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| Serge Aurier’s PSG rant spewed insults but his impudence was exhilarating | Serge Aurier’s PSG rant spewed insults but his impudence was exhilarating |
| (about 7 hours later) | |
| It is always instructive to get the view from abroad and this week it fell to the Paris Saint-Germain manager, Laurent Blanc, to observe of social media sedition: “Look at what happens in England.” | It is always instructive to get the view from abroad and this week it fell to the Paris Saint-Germain manager, Laurent Blanc, to observe of social media sedition: “Look at what happens in England.” |
| Related: Laurent Blanc hits out at ‘pitiful’ PSG defender Serge Aurier over slur | Related: Laurent Blanc hits out at ‘pitiful’ PSG defender Serge Aurier over slur |
| The springboard for these remarks was the already infamous video interview between the PSG defender Serge Aurier and a shisha-smoking member of his entourage, who appears not to have got a number of memos on how stuff works. Aurier is now on indefinite suspension for a series of extravagantly thick insults aimed at elders and betters ranging from Blanc himself to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who – if he has ever taken anything in good part – certainly hasn’t done so in the 21st century. | The springboard for these remarks was the already infamous video interview between the PSG defender Serge Aurier and a shisha-smoking member of his entourage, who appears not to have got a number of memos on how stuff works. Aurier is now on indefinite suspension for a series of extravagantly thick insults aimed at elders and betters ranging from Blanc himself to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who – if he has ever taken anything in good part – certainly hasn’t done so in the 21st century. |
| For all his studied disappointment with the 23-year-old player before Tuesday’s Champion’s League tie with Chelsea, Blanc seemed to address the incident more in anger than in sorrow, though he perhaps took a sliver of comfort from the perils of the modern world being worse in the more hysterical societies. “We’re never safe,” he warned of the permanently raised threat level around players speaking their brains online. “Look what happens in England with social media. It’s really difficult to control everything, particularly communications-wise. Every club suffers that way.” We can argue all day about whether the Premier League is the best league in the world™, but it’s exciting to think we might be regarded from abroad as the badlands of social media insurrection as far as football is concerned. | |
| Whether you fought in two world wars to take lectures in deference from a Frenchman is a matter for you: I myself have set aside the matter of my distinguished military record to listen carefully to what monsieur Blanc has to say about what may yet become the English disease for a new generation. I had already wished that instead of foregoing a big brand name for this season, the Premier League had been sponsored by the leading smelling salts manufacturer. This only convinces me. | Whether you fought in two world wars to take lectures in deference from a Frenchman is a matter for you: I myself have set aside the matter of my distinguished military record to listen carefully to what monsieur Blanc has to say about what may yet become the English disease for a new generation. I had already wished that instead of foregoing a big brand name for this season, the Premier League had been sponsored by the leading smelling salts manufacturer. This only convinces me. |
| And yet, and yet … unfashionable though it seems to be to admit it, I have to confess to finding Aurier’s idiocy rather funny. Not the remarks themselves, you understand, but the affront caused, in a game mostly far too oppressively grand for its own good. I cannot think of quite how cross Aurier’s nasty brainmelt would have made its targets – Ibrahimovic in particular, obviously – without feeling a qualified measure of mirth. | And yet, and yet … unfashionable though it seems to be to admit it, I have to confess to finding Aurier’s idiocy rather funny. Not the remarks themselves, you understand, but the affront caused, in a game mostly far too oppressively grand for its own good. I cannot think of quite how cross Aurier’s nasty brainmelt would have made its targets – Ibrahimovic in particular, obviously – without feeling a qualified measure of mirth. |
| The pity, of course, is that the only way Aurier could think of doing it was by recourse to the usual quarter-witted homophobic insults. Much of football, like much of the society it reflects, is still rather stuck at this stage, unable to see that a variant on “gay” being the default insult is something they should have grown out of long ago, like nappies. Except infinitely more hateful. | The pity, of course, is that the only way Aurier could think of doing it was by recourse to the usual quarter-witted homophobic insults. Much of football, like much of the society it reflects, is still rather stuck at this stage, unable to see that a variant on “gay” being the default insult is something they should have grown out of long ago, like nappies. Except infinitely more hateful. |
