Cursing is not clever but many footballers do it, which is why the pre-World Cup fuss about Wayne Rooney's foul mouth has gone too far.
The striker who carries England's World Cup hopes on his pasty-white shoulders harangued a South African referee in a training match this week. His use of ugly language, as common as trouble on the tough streets of Liverpool where Rooney grew up, was, of course, naughty and disrespectful. It earned the 24-year-old the wrong type of headlines about his hot temper and whether he could be a liability for England's campaign to rule the football world again for the first time since 1966.
Perhaps he could. But it seems unlikely. Rooney is almost a Zen master of cool compared to the raging bull he used to be. He has matured, if not mellowed, under manager Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, learning that it is better to sweat out some of his natural aggression on the training pitch than in the heat of a match. Becoming a dad seems to have taken a bit of the boxer's edge off him, too.
Needle him as they might, U.S. players who will try, perhaps in vain, on Saturday to stop him from scoring should not expect Rooney to make the petulant mistake of being sent off for stomping on a player's groin - which is what happened in his last World Cup match in 2006. Rooney has not been booked in his last 17 games for England; his last yellow card came in a 2-0 win in May 2008 against the United States - which was the last time the two sides met.
Really, however, Rooney's temperament shouldn't be the issue going into Saturday's game. Nor would it have been were it not for Jeff Selogilwe, the South African who seems to have an unusually thin skin for a referee and to have been far too eager to tell the world that Rooney verbally abused him.
Selogilwe says Rooney directed the F-word at him during England's 3-0 win in a training match Monday against club side Platinum Stars.
``I said, 'No, Rooney, you don't use that word again ... He was so aggressive,''' Selogilwe told The Associated Press in a phone interview. ``I was very much disappointed because Wayne Rooney is my role-model player.''
Not to excuse him, but cursing just makes Rooney a child of our times. Footballers, their fans and pretty much all of us do it these days. Words that a couple of decades ago were regarded as very bad are now common on TV. Plus Rooney curses in English, which makes him more liable to upset referees who are expected to speak the language to officiate at the very top of the game. Players who swear in other languages might slip under the radar.
``At the end of the day, you don't understand half of it,'' former Premier League and FIFA referee Graham Barber says of non-English-language cursing. ``So what do you do about it? Say: 'I think he swore he at me, so I sent him off?' You don't, do you?''
Also, if Selogilwe was as insulted as he says he was, then he should have sent Rooney off. That's what the laws of the game call for against ``offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures.''
Then, Selogilwe might have kept quiet, because what happens on the pitch should stay on the pitch. Otherwise, referees are going to get into the losing game of having to constantly defend and justify their decisions.
But Selogilwee instead cautioned Rooney and then basked in the international fame that his yellow card generated.
``The minute you leave the player to insult you, then he's going to insult you again,'' he told the BBC. ``The last thing, he's going to punch you.''
Selogilwe, 48, says he usually officiates lower division South African matches and that the England game was his first involving a national side in 12 years as a referee. He was clearly a little star-struck: Selogilwe says that before the player's outburst, he asked Rooney to gift him his shirt after the match. After cautioning him, however, he told Rooney: ``You can keep your shirt.''
Selogilwe is not a FIFA-designated referee and will not officiate at the World Cup. That is a good thing, because this mini-affair could have been better handled or, at least, with more discretion.
There is a risk, however small, now that because Selogilwe went public about Rooney's cursing, the player whom England is relying on for World Cup goals will carry an even bigger label marked 'potential troublemaker' into the tournament. It is proof of their diligence that Carlos Simon, the Brazilian referee for Saturday's England-USA match, and his assistants have been studying English-language obscenities beforehand. But it also suggests that the issue of cursing is, in the wake of Selogilwe's comments, now being taken more seriously than necessary and raises the question of whether Rooney might be made an example of should he be stupid enough to mouth off again.
``What is very unfair about singling Rooney out is that you are almost putting a problem in the referee's mind before anything happened,'' says Barber, who has hands-on officiating experience of dealing with the player.
For the sake of fairness, let's hope that is not the case.
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John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.
