Читать книгу You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport - Matthew Norman - Страница 32

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Arjen Robben

It pays rich testament to this gifted Dutchman that the fans of Chelsea FC, seldom saluted as the least partisan of supporters, cannot stand the man who contributed so much to the winning of their first Premier League title in 2005–06.

It was Robben’s miraculous achievement to relegate Didier Drogba, sublime as he was at the reverse triple somersault with tuck, to the team’s silver medallist for high-board diving. The Ivorian über-narcissist is a perhaps surprising omission from this book, due to a fondness I cannot quite explain other than to say that his histrionics are much reduced now, and that what remains has become endearing. The sight of him being hauled to his feet by John Terry with a brusque ‘Come on, love, up you get, you’ll live,’ is one of the league’s more touching rituals.

There is nothing engaging about the precociously bald Netherlander, however, and there never will be. A narky, arrogant, unceasingly petulant little bleeder, Robben may or may not be world football’s most talented winger, but there’s no doubting his status as its pre-eminent whinger. Any uncertainty concerning his status was removed by his spiteful moaning about Howard Webb’s refereeing of the 2010 World Cup final. The Dutch performance, which raised the image of the infamous Uruguayan scythers of 1986 as coached by Bruce Lee, was, it goes without saying, an utter disgrace. As a betrayal of Holland’s football tradition, the premeditated attempt to kick Spain out of their rhythm in a first half of unmitigated cynical violence will sooner be forgotten than Mr Webb’s leniency towards the Dutch. One appreciated the Yorkshire copper’s aversion to showing a red card in this particular game, yet in a different context the match would have ended before half time, with Holland forfeiting a technical 3–0 victory to Spain due to having fewer than seven men on the pitch. As Johan Cruyff succinctly put it, his successors in the orange shirts were ‘anti-football’ in Soccer City that night.

And yet, when it was over Robben somehow found the chutzpah to accuse Mr Webb of favouring the Spanish, his bleatings centring on one incident of sledgehammer irony. Having spent his entire career falling melodramatically and rolling for twenty yards in feigned excruciation for no physically explicable reason, he broke the habit of a lifetime by staying on his feet when clearly tugged back late in the game by the ageing carthorse Carlos Puyol. If he had gone down then, being through on goal, even Mr Webb might have shown Puyol a straight red, although that’s far from certain, given that Mark van Bommel might have removed a scimitar from his sock and sliced Andrés Iniesta’s head off without being offered first bash at the soap by Mr Webb.

Whatever, the lure of scoring the goal that won the World Cup kept Robben from the traditional collapse. Once Iker Casillas had safely collected the ball, Robben raced towards Mr Webb in the traditional moansome-aggressive style, screaming like the face in Edvard Munch’s painting at the injustice. The outrage was rooted in his belief that he should have been rewarded for staying upright for the first time in his career. The rules of advantage, as correctly applied by Mr Webb, were an irrelevance. He had eaten his cake, and now he wanted to have it. It was a wretched vignette of a wretched man, and caught the essence of the unlovely Arjen Robben to gruesome perfection.