Imagine you're Mario Balotelli for a second. Yes, you have to.
You just dinged your prized Maserati while trying to park in Manchester and you're getting out to assess the damage. It's only a minor scratch and you can certainly afford to get it fixed, but you're still annoyed with yourself for doing it, as anyone would be. And that's when a stranger in a green jacket comes up to you and gives you the V-sign. Just, boom -- screw you, football man. Have some of this.
Why? Because he reads about you in the papers (especially that bit about throwing a dart at a youth team player) and watches you play football on Saturdays and he's decided that he doesn't like you. No -- he's decided that he hates you. Hates you more than anyone he actually knows personally. So when he spots you on the street in your fancy pants t-shirt with your fancypants hairdo, just after you scratched your fancypants car, he wants to be sure he takes the rude opportunity to let you know that he has adjudged� you to be a twunt.
In his press conference ahead of Spurs' first Champions League match against Real Madrid, Harry Redknapp discussed Wayne Rooney's two-match ban for furiously shouting a sweary tirade directly into a TV camera to celebrate his hat trick. From FourFourTwo:
"Why is he so angry?" Redknapp asked at a news conference in Madrid on Monday ahead of Tottenham's Champions League match against Real.
"I don't remember Bobby Charlton doing it when he scored," he added, referring to the former United and England midfielder, a World Cup winner in 1966.
"Why do they have to be so angry with the world these young footballers earning hundreds of thousands pounds a week?"
"I respect him a great deal as a player but he's a silly boy and he shouldn't have done it."
While Bobby Charlton played in a far from idyllic time -- football violence was on the rise in the '60s and Manchester United fans did their fair share to help that -- it's hard to believe he had as much scrutiny and prodding as the modern players do. Was the money in the game as obscene as it is today? Did the papers gleefully try to dig up (and make up) dirt about players' personal lives? Did anyone push live broadcast cameras in their faces seconds after they scored a big goal in a personally difficult season?
Now, there's always someone out there who doesn't like you or the people who pay you to work for them. And sometimes, they'll jump at the chance to scream that fact at you on the street. You turn on the TV or the radio and maybe they're talking about how you're a waste of money or maybe how you should be sold to a club in a place you've never wanted to visit or or maybe that you're obviously not trying hard enough. You go on the Internet and there are blogs (like this one) and tweets and Facebook groups and YouTube videos making fun of you. There is no escape. Sure, you're getting paid lavishly to play a game and you might be off on holiday in a tropical paradise trying not to think about all that, but it's still going on all around the world all the time always. There's no escape. There's always that toolbag in the green jacket biting his lip and shoving two fingers in your face one way or another.
Maybe -- just maybe -- that's why some of these guys snap. We provoke them and we provoke them and then we wonder why they react like constantly provoked human beings. Does it justify "silly boy" behavior and misguided freakouts? Probably not. But it just might be why it happens.
Photo: The Mirror
Moon Bloodgood Kristin Kreuk Molly Sims Monika Kramlik Lacey Chabert
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