By Paul Sorene
Not Raheem Sterling. Paul Gascoigne and Paul Merson of Middlesbrough celebrate a return to top flight football after a Nationwide Division One match against Oxford United, May 1998
Liverpool’s Raheem Sterling is part of a trend. The shisha smokin’, laughin’ gas inhalin’ star is just the latest footballer to be “involved in off the field controversy”. Well, so says the Daily Mail, which delivers five players who erred:
Here, Sportsmail details five other misbehaving stars involved in similar incidents away from the field.
According to the Mail, not breaking the law in the privacy of your own home is controversial. Raheem Sterling is now apparently in a “bad boys” group with these bright young things:
Jack Wilshere: Smoking tobacco.
Diego Maradona: Taking shedloads of cocaine and ephedrine.
Saido Berahino: Drink-driving and inhaling nitrous oxide.
Paul Merson: Drink, cocaine and gambling.
Kyle Walker: Inhaling ‘hippy crack’ from a balloon during a night out in Sheffield.
Having bracketed Sterling in a mixed group of occasional tokers and hard-drugs users, the Mail ups the ante and looks at the Liverpool man’s impending death. It adds:
P.S. If you thought those guys misbehaved, here’s Robin Friday… The former Reading forward was the original bad boy and was better known for his drug-taking, drinking, womanising, fighting and smoking, despite being a talented player.
He retired aged just 25 in 1977 and died 13 years later after suffering a heart attack.
In Paolo Hewitt’s book The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: The Robin Friday Story, we learn:
Robin walked out of Cardiff and football in the summer of 1977. Twelve years later he was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose. Hundreds and hundreds of people attended his funeral. In the year 2000 Reading fans overwhelmingly voted him their player of the century. There could be no finer accolade for the man.
PS: The Mail used to like controversial bad boys, you know, like Hitler.