Football Betting: Why England don't need role-models

120 Team England / Maxliu / 05 March 2010 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet

John Terry and Ashley Cole have been castigated for their off the field behaviour

Hypocritical calls for football players to set perfect examples to youngsters benefits neither players nor fans, says Max Liu.

"Roy Keane and Zinedine Zidane were never boring; role models are boring and boredom is unforgivable."

Will John Terry's commanding performance in England's win against Egypt put an end to sanctimonious calls for footballers to be role- models?

Probably not, but I ask because on Wednesday night we saw the best of Terry. We would have seen the best of Ashley Cole too had he been fit; players are at their best on the pitch, playing football is what they excel at and what they're paid to do. Yes, they endorse charities and provide platitudes about racial equality, but the current received wisdom that they should be role models for children is folly.

What England [7.0] need if they're going to win the World Cup this summer is heroes. I've always had heroes - Marcel Proust, Bruce Springsteen, Tony Benn - because heroes suddenly fill the sky, they don't so much lift us out of our own lives as imbue them with wonder and exhilaration. I'm for anything that allows us to dream. What I'm not for is spic-and-spam non-entities who will advertise McDonalds as soon as they're retired.

Much of what surrounds football - Match of the Day, clubs' infantallising approaches to their fans, gaudy merchandise - is irrelevant to how life is lived and spoken in Britain in 2010. But football seems content, willful of its own increasing irrelevance. The England team is permeated by the atmosphere of a school prize-giving ceremony and it will only get worse this summer. The suited photo-calls, sunkist dispatches from the team hotel in a hokey language nobody speaks - this is role model culture and, rather than encouraging children (by which I suspect they mean all of us), it alienates them.

A role model is a member of the establishment whom non-members are supposed to look up to, a dummy designed by those inside to help control those outside. The sports biographer Eamon Dumphy once said: "If you're small, if you're poor, if you feel like you've been left behind, look at Roy Keane." Keane was never a role-model, but he will always be a hero to me and children are inspired by him because he was driven, uncompromising and flawed. He exuded the life-giving qualities of a cultural example and embodied the spiritedness of a hero. The same can be said of Zinidiene Zidane. These players were never boring, role models are boring and boredom is unforgivable.

Another hero of mine, Sir Alex Ferguson, once told Dwight Yorke to "get a wife." Aside from the unreconstructed chauvinism of the statement, this shows how football makes impossible demands of its protagonists. Ferguson thought marriage would put an end to the striker's decadent lifestyle and that this would benefit Manchester United. Perhaps, but what an impossible demand to make of a then 29-year-old. Lots of 29-year-olds are married, but I'm 29, unmarried and wouldn't welcome an out of touch 60-year-old, least of all my employer, telling me to change that.

Terry and Cole are 29 and, while adultery can't be condoned, they are entitled to make mistakes. Perhaps footballers should not get married, see whoever they want to, settle down when they feel like it, rather than be forced to grow up prematurely by a hypocritical, tabloid culture which celebrates outdated ways of life that the rest of us don't adhere to. For the likes of Cole and Terry to persevere unhappily would be as dishonest as their indiscretions.

The current consensus - that players have a duty to provide squeaky examples to youngsters - makes disappointment inevitable. Football doesn't need role-models and neither do youngsters. We have no right to heroes either - they are a privilege, game-changers in the game of life. We should be grateful when we find them.

Tags: Ashley Cole, England football, John Terry, Max Liu, Roy Keane, Sir Alex Ferguson, World Cup betting, Zinedine Zidane