Over the years while I was working, I heard lots and lots of
differing reasons why people were unable to come into the office due to some
ailment, illness or injury, ranging from the probable to the implausible, from
the genuine influenza to the unlikely one day flu. But in all those years I
never heard of anyone claiming that they were unable to work because they were
too tired (someone once phoned to say they felt "too weak" to come
in, but that was an exception). In fact the only profession that I know of
where feeling tired is considered a reasonable excuse for not being able to
perform is ironically one in which fitness is assumed, that is professional
football.
England recently played a Euro 2016 qualifier in Estonia and
Liverpool's Raheem Sterling might reasonably have been expected to play, but
no, he warmed the bench before participating in just the final 24 minutes. England
manager Roy Hodgson was quoted as saying Sterling was "complaining that he
was a little bit tired and not feeling his best so we decided not to risk
him." The old argument, whether professional footballers should ever be
too tired to play, has been rehearsed many, many times over the years and all playing
football at that level is a job, just like working in a bank or a factory is a
job. I can just imagine how sympathetic the manager of a car manufacturing
plant would be if one of his workers rang in to say he was too tired to come to
work. "Get your a@*e in here
now," would be the likely response.
 |
| Raheem Sterling: Too tired to play football. Picture: The Sun |
You can tell that professional football is just a job to
many players at the highest level when you look at how many are happy enough to
sit on the bench and pick up their wages and not actually play very often.
Perhaps I am being naive, but I would have thought that being a professional
footballer would mean that you wanted to play at every opportunity, but
apparently not. Like many boys, I dreamed of a career as a professional
footballer when I was young, although I realised fairly soon that I would never
be good enough, however had I have been I'm sure I would have just wanted to
play, play and play.
Just as "tired and emotional" is a well known
euphemism for inebriation,[1]
so "tired" alone has, I am certain, been used on more than one
occasion within football as a roundabout way of indicating a player's unavailability
for some other, perhaps delicate, reason. Many years ago I recall a story (which
may have been apocryphal) of a player with a major club who picked something up
following some Ugandan discussions[2]
and whose subsequent availability was described as being due to a groin strain
(so not too far from the truth then).
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| The late George Brown, for whom "tired and emotional" was coined. |
Euphemisms are a rich source of humour and two of my
favourites are "watching badgers" which was an expression used by Welsh
Secretary Ron Davies after being photographed on Clapham Common whilst engaged
in sexual activity with a stranger, and "economical with the truth"
which requires no explanation, but I digress.
All of us of a certain age look back and think that various
aspects of life were better twenty, thirty or forty years ago (depending upon
our age), so it is easy to look at professional sport in general and football
in particular and, through rose tinted spectacles, pick out the parts that are
wanting compared with the good old days. Today the clubs in the Premier League
have squads of 25 players, many of whom train, pick up their wages, sit on the
bench but play infrequently. Compared with their predecessors, today's players
are fitter, better prepared and required to do much less so it is little wonder
that complaints of tiredness are met with such scepticism, particularly when in
Sterling's case it has been reported that just a day after he was too tired to
play football, he was energetic enough to go out nightclubbing until the early
hours.
Before anyone accuses me of picking on Raheem Sterling, or
indeed of suggesting that there was anything dubious about his claim to be
tired, I am not. I have no reason to suppose that his tiredness was anything
other than genuine, although since he is not twenty until next month he really
should be as fit as he is ever going to be. To put things in perspective
however, when Manchester United's Bill Foulkes was that age he combined playing
for his club and the England Under 23 side with part-time work in a coal mine.
I doubt that Foulkes ever missed a game due to tiredness; there again I doubt
that Foulkes ever saw the inside of a nightclub either.
 |
| Bill Foulkes, Manchester United legend and part-time coal miner. Picture: football365 |
Come Easter there will no doubt be Premier League managers
bleating about the "punishing schedule" that requires the delicate
flowers who play for them to participate in two games in five or perhaps four
days. Back in December 2013 Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said it was
"horrendous" that his team had to play six games in 23 days. It is
fortunate that Arsene doesn't manage a non-League team, many of whom play as
many as eight, nine or even ten games in the that number of days at the end of
the season following a winter of postponements. And these are players who hold
down full-time jobs outside the game too. Are they tired? Yes, probably, but
they get on with it.
Thoughts of tiredness probably entered the heads of the
Aston Villa players' heads when they won the old First Division championship in
1981, but that didn't stop seven of them playing all 42 league games. They
didn't have a squad of 25, they used only fourteen players in League games that
season. Their manager at the time, Ron Saunders, was very much of the
old school type of manager who would have given short shrift to any of his
players who complained of being tired. What he might have said about Raheem
Sterling being tired in October would have been interesting!
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