Hacker: Striking a nerve

There’s always something to get your teeth into where football is concerned – particularly in these days of mass media – and you learn to take small bites.

However, the fare offered up in the last few weeks has been so irresistible that a serious binge session was inevitable. Football has always been a passionate game and tensions are only heightened these days with each zero added to the players’ wage slips.

Even so, it seems that you can’t move at the moment for all the ill-will and complaining. Take the AC Milan-Tottenham match last week; goodness only knows what got Gattuso’s goat but his behaviour was, at the very least, unwise.

It’s one thing to repeatedly harass Peter Crouch, the biggest player on the pitch (even if he does need a few good meals in him), but then to go picking a fight with Joe Jordan – a fearsome fellow, 59 years old or not – enters a realm quite beyond stupid.

The big kerfuffle regarding footballers using Twitter appears to be dying down, although doubtless it will rear its head again soon. Arsenal’s Jack Wilshere recently escaped punishment where Liverpool’s Ryan Babel did not, with a hastily-removed comment about inconsistent refereeing.

The impression of these footballers simply as naughty schoolchildren muttering under their breath when the teacher has his back turned is one very difficult to suppress. Where do they get it from? At any rate, Wilshere can at least look to his manager as a – er – pillar of professionalism.

Looking beyond the Premier League, it is clear that managers are also contributing to this rash of outbursts. Derby County’s Nigel Clough has said that his striker Tomasz Cywka is “not very bright” and “can go back to Wigan or wherever he came from... until he learns the game”.

Unlike the whining of the aforementioned prima donnas, there is something undeniably refreshing about hearing a manager parroting the views of that mad bloke who sits a few rows behind you. Nevertheless, this carry-on can be in neither his nor the club’s best interests.

A little closer to home, Kilmarnock’s Alexei Eremenko has evidently been rifling through the pages of his Danny Murphy textbook. In wonder at why the opposition are not prostrate before him, Eremenko hit out at the treatment he receives in the tackle from his SPL colleagues.

However, it didn’t receive a great deal of press coverage – most probably because Eremenko is not a national media darling looking to assert himself on the punditry scene in time for his retirement. Moreover, though, he just lacked the conviction of the horribly self-involved Murphy; “nutcases” these SPL players may be, but Eremenko doesn’t “think they are going out to deliberately hurt [him]”.

The victimised tone is not utilised ad nauseum, and if he wasn’t even going to name any names then he may as well not have bothered. Speaking of nausea, that charming pair Richard Keys and Andy Gray – who last month had a stab at uniting the whole nation in outrage – have announced that they are to join talkSPORT radio, as they put Sky and that reasonably well-publicised sexism debacle behind them.

What better news with which to send you on your way? As if the talkSPORT studio wasn’t already a veritable furnace of bluster and downright bull, it should now have enough hot air to float the whole station and all its ‘experts’ up, up and away – far out of earshot. The Journal has its fingers crossed, anyway.