Remember the summertime? The warm weather, the bright nights, the pollen, the lack of rain. Well there’s a certain theme in the 2010/11 football season that seems to have followed on from the summertime. No, I’m not talking about the vuvuzelas. Thank Christ. I am of course talking about evil footballers and their murderous vengeance seeking tackles.
Yes, it’s been the talk of the town. Pundits moaning, managers whining, journalists clapping with glee. And just over a week ago Fulham captain Danny Murphy, who looks like a burly used carpet salesman when he wears a suit, thought he’d let people know what he thought.
I can imagine the journalists sat at that conference. Bored to death, traipsing into the press conference, boggle eyed, cursing their editors for sending them to Stamford Bridge, usually a good job, but not today. Today it‘s the Leaders in Football conference, about as inspiring as a ripped binliner floating down the River Severn. Out comes the carpet fitter and everyone groans. Not him again, anyone but him; Jody Morris, anyone. They reluctantly get out their pens and writing pads already starting to jot down the usual drivel he comes out with. “We deserved to win the Europa league.” “Bobby Zamora is a good player.” “I miss Roy.” And then all of a sudden, from nowhere, Murphy gives them a bite. After all these years they finally got a bite!
“Managers are sending out their players so pumped up there are inevitably going to be problems. Your manager dictates what your players do and how you behave. Every ship has a captain and that's the manager who is in charge. You get managers who are sending their teams out to stop other teams playing, which is happening more and more - the Stokes, Blackburns, Wolves”
Singling out football clubs Danny, well done. Producing no evidence at all, no facts, nothing, just drawing from his imagination and pointing the finger at Tony Pulis, Sam Allardyce and Mick McCarthy. And they had a finger to point back at him too.
Sam Allardyce came out first with his reading glasses and a power point presentation. Pointing out that his Blackburn side have received no more than 11 yellow cards this season and no red card. Now, Big Sam has had this power point out a few times. He has it on his windows 7 taskbar (it was his idea). Everytime he plays Arsenal he gets it loaded up before he arrives at a press conference to save time. I’m sure Arsene gets so bored on the coach up to the dreaded North he just decides to phone random journalists and slag off Blackburn some more. Even when he’s not playing them.
Mick McCarthy, when interviewed by the Beeb, just laughed it off, but Tony Pulis called it right when he said they were “easy targets.” And they are, they don’t play poetic football like your Arsenals, Man Uniteds or Chelseas. What do you expect them to do, go all out attack against them and take a 7-0 drubbing and be happy with it? No, they’re going to try and get something from the game. Stoke, Blackburn, and even Wolves are more than capable of getting a result against any Premier League side. It’s why it’s the best and most competitive league in the world. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful to round them up and throw slander in their face, just because they play a different style to your own.
What annoys me about Murphy’s comments is not just the fact that it’s not thought out, and it feels like he just read a tabloid newspaper’s sports pullout. It’s the fact he’s a hypocrite. This is a bloke who just last year against Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League decided it would be okay to kick out at fellow professional Darijo Srna. People in glass houses, Danny, they shouldn’t be throwing stones.
Strangely though Murphy declined to mention the team harbouring the most evil man in football. A man so wicked he wanders the night killing first-borns as part of some sort of ritualistic pre-match warm up. A man whose name reverberates around dojos everywhere striking fear into the heart of the most hardened of fighters, even Chuck Norris. This man, if he is a man at all, is Nigel De Jong.
De Jong has been tearing apart player after player ever since he joined Manchester City back in 2009. If you believe the papers that is. But he only really had mediocre reputation as a footballing bad-boy until his big moment in the spotlight, on the biggest stage. Back in March he tried to get into the evil scene when he took out Stuart Holden’s fibia in an international friendly. But the world didn’t seem to notice. He knew this though was his moment. His time to shine. The world thought they could ignore his evil capabilities. Well they could do so no longer.
Twenty eight minutes in and he saw his opportunity. Xabi Alonso, a mere mortal, only a few yards away was foolish enough to jump for a header with De Jong in the vicinity. The result was a merciless kung fu kick to the chest. De Jong’s card may have been bemusingly yellow but his evilometer was red, blood red. When he walked onto the pitch in Johannesburg he was a mere droplet on the radar, when he left it looked like coffee had been spilt all over it. Alonso was lucky: he left with his life.
After that spectacular moment De Jong became synonymous with pure dastardly evil. Since then he’s kept his bad-boy reputation by breaking Hatem Ben Arfa’s fibia AND tibia. Everybody knows Nigel now. He’s become the number one hate figure in football, even El Hadji Diouf looks like a wilting schoolgirl compared to De Jong.
Needless to say the media have slated him. Everyone’s getting in on the act, Marseille even want to sue him! Even Dutch coach, Bert Van Marwijk, has slammed him, dropping him from their most recent international games stating he has a problem with the way he “needlessly looks to push the limit.” But where is that limit? De Jong won’t be satisfied until he’s broken every bone in every player’s body. Then and only then he’ll be happy.
Not everyone has been hammering the Dutchman though. His international team-mate, Mark van Bommel, a man who if he stands still for longer than two minutes a mischievous teenager will run up to him and inscribe ’I wish my wife was this dirty’ onto him, has jumped to his defence saying the following:
“I know Nigel as a sweet guy. He doesn't want to injure anyone but wants to win every match. That is his strength… Thanks to Nigel we reached the final of the World Cup. And now I hear people calling him a criminal. What a nonsense.”
I’m sure De Jong is pleased someone out there, especially in the Dutch camp, is on his side. But there again Mark Van Bommel sticking up for Nigel De Jong is a bit like Myra Hindley calling Harold Shipman ‘a sweet guy’.
His club boss Roberto Mancini has come out defending him as well, calling the Ben Arfa challenge “a normal tackle,” which in fairness it was really, “people do look at things negatively but every week, in every game, here, in Spain, in Italy, there are unbelievable fouls, worse than Nigel's.” And he’s right, Karl Henry has produced his fair share of horrendous tackles way worse than anything De Jong has come up with. But he doesn’t get the fame, mostly because he’s rubbish, but also because he didn’t kung fu kick a Spaniard. Then there’s Paul Scholes, a man who doesn’t so much tackle as fall feet first into passers by. And how could we forget the one and only Roy Keane, he’d eat De Jong for breakfast and still go back to the buffet table for more!
De Jong is nothing more than a wannabe. He’s got a long way to go before he can sit amongst the alumni of hard-man tech with the likes of Big Duncan Ferguson and Terry Butcher. A man can dream though, a man can dream.
