The Times’ Rod Liddle has bunch of New Year’s resolutions / demands (“no players under the age of 38 will be permitted to write an autobiography, especially not if it is ghosted by some third-rate, semi-literate hack from the Daily Mail. Nor will they be permitted to make œhilarious TV programmes about pranks played upon their colleague”) for soccer’s leading lights. This is the only one I thought worthy of excerpt :
Henceforth players who score a goal will, at the very most, raise an arm in the air and smile self-deprecatingly before receiving a manly handshake from their captain. No cartwheels, no careering in maddened joy towards the corner flag, no oral sex with the rest of the team in the centre circle, no going œSssshhhhh to the crowd as if the achievement of scoring a goal has altered our collective perception of you as being an utter and complete tosser (take note, Lee Hughes). And if Nicolas Anelka (above) is fortunate enough to score again this season, he will not do that massively irritating and rather effete bird-type thing with his hands. One of those Bents – Marcus, I think it is, the one who sometimes plays for Wigan “ does a similar thing on the crushingly rare occasions that he scores a goal. He seems a comparatively likeable chap, Marcus Bent, certainly not in the same league of self-delusion and perpetual petulance as Anelka. So give it a rest, mate. You™ve scored a goal against Fulham or Middlesbrough? Hell, we could all do that. It™s no big deal. Spurs™ Robbie Keane, mercifully, seems to have stopped doing that crouch-down-firing-an-arrow business and has become a much better player as a consequence. Clearly Robbie had never actually fired an arrow in his life. If his mime were made real the bowstring would have snapped back into his face and the arrow ended up in his foot.