| But if we take that as a given, there is something slightly exhilarating about Aurier’s grotesque impertinence. It’s not just the slack-jawed way in which any of us might watch someone else’s act of spectacular self-sabotage – though the rubbernecking element is clearly a big part of it. It’s the sheer impudence to his designated elders and betters. | But if we take that as a given, there is something slightly exhilarating about Aurier’s grotesque impertinence. It’s not just the slack-jawed way in which any of us might watch someone else’s act of spectacular self-sabotage – though the rubbernecking element is clearly a big part of it. It’s the sheer impudence to his designated elders and betters. |
| Clearly, Aurier’s ridiculous comments marked him out as both gauche and a PSG parvenu. Though for reasons quite beyond me, Blanc declined to use any of the welter of French loanwords which best describe his player’s actions, preferring instead to stick to a headmasterly soliloquy: “Two years ago, I committed myself to bring him to Paris, so to see what I saw yesterday … that’s the thanks I get? It’s pitiful … it’s bad for him but what I won’t accept is that he’s damaged the club.” | |
| Mmm. I can never hear any manager or owner say that some twitterer has “let the club down” without being immediately transported back to all those times where my own behaviour (or indeed that of others) was judged by some arch enforcer of petty and frequently pointless rules to have “let the school down”. | |
| Related: Cries of liberté, égalité, fraternité will not puncture Premier League bubble | Marina Hyde | Related: Cries of liberté, égalité, fraternité will not puncture Premier League bubble | Marina Hyde |
| In football, as in school, or anywhere where internal discipline is prized above almost all, the insulted can’t simply let the insult go. We all know you have to have these ruthlessly enforced and maintained hierarchies or the machine suffers a catastrophic malfunction. Even so, I instinctively recoil from football’s endless emphasis on “respect” – perhaps the game’s most elastic concept. | In football, as in school, or anywhere where internal discipline is prized above almost all, the insulted can’t simply let the insult go. We all know you have to have these ruthlessly enforced and maintained hierarchies or the machine suffers a catastrophic malfunction. Even so, I instinctively recoil from football’s endless emphasis on “respect” – perhaps the game’s most elastic concept. |
| Furthermore, I have a weakness for life’s affronters – those willing, whether out of stupidity or calculation, to speak impertinence to power. It was much this way back in the wake of the 2006 World Cup, when Joey Barton began styling himself as the antihero to the crop of players whose ill-timed autobiographies he neatly summarised as “I played shit. Here’s my book.” A more specific jibe at Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard saw Lampard take immediate refuge in pomposity. “I don’t think Joey Barton should talk about me and Steven Gerrard,” he sniffed. “That probably says enough.” Indeed it did. | Furthermore, I have a weakness for life’s affronters – those willing, whether out of stupidity or calculation, to speak impertinence to power. It was much this way back in the wake of the 2006 World Cup, when Joey Barton began styling himself as the antihero to the crop of players whose ill-timed autobiographies he neatly summarised as “I played shit. Here’s my book.” A more specific jibe at Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard saw Lampard take immediate refuge in pomposity. “I don’t think Joey Barton should talk about me and Steven Gerrard,” he sniffed. “That probably says enough.” Indeed it did. |
| As for the suspended Aurier, full disciplinary proceedings have now been instigated. I hope he’ll be made to undergo some intensive diversity training, but it would be a show of weakness rather than a show of strength for PSG to get rid of him. Top-flight football is so overblown, so dementedly self-regarding most of the time, that almost anything which punctures its fastidiously nurtured vanity even for a moment feels like an oddly necessary release of tension. | As for the suspended Aurier, full disciplinary proceedings have now been instigated. I hope he’ll be made to undergo some intensive diversity training, but it would be a show of weakness rather than a show of strength for PSG to get rid of him. Top-flight football is so overblown, so dementedly self-regarding most of the time, that almost anything which punctures its fastidiously nurtured vanity even for a moment feels like an oddly necessary release of tension. |