According to Tony Pulis, the young gentlemen who play for Stoke City are a high-spirited bunch of practical jokers. ‘We have a smashing dressing room,’ chuckled the Stoke manager. ‘There’s about four or five of our lads who are always up to something, and there’s always banter going on.’ He made his football team sound like the Staffordshire branch of the Bullingdon Club.
To be fair to the Bullingdon, its members observe a certain decorum; trashing the odd restaurant or debagging the occasional commoner. The bantering lads of Stoke would find that terribly tame.
Why, just the other day one of their number reportedly brought in a pig’s head, dripping with blood, wrapped it in the clothes of their striker Kenwyne Jones and placed it in Jones’s locker at the training ground.
Jones, unsurprisingly, was deeply insulted. His religious convictions forbid the eating of pork, and he apparently regarded the prank as an offensive provocation.
Bad taste: Stoke midfielder Brek Shea with the offending pig's headOne imagines that his mood was not improved when Brek Shea, an unachieving American winger, posed with the porcine head for a picture on a social network. ‘Locker room banter gone wild!’ he tweeted.
Anyway, reprisals ensued, and the Stoke midfielder Glenn Whelan, who was subsequently absolved of blame, emerged from training to find a large hole in the windscreen of his car. Ironically Whelan, who enjoys a well-earned reputation for Wildean wit, was the prime suspect in a jape a week earlier, when Michael Owen’s Mercedes was covered with eggs and flour at the same training ground.
Owen took it like a faintly pathetic trouper. ‘This is what I will miss when I hang up my boots,’ he tweeted. I was marvelling at these grotesque convulsions when I came across a column which appeared on this page at the close of London’s glorious Olympics.
At odds: Kenwyne Jones (left) has apologised fot breaking Glenn Whelan's windscreen following the 'joke'It began: ‘While the nation revels in the glories of an Olympic summer, football comes trampling through the front door; thumping its chest and waving its wad. It is largely unloved and widely unwelcome, a sport reduced by its own tawdry excesses. The crying need is for some sensitive humility and self-awareness, but such virtues are unwelcome in the national game.’
More from Patrick Collins... Patrick Collins: Yorkshire princes dominate the costume drama of Headingley 25/05/13 PATRICK COLLINS: Golf needs a lesson in race relations... from football (And maybe the royal and ancient game can explain again why women cannot become members at Muirfield) 25/05/13 Patrick Collins: The passion of a true professional: Beckham didn't stumble into stardom... he got there through talent and sheer hard work 18/05/13 Patrick Collins: Root helps to lift gathering gloom as New Zealand hold the upper hand at Lord's 18/05/13 Patrick Collins: You know England are in trouble when the captain jumps ship 11/05/13 PATRICK COLLINS: Move over, Di Canio... Jo-say's coming home! When it comes to hamming it up, the Chelsea-bound boss is in a league of his own 04/05/13 Patrick Collins: Rodgers is toothless when it comes to dealing with Suarez 27/04/13 Patrick Collins: Carroll embodies the simplistic whack-it-long, chase-it-hard philosophy which Allardyce espouses... 20/04/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEThere have been a few welcome advances. Racial abuse has been almost eradicated, and those who speak out against such an odious offence are regarded as intelligently civilised rather than politically correct.
The racist treatment which Mario Balotelli has recently received from his own countrymen in Italy would be unthinkable here. Also, many of the old reprobates who once thrived on trite controversy have been mercifully silenced: even our own, dear Joey Barton has been reduced to a sporadic twittering of fatuous inanities from distant Marseille.
And yet, it was a season when cheats continued to prosper and officials were systematically abused; when salary demands mocked national austerity, agents trousered still more obscene rewards and vulgar ostentation became the distressing convention rather than the tacky exception.
It was a season which gave us the Suarez bite and the McManaman tackle, Sunderland’s managerial appointment of a self-professed Fascist, and Newcastle’s despicable decision, in the depths of a recession, to sell their shirt sponsorship to a payday loan company.
