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Charity Match by the Somerset Crumpet Hornblower

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Charity Match by the Somerset Crumpet Hornblower Charity Match by The Somerset Crumpet Hornblower You can say what you like about the modern footballer: about his innumerable Ferrari and mansions, about his clothing/record label and multi-million pound advertising deals, about his detachment from the common man in the street. In many ways footballers in the 80s and early 90s were not that far removed from you or me, and it is dizzying how fast the game has changed and how wide the schism has become between player and fan - monetarily, socially, morally. All that said, credit must be given to the players of today for the work a lot of them do, giving a bit back. Not all 21st century players are of the description above, nor do they all have philanthropy running through their veins, but let us take a couple of examples of those with a more selfless side. You might not want to hear how one or two of these players have sympathetic sides, bombarded and brainwashed as we are these days by the media into simple black+white versions of footballers bad, fans good. But hear me out... Didier Drogba. His foundation was created in 2007 to help “provide financial and material support in both health and education to the African people”. Hearing the man speak on that abomination of a chat show, The Graham Norton Show, a couple of years ago, he came across as humble, softly-spoken and determined to do something about alleviating some of the problems in his home country. Fair enough, he is mostly a diving, cheating, annoying pillock on the pitch, but if we are able to step back and look at the human not the player, he is at least doing something positive with his fortunes. And how many of the Chelsea squad have been able to keep themselves off the red-top front pages these past few years? We all hear about Premiership players’ every move these days, but it took me until 2011 – four years – to hear about Drogba’s charity work, suggesting he does not trumpet it merely to deflect from his on-field antics. Of course there are plenty of other star footballers who are attached to similar charity/ foundation work: Lucas Radebe (SOS Children’s Villages), Geoff Thomas/Neil Harris (cancer support), Zinedine Zidane (United Nations Development Programme, UNDP) and so on. The point could be made that footballers have enough time and money (most of them), so why shouldn’t they do this, indeed, why aren’t more of them involved, why aren’t they doing even more, and why isn’t someone like the FA making it a stipulation for clubs to ensure players do a certain amount of charity work? In proportion to their earnings perhaps? We shouldn’t criticise too much, they are soft targets and they are damned if they do/don’t. Most certainly, there are plenty of footballers doing good work on the quiet, too, and even that can lead to difficulty – Gareth Southgate blocked Middlesbrough players’ donations to the Mayday nurses campaign in ’08, as it involved publishing who had donated, thereby revealing who hadn’t. Damiano Tommasi. Tommasi, who won lo Scudetto with Roma in 2001 and represented Italy in midfield, was known as a hard-working tackler and was immensely popular with his team-mates for all his clubs. After a nasty challenge in 2004 during a ‘friendly’ v Stoke City (surprise, surprise – ed.) he endured a year out of the game and then shocked the footballing world on his return. In place of accepting the ‘normal’ (previous) contract offered by his club, he negotiated a deal worth €1,500 a month (about £1000 at the time), the lowest legally allowed by Italian employment law. Why? “I did it because I love the Rome Club and football,” he told the world. On the same money as a youth player, the former international never really rediscovered his previous heights of performance, petering out his career at Levante in Spain, QPR and in China. As president now of the Italian Footballers’ Association - after the previous president of 43 years stood down (how Italian is that! Nothing dodgy there! No kick-backs, or nothing, nope) - he works to donate all player fines to charitable causes, having a personal say in which ones are selected. Damiano Tommasi playing for AS Roma and Italy. Besides making a significant financial Mohamed Aboutrik donation, he once spent an off-season building low-cost housing for immigrants in Italy. of Egyptian club, Al-Ahly Mohamed Aboutrika. Egypt’s top club Al Ahly SC is arguably Africa’s most successful club, and its current midfield star, Mohamed Aboutrika, is an example of a humanitarian footballer, with quite a social conscience. Besides the usual charity work (UNDP and several public service announcements educating the viewers of Middle Eastern tv over topics as far ranging as cancer, hunger and giving blood), when he first signed for Tersana SC in Giza, he was offered a higher wage than a colleague who was signing at the same time. He refused and agreed a lower deal, equal to that of his team-mate. He is also known for his support of the Sympathise With Gaza movement. He was booked for revealing a t-shirt with this logo in How can you not sympathise with Gazza? I mean Giza. Which geezer? Er, Gollum, no, wait – who are we sympathising with, again? Not to attack the alcoholic/afflicted/troubled, but we couldn’t resist. Probably not the most appropriate images to use in a ‘serious’ article about being socially responsible. Or indeed the most appropriate person to adorn the text, but there we are. 2008, in protest over Israel’s 10-day blockade, explaining he felt for the children starving and suffering as a result. On being singled out by the media for his role in securing the African Champions League for Al Ahly, he replied with, "We need to stop this habit of praising a definite (ie particular) player. It isn't me, Aboutrika, but the whole team who won the Cup. Without the others' efforts, I can't ever make anything. Football is a game played by many players, it isn't tennis or squash." He also once said, “Every athlete has a humanitarian role in society. He doesn't live solely for himself, but for others too.” Not surprising when you consider he is a graduate from Cairo University in philosophy. If only more post-match interviews were of equal erudition. No article, serious or otherwise, about selfless acts of giving could be complete without resort to the one and only Mario Balotelli. If you believe a quarter of what you read in the press, scale it down by stripping away the hyperbole, gossip and mythologising, and ignore another half of what’s been written, our man has variously taken a truanting kid by the PC Super (intendent) scruff of the ear into school and ranted at the Head and his class-mates Mario for bullying the, no doubt by then, shuddering, ‘never-to-truant-again- Miss-I-promise-just-get-this-lunatic-to-let-go-of-my-ear-Miss’ kid; handed out £1000 notes in the early hours of a match-day to homeless people on the streets coming out of Gala bingo on the Hyde Road in Belle Vue; and being found by the caribinieri in an all-women prison in Brescia, Italy, chewing the cud with the inmates, discussing theories of Silence v Loneliness and pontificating on (wo)man’s existence in the light of Italian law Article 41-bis of the Prison Administration Act, which allows the Minister of Justice or the Minister of the Interior to suspend certain prison regulations, thus confining women’s...(ok, that last bit was made up but he Old Hot - cross - bun - was found by the caribinieri in a women’s prison.) head, himself: Mario One only wonders what the Super one will get up to next. In a major scoop, we snuck a peek at his ledger and in it were some of his ideas for the forthcoming year: 1. I revive the work of Mother Teresa and initiate a Milk of Human Kindness Tour round sub-continental India, letting off fireworks from the top of an elephant and giving out platters of samosas and tureens of steaming rice to poor and sundry. 2. I successfully lobby Italian parliament to provide all children under the age of 12 to have a go-cart, in order that they use it to get to school on time, cutting into Italy’s chronic problems of primary lateness on the school register. I will police kids’ nation Balo works hard in pre-season, adherence to this all by myself. er, in St Tropez. All to ensure another year of acts of 3. I turn up, unannounced, at a U2/Boomtown Rats bar mitzvah benevolence previously party, and will tell Bob Geldof to “give us yer f***ing munney, and unknown among the industrial have a f***ing shave while you’re at it, you hobo.” I then hinterlands of Lombardia. Yes, redistribute said cash to all Man Utd fans who can’t afford to get that’s a bottle of champagne in in to OT or buy the latest Wazza replica shirt, as Utd spiral down his hand and what can only be the table in a crisis of mounting debt, rising prices and Davie described as a bong or pipe Moyes turning to the wine left by Slur Alec. Why always me?! connected to downtown Morocco.
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