To quote Kenneth Tynan, I doubt I could ever love anyone who gave a toss if Jack Grealish was drunk on holiday. In fact, I don’t think I could ever not despise them, tutting away on their phone-ins, transparently wishing it was them passed out insouciantly in the street, yet still able, thanks to a combination of age, natural gifts and being in peak physical condition, to get up the next morning, hit the beach and do it all over again, without being crucified by feelings of shame of self-loathing or a sense that they had somehow offended moral propriety. If they so much as suspected that Grealish had got laid as well that night, the few who didn’t combust with their own bitterness would demand Tim Sherwood fine him all his wages for the whole of next season.
As indicated, Aston Villa’s 19-year-old midfielder Grealish has been photographed after having had a few in Tenerife, the photo shared by some other kid at least a decade too young to think that anything has technically even happened to them unless they’ve posted a picture of it online. Anyone who reckons footballers never used to get up to this sort of thing before the digital era has suffered the most pitiable failure of the imagination – unfortunately, though, we are only projected to come to a grown-up accommodation with the realities of the social media age at some point in the late 22nd century.
In the meantime, in many quarters, outrage ensues. If it’s not Grealish, it’s Jack Wilshere having a fag in a pool in Vegas and I imagine it’ll be only days before Raheem Sterling lets himself, the headmaster and the whole school down. They’re “the type” aren’t they? The Victorian division between the deserving and the undeserving poor has been updated to give us deserving and undeserving footballers, and their comparatively tame transgressions have become the mood music of the close season. Yet voicing disapproval about footballers smoking or drinking on holiday is like live-tweeting Take Me Out. Even if you have nothing better to do, you should seek to give the impression that you have.
Clearly at a loose end, Villa have issued a statement. “The club is aware of photographs of Jack Grealish currently circulating”, this portentous communique reads, before going on to say that they will be “meeting with the player”. Why? Well, because mere anarchy would be loosed upon the world were they to take the position of declining to comment at all on the basis that Grealish is on a private holiday. Much of football appears so convinced of the near-bestial nature of its playing personnel that absurdly draconian punishments are handed out for supposed behavioural sins, pour encourager les autres. It is, apparently, the only language they understand.
Thus there are really only two acceptable “looks” for a footballer in the off season, both of which can be seen in the training montage of Rocky IV. Either the player should rent a remote log barn and spend the time chopping wood and improvising weight training with an ox yoke. Or, if they’re older and/or are on loan from an American side, they should hone themselves in the world’s most hi-tech gym (I think the Brigitte Nielsen character actually went on to run the geriatric lab at Milan).
Players who fail to adhere to these rules must have every waking minute policed. We pay your wages, as the chant goes – indeed, a hilarious amount of fans seem to think footballers literally work for them and could probably draw you a really bad crayon diagram explaining exactly how. I always imagine this type of “football lover” as only a slightly less ghastly version of Papa Lazarou in The League of Gentleman, who would kidnap women while leering: “YOU’RE MY WIFE NOW.” Whenever their club signs a new player, these guys watch the telly footage of them holding up the shirt and rasp: “YOU WORK FOR ME NOW.”
Except they don’t. They play football for your club, at the market rate, and they’re really not morally obligated to spend their time off servicing your dim-bulb role model fantasy, 93% of which is predicated on the fact that you have unresolved issues about young working-class men getting rich. If they want to pass out in Playa de las Américas, get over it. Or go into analysis.
Furthermore, the close season now lasts about 40 minutes, obliging players to pack their jollies into far more contracted windows than previous eras allowed. It would take a heart of immense sanctimony not to be able to empathise. As I get older and my responsibilities increase, the opportunity of a big night out feels somehow wasted if I don’t exploit it to the very inadvisable maximum. Secretly, I would like to start in the West End and wake up in Rio, with no earthly explanation as to how I got there. Unfortunately, if you’ve failed to prearrange the possibility of intercontinental repatriation with the babysitter, this sort of thing has to stay a pipe dream. (Even an actual pipe dream has to stay a metaphorical pipe dream.)
But it doesn’t when you’re a young man in possession of a good fortune. If anything, I am rather disappointed to have never heard a single story of any player of the modern era waking up in another country during some time off. What’s wrong with you, Grealish? You could at least have come to in Lanzarote.
