Duleep Allirajah wonders how the Football Association has managed to avoid hearing what soccer players say on the pitch until now:
Rooney swore? So f***ing what
Those fretting over the footballer’s anglo-saxon turn of phrase have clearly never been to a match before.
Wayne Rooney’s angry outburst was curious. What did it mean? Who was he addressing? In appearing to pick a fight with a TV camera, it immediately struck me as an homage to Robert De Niro’s famous ‘You talking to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.
In a statement issued by his club, the player said: ‘Emotions were running high, and on reflection my heat-of-the-moment reaction was inappropriate. It was not aimed at anyone in particular.’ Maybe he was railing against his inner demons. Maybe there is no deeper meaning. Maybe it was a release of pent-up frustration after months of domestic strife and poor goal-scoring form.
But enough of my speculative interpretation, it’s the Football Association’s response that we should really be bothered about. The FA has banned Rooney for two matches for using ‘offensive, insulting and/or abusive language’. You don’t need to be a lipreader to work out that footballers swear quite a lot; every Saturday you’ll find them effing and blinding like proverbial troopers. But while disciplinary action for abusing match officials is nothing new, a ban for swearing per se is quite unprecedented.
