![]() I hoped we had all come to understand that there were other, more imaginative and less toxic ways of having fun and celebrating things than just guzzling booze and shouting at people. I thought we’d learnt our lesson from all that. It was as if we’d all been sucked back in time to the 1990s, when bad behaviour, excessive drinking and public displays of inebriated anarchy were prerequisites for all of our pop-culture heroes, including footballers. What is so remarkable to me is the gleeful, celebratory response that Grealish’s antics seem to have received from so many people in football. Look at the footage of Rice celebrating West Ham’s cup victory and tell me it’s not possible to have fun and feel joy without the help of alcohol. It would be wonderful if the increasing number of teetotal footballers (among them West Ham’s captain, Declan Rice) were celebrated for having just as much fun – if not more – as Grealish while stone-cold sober. I was so glad not to have ruined it with the pretty generic distraction of alcohol, as I certainly would have done in the past. Only the other week, I watched my team, West Ham, win a trophy in Europe and enjoyed the most exciting, fun-filled, love-drenched few days of my life – without a drop of booze inside me. Which is a shame, because big moments of euphoria can be enjoyed much more fully with a clear mind. The truth is that many British blokes just can’t seem to process moments of extreme emotion – good, bad or otherwise – without turning to booze to numb it out and send them into delirium. For decades, British males have been served up role models who have been lauded for their completely anarchic approach to alcohol and celebrated for the frisson of danger and mayhem that goes with it. The fact that many football fans don’t see it that way is testament to the continued normalisation of excessive drinking among young men in this country. A glass of champagne to celebrate a huge achievement seems fair enough.īut what Grealish has been up to this month has been pretty extreme. The point is that the rest of us shouldn’t be cheering them on as if it’s all perfectly normal. Because the point isn’t whether footballers are honest about their drinking or not. I’m more concerned with the responses of people around him. Grealish is a very likeable person who deserves all of his success and I don’t wish to judge him for his celebrations. “I would never sit here and lie to you and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t drink and I don’t party’, because I do, but then there’s so many people that will come here and say to you, ‘I don’t do this, I don’t do that’, when they do,” he added. He reported for England training worse for wear (teammates had reportedly offered him a wheelchair to get him on the private jet home from Turkey), but told the press that he was “a bit hungover but I weren’t drunk or anything”. “I’m a turkey and the turkey needs feeding,” he explained to onlookers, somewhat puzzlingly. He celebrated by going on a three-day bender that spanned Istanbul, Ibiza and Manchester, during which he was pictured guzzling champagne from the bottle, stumbling about bare-chested, looking as if – as one YouTube commentator put it – “he know what planet he’s on”, and leaning back while teammate Kalvin Phillips poured neat vodka down his throat. Twenty-seven years old, rich, handsome and truly gifted, he is a £100 million footballer who has just won the Treble with Manchester City. Jack Grealish says he’s living his dream.
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