I’m heading through Nick Hornby’s ‘My Favourite Year’ right now and it’s a great read, although sad in a way. It details a love and respect for the great, good, and ordinary men of football, players who plied a lucrative trade but had a good sense of candour and respect for their position. Yesterday, revelations surfaced that a Manchester United player had been accused of rape after a cash-laced boozer at a posh hotel. It’s tempting to give in to the curmudgeonly attitude that everything was better in the old days when players had respect for their club, their fans and their status as men paid wages many times greater than those of the vast majority of their supporters to play a game we all dearly love. It’s easy to forget the George Best’s of the world, players who crumbled under the weight of their astronomical talents, driven to drink by the daily pressures of their exalted status. But the behaviour exhibited of late by players of the likes of Anton Ferdinand, Joey Barton, and now Jonny Evans, hardly star players, reflects a disturbing trend among the new generation of young, spoiled, overproduced and overhyped footballers.
That a player was accused of rape is shameful. Yet more shameful is the behaviour of Manchester United’s first team, rolling about town like a bunch of rowdy CEOs on a tear – what’s ten or twenty thousand pounds on a good time when most human beings can’t afford enough to feed or clothe themselves, to even buy a book or a football? Surely we deserve it, we’ve put in our dues after the umpteenth stage-managed charity event, we deserve to live like glutinous savages, our almighty and superior ability earned us that right. And Sol Cambpell has the audacity today to talk about footballers’ ‘human rights’, that players should be shielded from the opinions of fans who live only for the game and their club. And Jaime Carragher won’t play for his nation because, lo and behold, England fans have the gall to expect some respect and quality in return for the privilege to wear the shirt with the Three Lions. What has happened? What has changed? Where did this gross and wildly-inflated sense of entitlement come from?
That a player was accused of rape is shameful. Yet more shameful is the behaviour of Manchester United’s first team, rolling about town like a bunch of rowdy CEOs on a tear – what’s ten or twenty thousand pounds on a good time when most human beings can’t afford enough to feed or clothe themselves, to even buy a book or a football? Surely we deserve it, we’ve put in our dues after the umpteenth stage-managed charity event, we deserve to live like glutinous savages, our almighty and superior ability earned us that right. And Sol Cambpell has the audacity today to talk about footballers’ ‘human rights’, that players should be shielded from the opinions of fans who live only for the game and their club. And Jaime Carragher won’t play for his nation because, lo and behold, England fans have the gall to expect some respect and quality in return for the privilege to wear the shirt with the Three Lions. What has happened? What has changed? Where did this gross and wildly-inflated sense of entitlement come from?
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