Footballers Are Cretins
Posted by Zeno in Premiership | 26 July 2006
It was while watching the build-up to the WC Paraguay game (I shall, henceforth, refer to the Mondiale only as “WC”, to commemorate the room I’d rather have been in for most of the games) that the truth hit me like a pair of discarded Premiership medals. English footballers are stupid.
Now, if you resort to playground rhetoric, you might very well think “Well, Sherlock Holmes”, and flick over to another, more intelligent blog, in which you’ll doubtless be able to find a cute photo of an otter and a video of Jessica Lohan-Hilton simulating fellatio with her latest range of GM vegetables. Or something. Bear with me.
Roque Santa Cruz was being interviewed in the build-up to the game, and waxed lyrical about the relative merits of Sweden and England. His English was more or less faultless. And yet this is a guy who comes from a Spanish-speaking nation and plays his football in Germany. There isn’t an earthly reason for him to speak English, but there he was. Of course, being British, we damn well expect at least one of the oppo to have a grasp of our mother tongue. And it’s a bit of a giggle if their English is a bit crap. Remember Claudio Ranieri’s early efforts to give press conferences? Hey, he was my manager and even I found it funny.
Now imagine an English international – any of them – being asked to do an impromptu chat with a Spanish journalist. I whole-heartedly include our erstwhile captain, who has lived in the frigging country for three years, in this query. Can anyone envisage any of them being able to string more than a word or two together? Si? Puta madre? Tortilla? No, me neither.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Frank Lampard, as is well-known, has a Catalan partner and a friend of mine managed to interview him at the beginning of last season. As well as being an articulate and nice man, I’m told, he also spoke fondly of making sure that his daughter was raised fluent in Spanish, as well as English. And we’re told that Steven Gerrard is a notorious reader of Tolstoy in the original Russian, prompting much hilarity and leg-pulling from team-mates on both Liverpool and England away trips as he pores over his well-thumbed copy of Anna Karenina, scribbles copious notes in the margin and imagines himself a dashing, latter-day Count Vronsky.
Actually, I made the Gerrard one up. Fooled? Didn’t think so.
A mole inside Stamford Bridge once said to me that Eidur Gudjohnsen spoke better English than anyone else in the squad, and was by far the sharpest tool in the Chelsea box. Ironically, it was alleged, the Iceman was also something of a tool: arrogant and hard work for journalists. Well, if that’s true then I sympathise with him (Gudjohnsen, not the journalists). After a day’s training or 2 hours of slog on a football pitch, naturally the first thing you want to do is exchange pleasantries with an overweight hack who thinks he knows more about football than you ever will, and actually could have made it as a midfield general, thanks very much, it was just that gammy knee that cut his career at Orient short, etc etc.
So it was with some surprise that I read the following quote from Eidur on today’s Mirror website. "Although he treated his players very well, we used to be afraid of him if we were losing as he would get extremely angry. He would start ranting and raving at us. But he was very organised and professional. If he said a training session would last for an hour and a half, that was how long it was - not a second more or less." The article also describes Mourinho as a “details-obsessed perfectionist”. What insight. What a penetrating analysis of a man who, since he has been in England, has epitomised the sort of details-obsessed management that could very well be interpreted as perfectionism. Does this ever occur to Mirror readers, I wonder? Do they read these pieces of journalistic effluent and ponder the incredible bleeding obviousness of it all? Do they open their newspaper every morning and think to themselves “Christ, what I really want today is to be told something stultifyingly dull, rehashed as though it’s ‘news’, then spoon-fed to me in syllable-sized chunks”?
Perhaps I’m being unfair, picking on the Mirror. They do, after all, boast the best sports journalist in tabloid-land in Oliver Holt. And because Mr Holt and Marina Hyde have done such effective hatchet-jobs on the Rooney autobiography (part one of five, lest we forget), I’ll pass on that last opportunity to be nasty and bring the curtain down on my rant. Hey! Let’s be careful out there.
