Tiny Slaps to the Face of Nemanja Vidić
Slap #1. Light posting for the rest of the week as I attempt to cope with the fallout of my match correspondent running off with the daughter of Vladimir Lenin’s embalmer. Is he okay? Is he dead? Does he think I’m going to pay for his plane fare? I know as much as you do at this point.
Slap #2. On that note, if you happen to see an American guy in his mid-to-late 20s running around with a Russian girl who’s transcendently out of his league, please send me the name of your location. Actually, that could be a lot of different things. Do some research on your own first.
Slap #3. I thought it was an exciting match! No, it wasn’t a feast of goals, but that just made it more intense at the end, as the players were battling each other, the weather, the pitch, and the wrath of whatever fate sent so many good shots crashing off the woodwork. It felt like a scene in an action movie in which the principals fight the death while clinging to a ledge over a precipice. No, they can’t use all their moves, but they’re dangling over a thousand-foot drop. And still hitting each other. Literally, in Drogba’s case.
Slap #4. That said, Rooney, Drogba, Essien (in the first half), Ronaldo (in the second half), Ferdinand, and Joe Cole were well below their best. Rooney actually wasn’t as bad as a lot of people are saying—he made some good passes, especially in the first half, and set up an attack that was botched by Tevez and Carrick—but never managed to find a shot for himself. Ferdinand, I thought, was worse than people are saying—scattered and inconsistent. No one’s saying anything about Joe Cole, which is just about right.
Slap #5. Numerous writers and bloggers are mocking Terry today for breaking down in tears after the end of the match. What the hell, Internet? You want him to go through an experience like that and be totally unmoved by it? And then you want to complain that modern footballers don’t care enough about the game? Just so we’ve got that straight, then.
Slap #6. It wasn’t Terry’s fault that he slipped on the wet grass as he was taking his penalty. That said, if Hamlet wouldn’t have stabbed Polonius, Ophelia would have been the Queen of Denmark. It’s a fine line between tragedy and accident.
Slap #7. Avram Grant should be the coach of Chelsea next year. I have definite feelings about that.
Slap #8. Do you think Grigoriy would be up for covering the MLS? I may need a new writer, and I mean, we know he can use the laptop.
Can we get Grigoriy’s opinion on Jonathan Safran Foer [or his football-writing brother Franklin, if he likes], Brian?
The sexism inherent in the slagging off of John Terry [and Didier Drogba] annoys the hell out of me, even though I harbour a tenderness [cough] for a sort of mechanical stoicism among sportsmen and -women, myself.
Some of the criticism of Terry’s crying has certainly been quite sexist, whereas other reaction has been of the “it’s only a game, man” variety (and some has conflated the two).
My reflex reaction would be along the “get some perspective” line. But then I think of how badly I feel when I watch my team (from a safe distance, in my sitting room) lose in a similar way, however irrational and temporary it may be. How must it feel for someone like Terry? His life is defined to a huge degree by what he does on that field fifty or so times a year. What more defining moment could there be than a single kick to decide whether or not your club wins the tournament which itself by a defining point in their history?
(I’ll stop saying “defining” now.)
Add to this the fact that Terry is a lifelong Chelsea fan and has been with them as a player since he was a kid, and must therefore feel the blow all the more sharply, and even this Arsenal fan has a smidgin of sympathy for him.
I don’t think you can look at this particular case without taking into account Terry’s entire Alpha Male/Mr. Chelsea persona (which extends to screwing 16 year olds in the back of his Bentley (though not while parked in a space reserved for the disabled)).
Given that “JT” has been far from an innocent bystander in the creation of that persona, he has to expect to take a certain amount of flak when the facade cracks so visibly.
Personally, I found his reaction to be very much humanising. You had to be stone cold not to feel for the guy on at least some level.
My problem is that I can never tell when someone is being a “stud” or when they’re just pretending to old-fashioned hard man-ism. It’s probably sisterly charity that has had me tend to categorise John Terry as one of the latter rather than the former, and so, the emotionalism actually seemed rather consistent with his persona. He’d be like something out of DH Lawrence.
I didn’t know about the underage girls. [They were girls, I presume, else we'd have heard a lot more etc.?]
I do feel sorry for Terry, if only because I hate penalty shoot-outs and their random cruelty, but otherwise I agree with ursus.
(It wasn’t Terry’s fault that he slipped, but he can’t blame the miss on the pitch entirely given the other successful pens. As a centerback, and not even a ball-playing one, he just should never have been picked to take one in the first place.)
And yeah, the sexism is awful, but par for the course in a lot of footie writing, unfortunately.
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