2) I definitely agree with you that some of the UK papers routinely cross the line between personal/professional bounds, and even journalistic lines in terms of interference with a player’s life.

But without any dimension of fault or weakness or frailty, the players, to me, cease to be human and might as well be mannequins in a history museum which I will never visit.

If Diego did not enjoy ‘skiing’ in summertime and Pele knew how to manage his finances, then these figures would totally incomprehensible to me atop their perch on Mt. Olympus

I like to see players’ faults, sometimes, but the tabloids are capable of, if not ruining people’s lives, at least distracting from their game and changing the course of their career. It’s fascinating that Jermaine Pennant came from where he did to become a Liverpool player, but on the whole I’d rather not have had the News of the World find out his dad was dealing drugs and send an undercover reporter to get him arrested. By the same token, I think we would have managed to get a sense of Ronaldo’s character flaws even if he hadn’t winked and set off years of god-awful headlines in the Sun.

Rise-and-fall arcs can be fascinating; I just find them less so (less real, less fair) when they’re played out in the nether/otherworld of the Daily Mirror.

I am not talking about the Dirty Hero anti-hero, but from Odysseus’ pride to Superman’s kryptonite, we as humans must see an achille’s heel or the hero becomes a fantasy caricature, not believable and, more importantly, not relatable.

Case in point: the obsession with the Steve McNair death here in the states. He has gotten more press for his death than a remarkable MVP season and wonderful Superbowl performance.

Why? Because we finally clawed beyond his stoic surface to see the frailty of his inner depths – the good Lord (and 100s of talk radio hosts) can only speculate on what he was thinking when he did what he did.

I feel same the way when comparing Baggio’s penalty kick miss to Zidane’s headbutt. One reveals a deep, simmering battle with anger, a class hero character flaw, while the other is a bit of bad luck (it seems).

“We’re in a weird bind with respect to players we like—we want them to be themselves, and yet we don’t want them to give the tabloids the material to destroy them.”

Absolutely! Surely I want to see Shava better than he probably is. But I have good reasons for it, even apart from the way he plays.

First of all – I admire the courage that he displayed fighting for his freedom. Obviously, he wanted a new challenge, wanted to prove his ability as a professional outside the country.

But – Russia has the most elaborate tradition of choking the freedom of individual and summoning public opinion against a person who does not subdue to the needs of state\organization. In regard to football it is:
- not letting the player even know that a certain foreign club wants to buy him
- threatening him all kinds of sanctions if he insists on leaving
- and – a wonderful know-how! – appointing personal managers who act to the benefit of the club against the interests of a player.

AA had such a manager – Andreev – who has already proved being for club management in spoiling Kerzhakov’s transfer. That’s why Shava had to look for an independent one – Lahter. Not the best choice, but it worked.

Also, nothing is easier for club management than to put pressure on a dissident player using the media – as it was done in Shava’s case in dozens of dozens of articles, radio and TV performances. Zenit fans treated him as a traiter, fans of rival Russian clubs claimed that nobody wants him abroad and he will be a failure if he tries. One must be very brave to stand all that pressure and keep on moving. Especially after Kerzhakov came back from Spain with a reputation of a looser and was not accepted back to Zenit.

Simultainiously Zenit offered AA a much better contract in case he stays. Although Shava earns considerably less in Arsenal than he did in Zenit (not to mention the proposed embettered contract), the public opinion made in pre-transfer time still works. To put it as crude as possible, the idea is that he has abandoned Mother-Russia hunting for money. Shava is reading for years that he is a greedy bastard. “If you keep calling your child a pig, you will grow a swine”.

About stupid and refined. Those in UK who considered women not suitable for getting University degree in the ХIХth. c. (to sound less anti-Russian I must state in 1880s women got degrees in Russia, including medical doctor’s diplomas) were not less clever than those who think the opposite nowadays. It’s a matter of culture, not brains. Same in regard to women drivers in Russia. In soviet times private cars were few. Drivers spent half of their lives lying under the car trying to repair it, as practically there was no service. Surely women drivers were few. Changes came less than 20 years ago. The idea that women can not drive is still prevalent in Russia and will disappear only in the next 20 years, I suppose. It’s cultural.

It would be fair to take into consideration that Arshavin or his wife never said anything mentioned above to English journalists, any journalists at all actually. These comments (silly as they are) were dug out from Arshavin.eu – his official website and date back to much earlier times. AA was an unmarried youngster when he commented about women – he turned out to be a very loving and responsible husband and father afterwards. Yulia’s impressions – mainly about food – appeared years later as a talk of a woman pregnant with AA’s second child on her 2-days visit to UK long before AA signed to Arsenal.

Hairstylist’s story was invented by that very hairstylist who gave an interview to a Russian newspaper; AA was quite unhappy about it. As to designing clothes, AA never starts talking about it himself and does not support these discussions. But as he really has a diploma, he would not deny it.

AA comes from a very basic background, he grew up in hard post-perestroyka times when the parents (his single mother incuded) struggled just to have their children properly fed. I know that as I’m St.Petersburg myself, and my son was a baby in those hungry times when AA was a teenager. No one would call AA refined or cultured. But one thing that even AA-haters admit about him – he is very honest. And he is learning fast. Hopefully, he would be better by year.