Walcott, Vardy, Henderson? Why we irrationally hate some footballers
Some queries are put up on Twitter and tumbleweed rolls across the screen.
Others immediately make a connection and your notifications require virtual stimulants to keep up. So it was that the other day I mentioned my long-held irrational hatred of Arsenal winger Theo Walcott and my phone ping, ping, pinged as friends, colleagues and online acquaintances chipped in with their own example.
It’s a thing apparently and we all have one: a player whose very existence on the pitch reduces us to snarky testiness despite there being no discernible reason for it.
There is certainly no explaining why Walcott raises my hackles every time he Roadrunners into view. Away from football he seems like a perfectly personable chap while during games he’s a veritable goody two-shoes.
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The best I can come up with is that his running style annoys me with his legs whirring maniacally away while his back remains upright and his arms loose. Legs have no business being that furious when the upper part of the body is going for a Sunday stroll.
Then there’s the legitimate claim that the 28-year-old has never really fulfilled his early potential yet surprisingly remains highly rated by some. But if being over-rated is due cause for hating on a player I’d be scowling at half of the Premier League. Maybe then it’s just his stupid beard on his man-child face.
If I felt any degree of guilt about harbouring such shallow loathing it soon dissipated when the replies came in. The world it seems is full of wondrously petty spite and nearly always for no just cause. A tweeter named ‘Toffee Kev’ singled out former Argentinian left-back Juan Pablo Sorin for his ‘stupid long hair flapping in the wind’ and his ‘awful hunched over running’.
Another admitted to detesting Chesterfield boss Gary Caldwell because of his resemblance as a player to Sid, the sadistic child in Toy Child.
Most pleasingly of all the vast majority of grievances were not based on entirely understandable grounds, namely resentment at players associated with direct rivals. These were personal vendettas that have organically festered of their own strange accord.
There was a heartening lack of name-checks too for the usual go-to hate-figures in the game. Only one person offered up Joey Barton with no mention at all for Robbie Savage or John Terry. Maybe they’re a given?
Instead the most popular unpopular players – retired or otherwise – were those accused of delusion in some form, either believing they’re better than they really are or, in the joint cases of Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson and Adam Lallana, ‘harder’.
The latter’s hard-man credentials were eloquently undermined by one tweeter who pointed out that the midfielder ‘tries starting on bigger players…knowing he would get his world ended but is protected by the prism of a football pitch’. Elsewhere George Boyd clearly gets under the nation’s skin judging by his numerous votes while it was gratifying to know that some animosities persist despite the fact that the players in question have subsequently faded from view.
Scott Parker was one such classic of the genre with even the fast food advertisement he did as a child being attributed as a possible trigger for the ill will. On the subject of ads we return to Lallana whose skincare posturing has evidently done him little favours.
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My personal favourites however were the grudges that were accompanied by confusion as to why this particular player has evoked such strong negativity. “Don’t know why I hate him. He seems like a lovely man but I just can’t stand him,” one reply ended after nominating Petr Cech.
Jamie Vardy meanwhile has ‘a face that makes me want to punch him’, according to Mick Curtis who then asks if that makes him a bad man. No, it does not and that is absolutely no reflection on the Foxes striker. It is perfectly normal to summon up bile at the mere sight of a supposedly random player, as normal in fact as feeling devotion to another simply because he happens to wear your club’s shirt.
In a world replete with talent and reality shows each amounting to fickle popularity contests is it any wonder that football is viewed in the same context and similarly throws up villains chosen via pure gut instinct?
Which bring us back to little Walcott, the eternal boy wonder, and my entirely irrational hostility. Though maybe it’s not after all? When writing this a long forgotten memory resurfaced from childhood of watching my school team from the touchline as an extremely reluctant sub.
The player in my favoured position of right-wing skipped past one opponent then jinked inside another before he was off racing at speed toward goal, vocally encouraged throughout by the small crowd gathered.
I hated this player; this team-mate. I was jealous of him and wanted to be as good as he was. I watched on with no small degree of bitterness as he honed in on goal, his legs whirring ten-to-the-dozen, seemingly detached from a straight back and loose arms.
Aristotle claimed that everything is connected if you look hard enough. Maybe the old guy was really onto something?
