The player’s right to celebrate? We’ve always championed it loudly here — and not least in the matter of goals scored by that player against his former club. The vogue for po-faced non-celebration “out of respect” (and the purring approval it tends to evoke) strikes us as one of the game’s most dismal recent developments — a worrying mark, even, of football’s gradual disappearance (not to put too fine a point on it) up itself. Go ahead, we’ve always said. Spare us the alleged internal conflict. Help yourself to a knee-slide — even an ear-cup. We’re big enough to take it, and goals, being pretty much the point of the game, are for celebrating, after all.
And boy, did David Luiz take us at our word this week. Rising to head in the 86th-minute equaliser that kept Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League and throw his old club, Chelsea, back on the rack where they would eventually perish in extra time, the Brazil centre back spent not even a split-second on rueful reflections regarding what used to be.
Face aflame with joy and relief, he belted round the back of the goal and along the goalline to a position in front of the visiting French supporters. There, he unleashed a carnival display of muscular arm-pumps and hip-thrusts that seemed to be hours in the delivery. He was still at it when the rest of his team-mates had long since reassembled at the other end of the pitch for the restart. About four and a half minutes later, Luiz finally disengaged his hips, recomposed his facial muscles and reluctantly jogged back upfield.
Quite right too, in the circumstances. All power to him.
Except for what happened next.
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Which is that, upon reaching the centre circle, Luiz looked across to the fans of his former club in the Matthew Harding Stand, and offered them an apologetic, palms-upturned, wincing, “that-hurt-me-far-more-than-it-hurt-you” shrug — the gesture made popular by Cristiano Ronaldo, when scoring for Real Madrid at Old Trafford, and various other weasels.
At which point, all that good work was immediately rent asunder and lay in tatters on the floor. We need to stress: this is not something you can have both ways. You celebrate royally or you don’t. (Hopefully, you celebrate royally.) But you don’t celebrate royally and and then try to milk yourself some sentimental acclaim on the “a piece of my heart is forever with you” ticket.
It was an appalling moment, one that Luiz did nothing to ameliorate by apologising again, formally, after the game, and we have to point out that it did damage to our longstanding admiration for the mop-headed Brazilian that no amount of goofball tongue-extended selfies on Instagram over the coming months is likely to repair.
But that’s personal. The general point — made here with due disinterest — is that it must be in the game’s interests in general to discourage such pieces of oily equivocation at all costs. To which end, a retrospectively administered three-match ban from European competition for Luiz for that piece of double-turncoatism on Wednesday night wouldn’t seem draconian, would it?
• With Sam Allardyce confirming that Enner Valencia will be missing from West Ham United’s line-up against Arsenal today after stepping on “a broken teacup”, this would probably be a good moment for Barclays Premier League clubs as a whole to refresh themselves on the perils that lie out there for players during the traditional English teatime.
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You can’t stop players taking tea, of course. They’re young men. But you can at least gently remind them of some of the more obvious dangers they face, in and around the cake-stand and the linen tablecloth.
The hot teapot speaks for itself in this area, clearly, and especially at the beginning of the mid-afternoon repast, as do, at all times, the sugar tongs. So, too, does the world of slipperiness opened up by a buttered crumpet. However, players could perhaps usefully be told that, while those silver toast racks look blunt and harmless enough, you could definitely turn an ankle by standing on one. Same goes for a fruited scone, especially if stale.
Also, it’s vulgar to put the milk in first. And to slurp.
Evading question ... stats the way to do it
Asked why England had fallen short of a required total of 275 against less than mighty Bangladesh in this week’s World Cup group-stage match, Peter Moores, the England head coach, brought a storm of derision down upon himself by replying: “We’ll have to look at the data.” The honking hasn’t really let up since.
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Here, people said, was all the evidence you could need that England have fallen into a state of overmanaged statistical paralysis, players and staff alike staring hollowly into laptops and iPads, lost in a headache of charts and graphs while the rest of the world forges ever onwards and upwards by the simple expedient of playing cricket with bats and balls.
But is that what Moores’ words really implied, though? Or was the coach being far more canny than that — light on his feet, even? Consider his position. He’s been put on the spot by live television in the immediate wake of the latest in a series of humiliating underperformances, with his job apparently on the line and English cricket officially colder than a puffin at Christmas. As such, he wisely and skilfully — and off-the-cuff — reaches into the lexicon of the business school to get a result in an area in which that branch of rhetoric is unmatched: namely, basic evasion.
“We’ll have to look at the data,” essentially means: “I don’t as yet have the first clue what went on out there” — but with the advantage that it sounds so much better than that, suggesting that somewhere behind the inexplicable chaos there is data, and maybe answers.
In that sense it isn’t the token of a bogged-down mindset, steeped in an irrelevant coaching culture, but a smart thing to say to get yourself out of a hole when Nick Knight, of Sky Sports, is in front of you with a microphone.
Indeed, our take on this, having drilled down, is that, “We’ll have to look at the data,” should be chief among the preferred options in the post-defeat interview environment. And not just for cricket. At this juncture all sports bodies could be looking to action an adoption process for this response with a view to positioning it among the core competencies and top-platforming it as a key deliverable. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution. We’ve looked at the data to prove it.
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• So much fuss over one errant moment by a broadcaster: media-wide debate over his fitness to continue as an employee of the BBC, clamour for his public repentance, political point-scoring, angry comment pieces, sober leaders... petitions, even.
Yet, frankly, what was John Inverdale truly guilty of? A simple slip of the tongue of the type that can bedevil anyone.
What unforgiving times these are. Whither basic human sympathy? Who among us hasn’t gone to use the expression “rose-tinted” in a Radio 5 Live broadcast from the Cheltenham Festival and accidentally dropped the c-bomb in the latter portion? Similarly, who among us hasn’t got hungry in a hotel at 10pm and started punching people? Let he or she be the one to cast the first stone.