THERE probably isn’t a single professional footballer or manager, past or present, who will agree with this column.
And those of us on Civvy Street who have never kicked a ball for money, can never understand the chivalrous codes of conduct those men live by.
But this isn’t about that lot. It’s about those of us who pay their wages in the often vague hope that they might entertain us.
It’s about showboating. It’s about feints and dummies and nutmegs and stepovers. It’s about taking the p***.
When Raheem Sterling ended the Manchester derby by doing stepovers, while being pursued by Alexis Sanchez and Marouane Fellaini, he’d clearly crossed that mystical ‘line’ which only those in the game can truly identify.
We knew this because Fellaini kicked him up in the air, then the loveable human teddy-bear Juan Mata delivered a barrage of abuse and even City boss Pep Guardiola, high priest of the beautiful game, gave his man a ticking off.
Yet wasn’t what Sterling did exactly what City supporters pay good money to see him do?
Until these past few years, they’d waited about four decades for the chance to take the mick out of United.
Their filthy-rich Abu Dhabi owners have spent royally on world-class talent and rule-dodging lawyers to get to this point.
And here those fans were, bellowing ‘ole, ole, ole’ as City did not merely defeat United but thoroughly outclassed them.
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After a 44-pass move for City’s third goal came some saucy passing triangles involving Phil Foden and Leroy Sane, before Sterling applied the coup de grace with stepovers to delight the faithful and enrage United.
But while pro footballers can intimidate, cheat and attempt to con referees every time there’s so much as a throw-in, should they try to outfox an opponent with a cheeky piece of skill, they’re branded disrespectful show-offs.
There’s nothing more amusing to a fan than seeing their own player wallow in their team’s superiority.
We usually applaud invention and improvisation, so why the need to draw lines about exactly how a footballer outwits an opponent?
Was the original Cruyff turn disrespectful to his Swedish opponent at the 1974 World Cup? It certainly wasn’t ultimately effective as Holland ended up drawing 0-0.
What about a rabona, where a player wraps his kicking leg around the back of his standing leg? That’s a bit flash and it’s named after the Spanish word for playing truant from school so surely that’s immoral too?
Those passing triangles made Manchester United’s players look like training-ground cones but apparently they were okay, even though City were simply running down the clock.
So what’s wrong with stepovers or any other elaborate flourishes you want to add to get supporters off their seats?
Neymar gets this all the time in France, where he frequently embarrasses vastly inferior opponents. But, like Sterling, he’s a high-class entertainer in the world’s most popular sport. Who says he has to be shy about it?
And it’s not as if Sterling is some mere show-pony. Against United he was popping up at left-back to win tackles, robbing United players of possession in midfield and operating as an intelligent centre-forward late on.
This is a fully-rounded footballer, who has developed superbly under Guardiola’s guidance.
So there was no need for the City boss to tell us that he’s young and that he’ll learn. He should have nothing to learn in that sense.
But in so many ways, football has become a game obsessed with the idea of ‘showing respect’ — often with an aching lack of authenticity.
We’ll see it when Wayne Rooney is lauded at Wembley on Thursday.
And soon we’ll be seeing it when they hand out orders of service for all the different minute’s applauses we have to observe during the course of every match to show respect to this person or that.
So to make it easier for us laypeople to understand, perhaps they ought to inaugurate an FA disrespect panel and haul Sterling in front of that to teach him a lesson.
Or perhaps we can be revolutionary and just enjoy the entertainment?
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News Pictures Were Raheem Sterling’s stepovers disrespectful to Manchester United? Like the Cruyff Turn and Rabona – it’s exactly what we pay footballers to do
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Hayden Panettiere
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To achieve her kick-ass figure, Hayden – who plays cheerleader Claire Bennet in Heroes – follows the ‘quartering’ rule. She eats only a quarter of the food on her plate, then waits 20 minutes before deciding whether she needs to eat again.
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kim cattrall
Size: 10-12
Age: 52
Height: 5ft 8in
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SATC star Kim swears by gym sessions with Russian kettle bells (traditional cast-iron weights) and the South Beach Diet to give her the body she wants. To avoid overeating, Kim has a radical diet trick – squirting lemon juice on her leftovers – so she won’t carry on picking.
Kim says: “I am no super-thin Hollywood actress. I am built for men who like women to look like women.”
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