You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ fact, he’ll more than likely sue over this.

      ‘If it pleases your lordship, my client Mr Frank Warren, a man of the most blameless character, a pillar of his local community, a tireless worker for many deserving charities, is profoundly distressed by the implication that he may tend toward the mildly litigious, and seeks substantial damages for the injury to his feelings and reputation …’ Somewhere in such an action we might sniff out the stirrings of a defence, should it come to that. And it’s even money that it will.

      92

      Graeme Souness

      Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night.

      No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time.

      The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there.

      Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment.

      Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’

      Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face.

      91

      Kriss Akabusi

      It pays testament to his enduring genius to irritate that even today, years after last setting eyes and (worse) ears on the man, it remains impossible to do the late-night channel-flick of the insomniac philistine without a frisson of terror that Kriss Akabusi might crop up in an ancient repeat of A Question of Sport.

      As a useful 400-metre runner over hurdles and on the flat, specialising in stirring last legs of the relay, Akabusi seemed a harmless enough soul. Yet even then the exaggerated can-do enthusiasm of his post-race interviews – for all that they often came moments after he had proved that he couldn’t do, and indeed hadn’t done – hinted at the horrors to come.

      Television executives evidently noticed them, and concluded that what the viewing public needed in the deep recession of the early 1990s was the human equivalent of one of those executive toys which, at the faintest touch, produce an extended burst of deranged giggling. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, Akabusi will live to be 140. The problem for the rest of us is that while he was getting all the health benefits, we were stuck in the placebo group. Worse than that, the insane chortling that was doing him such a power of good had the disturbing side effect of raising the blood pressure in the rest of us.

      If there is an unflatteringly jealous tone in the above, the reason for that is simply put. Of all the human traits, the one I envy most is the Akabusian gift of being easily amused. In a dark and gruesome world, what ineffable bliss it must be to laugh uncontrollably at nothing until the ribcage creaks and the bladder screams for mercy.

      In what passed for his televisual heyday, when he was a presenter on Record Breakers and a guest on just about everything else, nothing – not one thing – Akabusi could hear would fail to strike him as outlandishly amusing. If the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 revealed a high ridge of pressure moving towards South Utsira, he’d squeal with mirth. If the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had been marked sharply up in brisk early trading, he would yelp and shake with merriment. If his GP had told him that he’d developed gangrene in both legs, and required an immediate double amputation, he’d have collapsed with mirth and crawled around on the floor until the limbs detached themselves of their own accord. In his commitment to laughing uncontrollably at the studiedly unfunny, he was a one-man Michael McIntyre audience long before that alleged comedian emerged to raise fresh doubts about the taste and even the sanity of his compatriots.

      Whether the unceasing screeching was genuine, possibly due to an undiagnosed neurological condition, or the stand-out feature of a construction designed to get him media work, it is impossible to be sure. I don’t remember his eyes laughing in tune with his mouth, but it was all a blessedly long time ago.

      Today, Mr Akabusi does what retired sportsmen with a TV future buried in the past tend to do. He is a motivational speaker, using silly voices, demented changes of decibel level (whispering one moment, yelling the next, neither volume remotely explained by the text), anecdotes and archive footage of relay triumphs to give new meaning and direction to the lives of those unable to find a televangelist at the right price.

      No doubt he makes a decent living from reliving the highlights of a decent career, and explaining to those unable to better the late King of Tonga’s personal best for the 60-metre dash how to adapt his athletic experiences to become better, happier and richer people. I hope so. There is no obvious malice in the man, and I wish him well.

      For all that, I can’t help thinking that that the only people for whom a talk from Kriss Akabusi would constitute an effective motivational force are members of the voluntary euthanasia society Exit.

      90

      Ronnie O’Sullivan

      For this possessor of the purest natural talent ever known to British sport – or games, for those who believe that a sine qua non of any authentic sport is that it leaves the player needing a shower – lavish allowances must be made. He is the scion of a family next to which the kith and kin of John Terry, engagingly Runyonesque though they are, look like the Waltons.

      Rocket Ronnie’s father remains a house guest of Her Majesty for murdering an alleged Kray associate in a restaurant in 1982, although he is up for parole, while the mother did a bit of bird herself for tax evasion. You needn’t have a doctorate in clinical psychology, or be a close student of the parental poetry of Philip Larkin, to appreciate the effects on a formative mind.

      The extent of Ronnie’s confusion and vulnerability was spotlighted a few years ago when, flailing about to make sense of his life, a little (a very little, perhaps) СКАЧАТЬ