There’s something about Mario. Always something. Sometimes it’s silly. Mario wears a funny glove-shaped hat before the Everton game. Mario gets stopped by the police, who want to know why he has £5,000 in cash in his car and he answers truthfully: “Because I’m rich.” Mario flies to Italy on his day off to watch a football match.
And, of course, because Mario doesn’t run around with a perma-smile plastered on his face, every former footballer turned pundit becomes a body language expert, asking themselves that all-important question: “Why doesn’t he smile more?”
Sometimes there really is “something about Mario” and it’s not so silly. Like the fact that he has as many yellow cards (ten) as he has goals this season. The latter strike-rate — one goal every 113 minutes — is as exceptional, for a 20-year-old adapting to a new league, as the former, identical bookings rate is worrisome.
Where to rank the Kiev incident? It’s telling that the reaction of many when he went out late for the second half, missing a good 30 seconds of play, was: “Oh goodness, what has he gone and done now?”
But it was an allergic reaction, comparable to the one he had suffered (for different reasons) at San Siro in October 2009 or as a child, back in Brescia, after an insect bite.
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You cannot help but feel that his reputation, once again, precedes him and that had it been another player going out late on the pitch, then asking to be substituted, the universal reaction would have been far more empathetic. It’s another cross that he bears.
One of his own making? Possibly, though sometimes it is good to remember that, in addition to his self-made excesses, he also carries burdens that have been thrust upon him, ranging from the weight of expectation brought on by his natural gifts to a childhood spent as often the only black face in a largely lily-white and sometimes racist society.
Oh, and he’s still just 20 years old.