made John Terry a fearsome competitor and leader, on and off the pitch, most likely does not translate to the public sphere.
For all his misdeeds, I’ve never felt too strongly either way about him. We know he came up tough, and that his family has some pretty unsavoury characters. It’s not an apology, but it mitigates a little – at least for me. Really, the only time he ever got my goat was in the week after the Ferdinand incident last year.
His people knew he was embroiled in a race row, so some Einstein thought it would be a shrewd move to send a picture of him cradling a baby of African heritage to the newspapers. The headline was something like “Terry shows his caring side” – no more than a couple of days after he’d called a person a “black cunt”. So here’s an unreconstructed sportsman from a difficult background, piloted by the raw drives and urges that pushed him to the top of his game, being manipulated into something audiences can digest. To hell with that. For various reasons, he’s an asshole. And he doesn’t need to be better than an asshole to do his job well.
Footballers come across as relatively straightforward human beings. I suppose it makes sense, their simplicity (I don’t mean intelligence) is why they’re here, they’re focused; they’re conditioned throughout their teens to forget self-doubt, maybe ignore sentimentality; to achieve their goals. On a human level there’s little that a feckless lazybones like me can empathise with.
But these guys also have to handle to the disorientating effects of unimaginable wealth without missing a beat. It seems the way they most achieve this is by living like monks.
To me Wenger’s blog on Eurosport this week painted RvP’s domestic life as the routine of those blokes from the Bourne films – lying on a bed, eyes open, waiting for a call from the hierarchy. The benchmark has been lifted – their raised standards don’t quite track the incredible leap in what they earn, but the best footballers seem to work harder and look after themselves better than any generation before. The levels of professionalism that make footballers better than ever also, I imagine, make them less exciting.
Future autobiographies will make for relatively dull reading I reckon. Fewer orgies and dentist chairs. And who knows, maybe not as many nightclub fist-fights to read about (let’s be reasonable here!). Most of that’s been consigned to a time when clubs were less aware of the effects of partying on performance.
The point I suppose is that we shouldn’t expect too much from footballers, and shouldn’t get too excited when they make mistakes. Contempt should be reserved for the shady, unaccountable characters that try to exploit players.
And the incognito drink in a boozer! Pffft!
“As long as we don’t lose our love for this club.”
Now I wonder what kind of “love” that is. Surely not the love that we fans feel, because that’s something that you can’t lose. I am guessing that Uzzy’s translator has been wrong and incorrectly translated financial interest as love.
Goes for a drink in a Holloway pub “where no one recognises me”
A 20 stone Uzbek in a cashmere overcoat surrounded by eight ex Special Forces “operatives” quietly sipping his barley wine
And no one noticed
So we are afraid to criticize the neo-liberal economic Kool-Ade served up by Clinton and gladly spewed by one of his acolytes, Mr Obama or his English predecessor, Mr Blair. Much of the cutting back of welfare programs and slashing taxes for the rich and deregulation was supposed to spur economic growth. So said Reagan and Thatcher who clumsily tried to impose similar policies in the 80s. Romney is coming with a similar cudgel. But how skilful was Clinton and now Obama who talk a good talk but impose similar policies with predictably debilitating effects. The American economy, the so-called engine of world commerce, barely grew by 1% in the last marking period according to the latest data. Yet we are in a recovery.
But nobody wants to call a spade a spade so lets enjoy the opiate of the masses, football!
shotta 1% is like a treasure trove compared to our economy where stagnation would seem like progress
Engine of world commerce?! Loooong time ago but not no more and most likely never again.
Usmanov …enjoys having an incognito drink in a Holloway pub near Arsenal’s new stadium where “no one recognises me”.
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He’s physically repulsive enough that people probably just don’t want to have to look his way while enjoying their pints.