In that summer column, I also mentioned ‘screeching, threatening, intimidating’ football crowds, whose excesses were excused as being ‘tribal’. And I argued: ‘During the Games, we discovered that sports crowds could be honestly partisan. Opponents are not enemies. Respect is not a sign of weakness… Only in football is it considered admirable to be biased to the point of fanatical imbecility.’
Target: Arsene Wenger has been subjected to vile abuse from the terracesListen to your local congregation, consider the content of their chants: ‘Your support is f****** s***’, the vile denigration of Arsene Wenger or Emmanuel Adebayor, or that loathsome, vicious ditty, usually directed at Liverpool or Everton fans by London visitors: ‘Sign on, sign on, with hope in your heart/You’ll never get a job.’
They do not suggest that Olympic lessons have been learned.
But is football really in need of such lessons? It is, after all, the best-loved game on Earth, the game which has produced a stream of extraordinary individuals; from Tom Finney and Bobby Charlton, to Danny Blanchflower and Bill Shankly, to Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi. All men of staunch character and rare distinction — and all capable of adorning any sport.
Yet its weaknesses are obvious to all but the wilfully blind. And one of those weaknesses is a tendency to tolerate from wealthy, arrogant, immature young men the kind of behaviour which appals and affronts ordinary people.
We may not understand the mentality which imports a pig’s head, dripping with blood, into a locker room and wraps it in the clothes of a colleague. But we do know that such an action is wholly unacceptable and merits significant punishment.
When he raises his sights above the chuckling banter of his smashing dressing room, even Tony Pulis might agree.
Sky pilots keep cricket flying
The Test series was two sessions old and David Gower was bored. The old entertainer had endured an austere day, with England slurping along at two runs an over and he couldn’t hide his tedium.
By contrast, Nasser Hussain had thoroughly enjoyed himself. This was Test cricket, he insisted. Much better grim attrition than watching a side amass 300-3. Michael Atherton could see both points of view but the pragmatist in him sided with Nasser. And that was when we knew we were in safe hands.
A cut above: David Gower, Michael Holding and David Lloyd are key components of Sky's excellent coverageFor Sky’s cricket coverage is designed to make us think. Where their football — Messrs Souness and Neville apart — is largely a dumbed-down exchange of bloodless platitudes, their cricket is aimed at sentient adults. Those former England captains, assisted by the shrewd drollery of David Lloyd and the languid wisdom of Michael Holding, teach us things about the game that we had only guessed at.
In the space of a so-called ‘Third Man’ feature last week, we were given lessons on the techniques of swing and seam, which these men spent a career acquiring. The addition of Andrew Strauss will only strengthen an impressive squad.
It is sports television at its most admirable.
It didn’t need much to sharpen our appetite for the Ashes but Sky’s cricket has done the trick.
Reading down but still sane
A fact for the fag-end of the football season: if QPR fail to win at Anfield, or if Reading take a point from Upton Park, then Rangers will finish bottom of the Premier League.
Both clubs were relegated long ago, yet their circumstances are quite different. While Reading have been frugal to a fault, Rangers have taken an alternative route.
After indulging the expensive disaster that was Mark Hughes, they allowed Harry Redknapp to break the club transfer record twice in two weeks. They were bottom when he arrived, and there they remain. Not his fault, of course, as his admirers regularly inform us.
But as the two clubs scramble to avoid the ultimate indignity, only one will go down with its sanity intact.
PS
Paolo Di Canio enjoyed a lively week.
He fined seven of his Sunderland players, threatened to reduce the squad’s holidays and ordered them to return for training.
He revealed that he had spent his first three weeks at the club ‘with one ear and one eye closed, otherwise you can make too much shock’.
He now intends to ‘make sure they adapt themselves to me’.
Some detect the smack of firm government in this crude grandstanding. Others fancy they hear the ominous rustle of men in white coats.
A busy month: Paolo Di Canio has been in the public eye of lateMore... Stoke's Jones apologises to Whelan for smashing car windscreen after finding pig's head in locker Stoke's Jones denies smashing team-mate's car after finding pig's head in locker Race for, erm, 10th is on: Reckon the final day is just a parade? Think again... there's £4.5m up for grabs
