Should Premier League Footballers Be Expected to Be Braver Than We Are?

It is perhaps an inopportune week to question whether a powerful, angry white man may have a point hidden beneath the balderdash and bluster, but given Rome is probably burnt to a crisp already, why not enjoy the sound of a little fiddling. 

At no point on his campaign trail was Donald Trump ever asked about Manchester United defenders Luke Shaw and Chris Smalling, but one suspects if he had, his response would have been in line with Jose Mourinho's.

Earlier in the year, Trump proffered a view decrying the fact America's national pastime, NFL Football, "has become soft like our country has become soft," per the Washington Post's Cindy Boren. Mourinho used the same sledgehammer to crack the nut that is the fitness of Shaw and Smalling, after the pair declared themselves unavailable for last weekend's game against Swansea City.

He never used the "S" word specifically, instead choosing to allude to it with all the subtlety of leaving a catalogue open on the page of a desired gift the week before Christmas. He ringed what he wanted just to negate any chance of ambiguity.

Mourinho lamented post-match, per the Guardian's Jamie Jackson: 

"

Smalling doesn't feel that he can play 100 per cent with his pain, Luke Shaw told me this morning that he was not in the condition to play, so we had to build a defensive line.

There is a difference between the brave, who want to play at any cost, and the ones for whom a little pain can make a difference.

If I were to speak with the many great football people of this team, they will say they played many times without being 100 per cent.

"

The problem with any debate is separating its content from the person who started it. Fail to do so and it's practically impossible not to be influenced by imagining, subconscious or otherwise, the argument spewing forth from the mouth of its originator. When that mouth belongs to Mourinho, it's hard to make out the spin from the spite. 

Given Mourinho's detractors, to momentarily borrow another Trumpism, would like to build a large unscalable wall around the Portuguese's persecution complex, it's little wonder the majority of sympathy appears to have come down on the side of the players.

If, as seems to be the case, Mourinho was making a wider point about the culture he has inherited at Old Trafford—with the BBC's Simon Stone reporting he is investigating all aspects of first-team affairs—to go for Shaw again seems ill-advised to the point of being a little crass.

It's like bawling at the pot washer after a bad meal at a Michelin star restaurant.

The 21-year-old's injury issues are well documented, with the player having complained of pains in the same leg he broke in two places playing against PSV Eindhoven 14 months ago in the UEFA Champions League. Who could have envisaged in a season in which Wayne Rooney has found himself benched for much of it, it would be the relationship between Mourinho and Shaw most commented upon?

Professional Footballers' Association chief Gordon Taylor has been quick to register disapproval, warning Mourinho a little empathy wouldn't go amiss, per The Independent's Jack Austin:

"

I was disappointed by that [Mourinho's comments] because, knowing the individuals, they are both highly thought of.

They've got personal problems which I don't need to relay, but sometimes a manager needs to be a psychologist as well, and also to be a counsellor because you can't treat everybody in the team [the same], every manager must know that. Every player in a team is different.

[...]

I think that's what management these days has to be. I'm not talking about being soft, I’m talking about being understanding.

"

Notwithstanding Taylor would have defended Joseph Stalin as being no more than a "little overbearing" had the leader of the Soviet Union been an admittedly unlikely member of the PFA, he makes a fair and pertinent point. Lest we forget, footballers are no less human than you or I, often with lives as complicated or fraught.

The subjects of Mourinho's ire are said to be bewildered with the criticism, according to Paul Hirst of The Times. Both have recently come back from injury; both have played with the aid of painkillers this season.

England interim boss Gareth Southgate has inadvertently profited from the situation in being able to demonstrate he possesses a backbone, insisting he has never known either to be "flaky."

Gary Neville, who has similarly worked with both players at international level, registered surprise Smalling has come in for criticism in a piece for Sky Sports. His assessment of Shaw was more nuanced and a little less emphatic:

"

I think Luke is a more complex character. He is young, has moved away from Southampton, and he needs to mature physically and mentally.

