Zidane

Just back after a week in Dublin to experience the tail-end of the Zidane shock-horror (cup final head-butt on the Italian). So much pious nonsense I have not read in many a year. If football now has quasi-religious status, then people like ZZ are its high-priests -- and the world affects to be bouleverse when they behave like mere mortals. The truth is that Zidane -- a hugely uncommunicative human-being -- became a blank sheet on which any interest group could write its agenda. For the starry-eyed politico-media class, he was a much-needed symbol of integration; for the advertisers he was a "do-no-evil" role model for the masses; for many in the banlieues he was a permanent poke in the eye to the establishment. On top of that he was accredited in our cultish world with a level of genius that once would have been ascribed to an Einstein or a Leonardo. Gentlemen, please, some proportion. Today the papers are full of people saying either 1) he has disgraced himself and tarnished an otherwise faultless career or 2) that this act of instinctive competitive energy is the perfect, almost god-like, concluding touch. For God's sake let him be. He is a footballer. He did what footballers do. Leave it there.