LITMIR.BIZ

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triple somersault with tuck, to the team’s silver medallist for high-board diving. The Ivorian über-narcissist is a perhaps surprising omission from this book, due to a fondness I cannot quite explain other than to say that his histrionics are much reduced now, and that what remains has become endearing. The sight of him being hauled to his feet by John Terry with a brusque ‘Come on, love, up you get, you’ll live,’ is one of the league’s more touching rituals.

      There is nothing engaging about the precociously bald Netherlander, however, and there never will be. A narky, arrogant, unceasingly petulant little bleeder, Robben may or may not be world football’s most talented winger, but there’s no doubting his status as its pre-eminent whinger. Any uncertainty concerning his status was removed by his spiteful moaning about Howard Webb’s refereeing of the 2010 World Cup final. The Dutch performance, which raised the image of the infamous Uruguayan scythers of 1986 as coached by Bruce Lee, was, it goes without saying, an utter disgrace. As a betrayal of Holland’s football tradition, the premeditated attempt to kick Spain out of their rhythm in a first half of unmitigated cynical violence will sooner be forgotten than Mr Webb’s leniency towards the Dutch. One appreciated the Yorkshire copper’s aversion to showing a red card in this particular game, yet in a different context the match would have ended before half time, with Holland forfeiting a technical 3–0 victory to Spain due to having fewer than seven men on the pitch. As Johan Cruyff succinctly put it, his successors in the orange shirts were ‘anti-football’ in Soccer City that night.

      And yet, when it was over Robben somehow found the chutzpah to accuse Mr Webb of favouring the Spanish, his bleatings centring on one incident of sledgehammer irony. Having spent his entire career falling melodramatically and rolling for twenty yards in feigned excruciation for no physically explicable reason, he broke the habit of a lifetime by staying on his feet when clearly tugged back late in the game by the ageing carthorse Carlos Puyol. If he had gone down then, being through on goal, even Mr Webb might have shown Puyol a straight red, although that’s far from certain, given that Mark van Bommel might have removed a scimitar from his sock and sliced Andrés Iniesta’s head off without being offered first bash at the soap by Mr Webb.

      Whatever, the lure of scoring the goal that won the World Cup kept Robben from the traditional collapse. Once Iker Casillas had safely collected the ball, Robben raced towards Mr Webb in the traditional moansome-aggressive style, screaming like the face in Edvard Munch’s painting at the injustice. The outrage was rooted in his belief that he should have been rewarded for staying upright for the first time in his career. The rules of advantage, as correctly applied by Mr Webb, were an irrelevance. He had eaten his cake, and now he wanted to have it. It was a wretched vignette of a wretched man, and caught the essence of the unlovely Arjen Robben to gruesome perfection.

      74

      David O’Leary

      No entry in this book has caused me as much grief as that for this oiliest of rags on the managerial bonfire. Acknowledging that Mr O’Leary evokes fierce distaste is the easy bit. Pinning down precisely why has proved the problem.

      A portion of it, having said that, is easily explained. The former Ireland and Arsenal central defender memorably disgraced himself as manager of Leeds United. I refer here not to the grandiose £100 million transfer-market splurge that contributed to the club’s flirtation with bankruptcy a few short years after it had come within a game of the Champions League final. As detached analysts of Leeds United will agree, that was greatly to the credit of O’Leary and his anagrammatic chairman Peter Ridsdale (dire Leeds prat), the sadness being that they so narrowly failed to pull it off.

      The incident that best illuminates Mr O’Leary’s odiousness was the publication of his book Leeds United: A Season on Trial within days of an assault case involving two of his players, Jonathan Woodgate (convicted) and Lee Bowyer (acquitted), being concluded. When he denied intending to profit from the beating up of an Asian man by insisting that the book’s title was a hapless coincidence, he mixed the defining twin traits of arch hypocrisy and rampant self-righteousness into a lethal cocktail. Blithely continuing to select Mr Woodgate added a needlessly bitter twist.

      More than anything, however, I suspect that the violent reaction to O’Leary is visceral. The sight of that overly smooth face and those shifty cow eyes, and the sound of that creepy, unctuous voice rouse subliminal memories of Jungle Book python Kaa, or possibly early-era Celebrity Squares Bob Monkhouse, and the guts respond by piping acid up towards the oesophagus.

      You don’t see or hear much of him any more. Either he weaned himself off the addiction to linking his name with managerial vacancies he had less chance of being invited to fill than the late Professor Stanley Unwin, or football hacks finally tired of giving credence to these fantasies. But it pays tribute to the enduring influence of David O’Leary, from whom insincerity oozes like toxic treacle, that the thought of him retains the power to send you scurrying for the anti-emetics to this day.

      73

      Lleyton Hewitt

      When it comes to mellowing arguably the least charming sportsman even Australia has yet produced, nothing has succeeded like failure. Now that he has been reduced to a journeyman, tinkering about in the lower reaches of the world’s top thirty, and occasionally making a Grand Slam quarter-final, Lleyton Hewitt is little more than a minor irritant, where once he was a pustulating, septic boil on the buttock of professional tennis.

      It seems almost surreal today that this cocky ball of ocker bumptiousness was the tour’s leading player in the early nough-ties. Yet, inexplicable as it now appears, in the thankfully brief interregnum between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer he twice ended the year as world number one, and snaffled two Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon in 2002, and the US Open the following year). The mortifying prospect then was that he would dominate for years, and perhaps he might have done so, but for one poignantly minuscule slice of bad luck. He had exceedingly little talent, judged by the standards of those who so quickly supplanted him, for playing tennis.

      What he did have in spades was speed, footwork, energy and reliable passing shots off both wings, and for a little while that amalgam of the lower-range attributes was enough to take out less dependable baseliners, and serve-volleyers such as Tim Henman (whom he ritually slaughtered whenever they met) and Sampras, whom he dismantled in that US Open final.

      And then, the Lord be praised, the quality of men’s tennis surged with such startling rapidity that Hewitt went swiftly from number one to also-ran. It was no longer enough to be a latterday Jimmy Connors, all effort and sweat and what George Galloway knows as indefatigability. To have a prayer of coping with the Fed, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, you needed variety, cleverness and a nuclear weapon – an A-bomb serve like Andy Roddick’s, for example, or an intercontinental ballistic missile of a flat forehand in the style of Juan Martín del Potro.

      Hewitt had nothing of the sort. What he had, and has still, is what I would call typically self-conscious Aussie cussedness, but he would boastfully identify as ‘heart’. Hence that endlessly repeated gesture of the fist banging his chest, en route to losing another love or ‘bagel’ set to the Fed, as he looks up to his box screeching ‘Come awn!’

      Heart’s fine, if that’s what it is, but brain is better, and a combination of both best of all. Cerebrally, alas, Hewitt is the amoeba of the tennis world, the personification of the classically Australian conviction that it doesn’t matter a jot if a nine-year-old can’t tell the time so long as he shows promise at Aussie Rules football or she is in the right swimming team.

      Thus it was, during the US Open of 2001, that he told a press conference that there wasn’t a soupçon of racist intent in the incident for which he will be remembered. He was playing James Blake, the Harlem-born black American, when a black line judge had the impudence to foot-fault him twice at important moments in the third set. Hewitt approached the umpire’s chair, and the microphone captured the following remark: ‘Look at him,’ said Hewitt, gesturing towards the line judge, ‘and tell me what the similarity is [gesturing now towards Mr Blake]. I want him [line judge again] off the court.’ The umpire, the Swiss Andreas Egli, didn’t oblige Hewitt there, but nor did he announce: ‘Code violation, paranoiac racist idiocy,

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