Brazil’s Neymar is sucking the joy out of football with his glass legs and comedic performance
I’D rather England win the World Cup than Brazil. Neymar. He’s why. One of the most gifted players in the world, they say.
I don’t agree. To be considered great, like Messi and Ronaldo, you need a sterling character, both on and off the pitch. (OK, Ronaldo has thrashed his in the past couple of months). Neymar’s is hollow. He is a footballer without a soul. How can anyone like him?
He may shine in fits and starts, but over the course of 90 minutes he will spend more time rolling around on the deck trying to con referees than playing the game the way it should be played, with guile, craft and, above all, honesty.
All that talent, yet, being a footballing comedian is in his DNA.
He has glass legs. At the last World Cup in Russia, Swiss TV station RTS counted how much time Neymar spent on the ground during Brazil’s failed campaign. Fourteen incredulous minutes. Count out loud to 840. Incredible.
His antics and hysterics take all the joy out of watching him “play”.
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They make people like me want Brazil to lose. They’ve won it enough times anyway. The most successful side in World Cup history, with five triumphs.
Another golden statue would be all very meh, especially with Neymar front and centre dancing a Samba celebration. Watching him prance around after Brazil’s easy 4-1 victory over South Korea in the last 16 on Monday filled me with nausea.
ITV World Cup pundit and master of calling it as it is, Roy Keane, thundered in inimitable style: “I’ve never seen so much dancing. I can’t believe what I’m watching, it’s like watching Strictly.”
He added, somewhat tongue in cheek, “People say it’s their culture . . . I don’t know. The first goal I don’t mind, but the fourth goal, the jig or whatever they are doing, I’m not happy with it.”
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Fellow pundit Graeme Souness was in Keane’s corner. Neither Souness nor Keane were much fond of showboaters when they played. And their disdain for the greatest modern-day showboater in the game was as crunching as the tackles both were famous for.
Souness boomed about Neymar: “He’s got incredible ability. He was heir apparent to the throne of Messi and Ronaldo but he’s not picked the baton up for me.”
The no-nonsense Scot added: “Some of the football was fabulous, but I’m thinking — and he’d (looking at Keane) be the exact same if he was out there - you would’ve emptied him.
“Some of his antics with his showboating, it’s not for me.” I can only imagine what would have happened to Neymar had Keane or Souness been on the same pitch. Emptied is Souness’s polite phrase.
It would have been enough to make the hardest men wince.
If Neymar’s footballing style doesn’t get your goat, maybe his politics will give you a moral itch as they prepare to take on Croatia in the quarter-finals this afternoon (Ajmo Hrvatska!!).
He is a fervent supporter of Jair Bolsonaro, inset, the one-time President of Brazil famed for his homophobia (“I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son”); his misoginy (“I wouldn’t rape you. You’re not worth it”) and his racism: (“Indians are undoubtedly changing . . . they are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”)
After ruling Brazil for four nasty years, Bolsonaro went for re-election in October. He failed, thankfully. His biggest celebrity supporter was of course, Neymar, who went on the Far Right leader’s Youtube to tell the world: “The values that the President represents, they are the same as mine.”
Are you comfortable with a guy like that winning football’s top tournament and lifting the game’s ultimate prize?
No, I didn’t think so. So come on England.
COST OF LIVING CRISIS
A COUNTRY without its most important asset – its young – won’t go very far.
A worrying study released by the Central Statistics Office this week revealed that more than HALF of under-30s are considering emigrating from expensive Ireland.
Some 57 per cent of 11,000 18 to 30-year-olds questioned said “they would consider emigrating to lower their cost of living”.
A further 43 per cent said they are preparing to leave because renting here is unaffordable. (At more than two grand a month for a pokey flat in Dublin they’re not wrong).
A further one in three say they worry most about how to raise a family in Ireland.
If this study doesn’t make Micheal and Leo sit bolt upright, then they are in the wrong jobs. Or maybe they’re considering fecking off too?
Sure we can leave the country to the tourists and the hoteliers?
GUILTY OF TAX FRAUD
DONALD TRUMP was dealt another blow this week when a jury in New York found his business empire guilty of tax fraud.
The Trump Organization helped make him a billionaire and propel him to the White House in 2016. Now, it could derail his efforts to run again.
The organization was found guilty in Manhattan’s State Supreme Court on all 17 felony counts of tax fraud and evasion.
The prosecution argued that for years the company gave executives off-the-books perks, including luxury apartments, top-of-the-range motors, under-the-table cash at Christmas and even free cable TV. No tax was paid on any of it.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office didn’t indict Trump personally. But it did invoke his name throughout the trial, saying he even personally paid for some of the gratuities.
After the verdict, District Attorney Alvin Bragg said: “We got to see the inner workings of the Trump Organization, the greed, the lies, the cheating.”
The conviction is a body blow for Trump’s re-election drive. It will alienate further top Republicans, many of whom are already frosty towards him in the wake of the recent midterm election failures.
I’d wager Trump won’t make it on to the ballot. His goose is cooked.
MAJOR WIN
HATS off to Morocco for reaching the World Cup quarter-finals.
Their backs-to-the-wall victory on penalties over Spain brought back memories of Italia ’90 for many, no doubt.
Morocco full-back Achraf Hakimi, born and raised in Spain, scored the all-important spot kick to send the Spaniards packing.
Hakimi is to Morocco what David O’Leary was to Ireland.
He was swamped by team-mates just like O’Leary was when he scored Ireland’s decisive penalty over Romania to send us through to the 1990 World Cup quarter-finals.
It’s some achievement to reach the last eight, as we well know. The Italians broke our hearts in 1990. Will Portugal be Morocco’s nemesis?
Whatever, this Morocco team will live for ever in the memory, just like Jack’s Army.
LIVE TO LAUGH
FOR many, life without I’m A Celeb has become meaningless. Without a dose of bush tucker, we stare into the abyss. Until something else tickles our fancy and takes hold to distract us from the inevitable end.
Yet to happen to me.
Forgive me for continuing the sombre tone, but such is life; a series of diversions until we meet our maker.
It’s how we choose to live those moments that matter. With a laugh or a frown, a whimper or a roar.
Those who laugh live longest. Which is why we miss Ant & Dec so much. The masters of live repartee; the modern-day Morecambe & Wise, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Bert & Ernie. Born mischief makers.
And it’s on Celeb where they excel at making it all worthwhile. They bring light to the three most miserable weeks of winter.