Monday, March 8, 2010
News Shock!!! Footballer has cosy night in
In recent weeks far too many column inches have been occupied by prurient reportage of and speculation about the intimate lives of two of England's leading footballers.
And the intrigue hasn't just confined itself to the tittle-tattle pages of the redtops and the celebrity segments of some of the frothier news programmes. In fact, questions of footballers' seemingly rampant infidelity have also occupied the airwaves on Radio 4, on The Andrew Marr Show and, believe it or not, for a good ten minutes of Question Time.
I, for one, am beginning to get really bored by newspaper stories concerning themselves with the overactive love-lives of John Terry and Ashley Cole.
Let's forget for a minute that they are men, although that obviously plays a part, and ponder a minute what most people their age, 29, are actually doing and ask ourselves the question, is their behaviour actually any different from the norm?
I've got many friends, male and female, who, their romantic aspirations shattered by the countless divorces of their parents' generations, flit from partner to partner, fling to fling and infidelity to infidelity.
Although I have to question the class and integrity of anyone who is willing to sell details of their celebrity tryst to a newspaper, and by proxy the celebrity who became involved with them in the first place, I can't help but feel that such stories should never be news.
Why on earth should Footballer Has Fling or Twentysomething Cheats on Partner actually be considered newsworthy, even if it is, in the case of John Terry, with the ex-girlfriend of a teammate? This mateship factor is hardly interesting either, most infidelities involve complex and intimate webs of relationships.
If the media want a Man Bites Dog story, they could do worse than look at Paul Scholes, a footballer who in this age of shag-happy celebrity players, is "shy", "unassuming", married, a father-of-three and, by all accounts, faithful.
Perhaps it doesn't set the pulse racing, but the front pages could do worse than carry the headline Scholes Stays In with an accompanying story detailing how his ideal day is to, "Train in the morning, pick up the kids from school, play with them, have tea, get them to bed and then watch a bit of TV."
Image © Crystian Cruz via Flickr under Creative Commons Licence