 

 

He is a young person with big expectation, but he is now in the spotlight at a big club, and Manchester United doesn't take prisoners.

Jose Mourinho won't either because it will be him or the players that are going to survive and he doesn't work on the theory it will be the players.

"

For all the goodwill from outsiders peering in, Shaw's camp need to stop leaks involving their client from coming out for reasons of preservation. If they can't, Shaw should start enquiring as to whether they will be better at finding him a new club than they are keeping his name out of the headlines.

Like Brian Clough before him, and Bill Shankly before him, Mourinho has no time for injured players.

Clough's almost phobia-like struggle to deal with players who were no strangers to the treatment room, after his own career was finished by injury, is recounted in Jonathan Wilson's excellent Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You: The Biography: "Clough the manager had a clear aversion to injuries and injured players, almost as though he couldn't bear the sight of a plaster cast for the memories it brought back."

Mourinho's similar aversions are well documented. Arjen Robben, who has always said he enjoyed playing under him at Chelsea, confirmed as much in an interview with the Guardian's Donald McRae last year.

"For me it was very good to work with him at that age because I was young and, yeah, with Mourinho, you have to be mentally very strong. You have to jump on the train with him or…you're off. So it was great for my development," said Robben, evoking images of Shaw looking lost on a platform like Paddington Bear.

"It was hard at first because I came with an injury. It was very difficult for me and also for him. Of course, he doesn’t like players who get injured."

The views of Real Madrid bete noire Sergio Ramos and former Chelsea club doctor Eva Carneiro would make for similarly interesting reading.

As a spokesman for the debate on how far managers should push players carrying injuries, Mourinho makes a terrible mouthpiece. Nonetheless, it's still a debate worth having. 

It should be noted here how there was no such backlash against Jurgen Klopp last season, when the Liverpool manager said Daniel Sturridge needed to play through the pain barrier to address long-standing injury issues.

The striker missed 40 of 58 matches in his predecessor Brendan Rodgers' final full season in charge at Anfield due to calf, thigh and hip problems.

When Klopp urged Sturridge to learn "what is serious pain or what is only pain," there was more chin stroking than condemnation. Klopp was cast as Merseyside's Friedrich Nietzsche for broadly saying the same thing Mourinho has been castigated for this past week.

A winning grin carries a fair amount of goodwill.

Roy Keane has echoed Mourinho's sentiments this week, having had a pop at Everton in his capacity as Republic of Ireland assistant manager. Wading into a spat between Republic boss Martin O'Neill and Everton counterpart Ronald Koeman over the availability of James McCarthy, Keane has been in typically waspish good form.

"I always felt the Everton players were going to turn up on crutches or crawling in the hotel door, and now it looks like we are probably going to have that issue again with Koeman. I hope not," Keane said, per the BBC. "Maybe Everton as a club need to—and it's a brilliant football club—maybe their players need to toughen up a little bit."

Coming from another alpha male like Keane, it could be interpreted as being little more than posturing; him and Mourinho a pair of great apes beating their chests up high, while everybody else below them gets on with eating a banana and wondering what all the fuss is about.

In her Guardian column this week, the always erudite Marina Hyde wrote amusingly on how each Remembrance Day is now commemorated by reams of column inches pontificating on how modern day footballers are sorry excuses compared to their forefathers. Some Premier League stars haven't even signed up for the Territorial Army, apparently.

"

Jose Mourinho is presenting white feathers to two of his defenders. Chris Smalling and Luke Shaw have fallen short in a variety of martial metaphors: they haven't put their bodies on the line, they haven't played "at any cost", they are cowards by another name. 

[...]

It's one of the endlessly implied questions of the modern age, isn't it: would footballers die bravely for us?

[...]

It's just more woolly "debate" about sacrifice in the age of pampering. I don't know if it is all predicated on some hilariously misplaced idea of masculinity from which my gender mercifully insulates me.

