What Wizards Guard Gilbert Arenas Looks Like to a British Soccer Fan

News that Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas has been indefinitely suspended from the NBA is creeping its way across the Atlantic and over to mainstream media in England.

The UK national newspapers are now starting to cover the story that Arenas brought three guns to his locker at the Verizon Center in Washington D.C., using them in a "misguided effort to play a joke" on his teammate Javaris Crittenton.

Now it appears this poor attempt at a joke hasn't really gone down too well, with NBA commissioner David Stern most certainly taking a stern approach, for behaviour that made Arenas "not currently fit to take the court."

Even more surprisingly, he then went and pointed his index fingers, as if they were guns, at his teammates before a game in Philadelphia!

Now admittedly, as a predominantly soccer, cricket and tennis fan living in Britain, I don't know much about the goings on in the National Basketball Association, but what I do know is that this Gilbert Arenas guy seems like an ass.

He's earning $111 million over six years (or $18.5 million a year), and yet he's foolish enough to do something like this?

Most soccer players at the highest level of the sport earn nowhere near this amount, and yet if anything like this happened in our best league, the English Premier League, the player would probably be banned indefinitely from the sport and have to cough up a multi-million pound fine.

More importantly, they'd keep a low media profile, repeatedly say how sorry they are and vow never to do it again, and nonetheless people would still hate that player forever.

But after reading this news about Arenas, I read some of his tweets on Twitter, which read, "i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny" and "i understand this is serious..but if u ever met me you know i dont do serious things im a goof ball this story today dont sound goofy to me."

Yes, Gilbert Arenas, you most certainly are a "goof ball." I read the more serious statement he released, before then reading the news of his actions in Philadelphia a day later.

To the British soccer fan, Gilbert Arenas redefines our whole understanding of sporting stars.

Some of them have all the money they need, all the fame they could want, and yet they neglect their responsibilities as role models, and don't care about (or perhaps just don't even realise) the implications their actions have.