The best economic book I read was on the origins of the Pelopponessian war, which is apt given the hurt in the Hellas. It was a marxist interpretation of hostilities and a great read if a somewhat acquired taste. Capitalism hasn’t failed, it can’t fail just in the same way that it can never succeed given its inherent contradictions. cold comfort to the pople of europe I know but outside of the isms it’s rather simple. The system prevails and by that its those in the City casinos raking it in, sit down with the crooked croupiers on its myriad of dirty games. I find it incredibly unerving watching the manipulation of the euro crisis by the casino. When you seee Germany being blackmailed into a Euro bond by these liars it proves that the house always win. What would De Ste. Croix have made of it who knows but he did a great job in explaining how a little Corcyra was economically vital enough to both Corinth and mighty Athens to get all hot and bothered about so our present surrealities would have been no problem.
Oh btw COYG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well win by 3.
The best economic book I read was on the origins of the Pelopponessian war, which is apt given the hurt in the Hellas. It was a marxist interpretation of hostilities and a great read if a somewhat acquired taste. Capitalism hasn’t failed, it can’t fail, just in the same way that it can never succeed given its inherent contradictions. Cold comfort to the pople of Europe I know but outside of the isms it’s rather simple. The system prevails and by that I mean its those in the City casinos where you can sit down with the crooked croupiers on its myriad of dirty games. I find it incredibly unerving watching the manipulation of the euro crisis by the casino. When you seee Germany being blackmailed into a Euro bond by these liars it proves that the house always win. What would De Ste. Croix have made of it who knows but he did a great job in explaining how a little Corcyra was economically vital enough to both Corinth and mighty Athens to get all hot and bothered about so our present surrealities would have been no problem.
Oh btw COYG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well win by 3.
Those pictures of Bacary on the dot.com look like farewell pictures to me. Hope I’m wrong. Him and Theo, fond farewell….Exactly.
Jonny, not trying to pick a fight, just a bit sick of the Torygraph “the euro is done for” crowd.
Because in this unipolar world – and out-of-control US military spending means it is unipolar – I’m convinced that even though the EU has evident and well-documented issues, unionisation at the EU level acts somewhat as a bulwark against rampant US economic imperialism, via the European Parliament (think software patents, to which it said no to the US). That the US wants to smash the EU, and I think it does, is no surprise.
That is, what are the chances of little Cataluyna standing up to the US on its own, once it achieves its longed-for independence, if by then the EU is also defunct?
The poster child for what happens in that circumstance IMO is Mexico – signatory to NAFTA, the tripartite trade agreement with the US and Canada, and now a de facto narco state as a result, after the collapse of its agriculture, which could not withstand the dumping of surplus US product such as corn. Not pretty at all.
Can Spain leave the euro, but remain in the EU? That’s the issue for me, and I’ve seen it discussed only rarely. (There doesn’t seem to be a consenus either way.)
But as shotta says, it’s even more complicated than that, because the base issue is whether capitalism itself is capable of meaningful reform, or if we’ll forever be in the grip of insane cycles of boom-and-bust, a conundrum some German dude explored at length in his meisterwerk a while back – well, you know the drill.
From his POV, though, it makes sense why Clinton, as you rightly point out (and I would add Obama and Bliar/Brown too), while often socially liberal, are in fact driven in their economic and foreign policy by the expansionist hunger, the hyper-predation of Wall St, and its offshore twin, the City. The abolition of Glass-Steagall is part of that, the lessons of Pecora and the 1930s blithely forgotten. One might even think capitalism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, but Brady here claims the house always wins. In its present form, though, capitalism certainly has effing amnesia, which doesn’t strike me as terribly healthy. Could it be dementia, even?
And as ACLF posters such as ZimPaul – where is he? hope he’s OK – and others outside Europe so eloquently and frequently note – we still have many social protections here others can only dream of. And we need to hang on to them tightly, as the protestors in Spain, Portugal, Greece are trying to do.
So as any successful fightback requires solidarity as its first ingredient – peace, man.
Chortle I thought you and I were already at peace CG!
Great comments BTW.
CG
>Can Spain leave the euro, but remain in the EU?
Yes and no. Yes, of course, there has to be a political will to achieve that and a fiscal desire to avoid writing off (inter)national debt. The markets might well enjoy the release of weaker european nations but the likelihood of vultures descending into the currency markets means that No, Spain or any other nation will not be leaving the Euro any time soon.