"

It's hard to find fault with Hyde's logic. Yet for all the talk of its gentrification, football remains a sport where demonstrations of machismo are as prevalent on the field as in the stands—it's ubiquitous throughout the game. It seems a little strange, then, that the views of Mourinho and Keane are seen as antiquated by a seeming majority.

Holding footballers accountable against loftier moral standards than we would judge ourselves is palpable nonsense, but are the principle sentiments held by Mourinho and Keane, parking ill-judged specifics aside for the minute, not aired just as readily in other sports without censure?

Cyclists in the Tour de France are iconised for pushing their bodies to the absolute limit; likewise boxers are lionised for the Sweet Science of Bruising. Rugby remains a hooligans' sport played by gentlemen, and call me a mad man if you will, but I'd rather risk playing football with a groin strain than drive a Formula One car about as stable as half a dozen Lego pieces stuck together at 240 mph on a wet track in Monaco.

The writer Norman Mailer once wrote: "There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will." It is those who fall into the latter camp that are the most fascinating.

There's something stupefyingly glorious about Bert Trautmann playing the last 17 minutes of the 1956 FA Cup final with a broken neck; Tiger Woods grinning (well probably not grinning knowing Woods) and bearing a broken leg and torn ACL to win the 2008 U.S. Open; Stuart Peace playing on with a broken leg for West Ham United against Watford in 1999; Cesc Fabregas scoring a penalty for Arsenal against Barcelona with a fractured leg in 2010; Franz Beckenbauer making light of a broken clavicle in the 1970 World Cup semi-final by placing his arm in a sling; Liverpool winning the league in 1965/66 using just 14 players (two of whom only made a handful of appearances); Los Angeles Rams defensive end Jack Youngblood playing the entire 1979 playoffs, including Super Bowl XIV, with a fractured left fibula.

It may be childish to hold these feats of frankly childish physical recklessness in thrall, but is this not part of sport's great appeal? To reduce us to a childlike state of wonder, admiring these other worldly figures as we might a statue on a plinth. There's plenty of time to be an adult, just as soon as the weekend magic dissipates and the office looms large on Monday morning. 

On a personal level, when it came to putting my own body on the line playing Sunday league football, I was such a flake a spectator once tried to stick me in his ice-cream cone. All of which makes it even more enjoyable when watching a footballer leave the field looking so tired they might burst into tears before they reach the showers. And if it's because they've been carrying a calf strain, sorry Marina, I just love them more. 

Nobody would advocate any sportsperson putting themselves in serious harm, there's plenty that have and regret it, but if Mourinho thinks his side is too soft, he's not necessarily the ogre many perceive him to be for telling them so. This current Manchester United side probably is too soft. 

Maybe it's a generational thing. Without wishing to bite the hand that writes the comments posted below the line, there does seem to be an awful lot of po-faced thinking applied to football these days. Supporters quoting sport scientists about why a player is right to want more time on the touchline to recover lost muscle fibre, as bar room chat, sounds about as much fun as giving energy bill vouchers for a birthday gift.

George Orwell would be spinning in his grave: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting." 

It sounds like something Roy Keane might say. Fittingly, then, it's the Irishman left to have the final word on the matter, courtesy of a hypocritical, yet no less entertaining for it anecdote about Ruud van Nistelrooy, taken from his autobiography The Second Half:

"

Ruud had his own traits; he could be moody at times – unlike me. But he was a good guy. He missed a Cup semi-final because of an injury – I think it was the one against Arsenal, at Villa Park in 2004. He came down the morning of the game and said, 'I can't play, my knee's sore.'

And I went, 'What’s up with you?'

I had a sore hamstring myself.

He said, 'Oh, I've been feeling my knee during the night.'

And I was like, 'It's the Cup semi-final, for f--k's sake.'

He said, 'Well, I've only got one body. I need to look after it.'

I was thinking he was the fool, but I think now that I probably was. I played and my hamstring was f--king killing me. I think I actually had a torn hamstring. Ruud ended up playing till he was thirty-nine, and still looks twenty-one. And I thought he was the idiot.

"