The opposite of good is bad.

The opposite of short is tall

The opposite of heroic is…

Well what? Cowardly? Sensible?? No schmuck???

We all love a hero. Every movie has a hero. Douglas Barder climbed back into his Spitfire are losing both his legs to fight the Hun once more. Gary Cooper faced the badies at High Noon because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Clint Eastwood only played heroic characters. And we loved them all.

Sporting heroes are the stuff of legend. Bert Trautmann playing in the 1956 cup final with a broken bone in his neck. Why? What motivates such behaviour?  Because he was a German? Some Neitzean Ubermensch? Because he was stupid?? To prove what, exactly, and to whom?

JPR Williams, famous Wales fullback and doctor (ahhhhh, those days of amateur sport…) cut his face playing, went off, stitched himself up on the touch line (with a fountain pen and bootlace… ok, maybe not) and played the match out.

Maybe its a ‘man thing’ along with staring at legs on the high street; something so inbuilt, so innate, so hard-wired that we all have it, us Men. But we don’t. When Jesus famously ‘turned the other cheek’ he gave the less heroic a noble ‘out’. Bless him.

And so to Hugo Lloris, the Spurs goalie. Collides with Romelu Lukaku (that’s a footballer, not an asteroid) and gets whacked with the Ivorian’s knee so hard on the head that he loses consciousness. The collision was of sufficient power that Lukako then limped off to have an ice pack applied to his knee. Oh, that’s hard, ouch!

But Lloris pushed away the medics, laughed at the stretcher they’d brought onto the pitch, sent the now-raring-to-go substitute goalie back to the bench, told his manager to fuck off and insisted on finishing the game.

A brain scan performed the next day showed two things. That there was no damage and that Lloris was definitely French. But the French aren’t heroes? Never. They lie down and get invaded by everyone and anyone. French children are all given white flags by their godparents at their Christenings. Its a tradition.

Lloris should not have been allowed to play on. French or not. It was not about heroism or ‘manning up’ or any such knuckle-dragging bollocks. Its about common sense. He was concussed, therefore he was not in a fit state and he could have fucked up and let in a goal. And concussed people are famously not great at making judgments, particularly as to their own health. The manager should not have given Lloris a decision that was not his to make.

Thought the real crime was the referee booking Lukaku. What a nob. Accidents happen; its a physical game. A simple, unintentional collision on the pitch. And since when is it a crime to attack a Frenchman? Not in this country, thank you very much.

Happy heroic Tuesday

 

A xxxx