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VIVID POSTCARDS
Postcard from London

by Duncan Leigh
November 2004

The talk of the town at the moment is of course the unfortunate Adrian Mutu. How the mighty fall from grace; it doesn’t seem 5 minutes since Mutu arrived at Chelsea in a blaze of glory for a few pennies short of £16 million. However, after a dream start, when the goals seemed to go flying in from all angles, things tailed off rapidly. Now we are left with the sorry spectacle of a disgraced drugs cheat rather than the golden pin up boy who seemed to have the world at his feet.

So what went wrong?

This correspondent would be wary of speculating about what Mr Abramovich has actually got for his money, given the rumours about what happens to folks who cross that very wealthy and powerful man, but the rumour mill in London is rife with lurid tales about Mutu’s sex sessions with porn stars to set alongside a much publicised marital seperation and some trouble with the Bucharest traffic police. There were also dark murmurings about whether the acknowledged positive A sample had anything to do with a similar incident experienced by Australian goalkeeper Mark Bosnich several years ago, when a positive sample gave Chelsea the opportunity to cancel the player’s contract and thereby save them an estimated £2 million a year. Neither player had been featuring in the first team and Mutu has recently had a public falling out with his manager Jose Mourinho, who is regarded as being as ruthless as he is graceless. However, while Bosnich denies any guilt to this day, Mutu appears to have accepted it as a fair cop, and by agreeing to counselling might have escaped a more harsh penalty. This has infuriated fans of other teams, not least those Manchester United fans who saw their star defender Rio Ferdinand issued with a savage eight month ban from football for merely missing a test, regardless of the fact that a test taken immediately afterwards was completely clean (and acknowledged as such by the Football Association).

On a wider issue this is another example of the way the British press appears to operate in this era of the ‘celebrity’. The press seems to like nothing more than to build up an individual for whatever reason, then to sanctimoniously knock him back down again with revelations of marital disharmony, drugs or general salacious rumour-mongering and gossip. Just look at the examples recently from the world of sport – David Beckham’s alleged romps with various hangers-on, most notably the objectionable Rebecca Loos, Wayne Rooney’s predilection for the older lady, Sven’s bulging little black book. The great British public seems to like nothing better than to read in minute detail who was doing what to whom (and who was watching in the case of ‘dogging’ exponent Stan Collymore). The grimier and more sordid the better.

While your correspondent of course takes no interest in such gutter press – after all the first class carriage of the 7.36 from leafy Tunbridge Wells in the Garden of England to Cannon Street in the City of London is a tabloid free haven – there is no doubt that such tat sells papers and will continue to do so. After all, the fact that you have got this far shows that even you can’t resist it!