Putting the oops in Hoops
Ah, where would we be without Wikipedia, eh? And if they ever get around to that odder phenomenon, the non-celebration of a goal, I would suggest they can make the definition even more pithy: “See Frank Lampard”, perhaps.
Although hardly the first or only player to decline to celebrate scoring against a former club — remember Denis Law for City against United, greybeards? — the high profile nature of the game meant that the veteran shipped an inordinate amount of flak for his solemn reaction following his equaliser for Manchester City against Chelsea.
The mildest brickbat thrown at him was that his behaviour was “inappropriate” but, in defence of poor Lamps I’d suggest that, having spent 13 seasons at Stamford Bridge and having just been exceptionally warmly received by his old fans when he came off City’s bench, he was entitled to feel a touch torn under the circumstances.
And, for all the criticism which came his way, it wasn’t as if he’d declined the scoring opportunity...
In any event, the mini-controversy brought to mind what was certainly the most inappropriate sporting celebration which your correspondent has ever encountered.
It happened many moons ago on the occasion of a basketball game in my old national school.
A rare enough occasion it was too, the fixture happening just once a year for reasons which were never entirely clear to us pupils who were effectively press-ganged into taking part. Since there was an outdoor court on the premises — which, the rest of the time, we employed exclusively as an arena for football played with a tennis ball — the staff presumably felt obliged to make at least some gesture towards using the facility for its intended purpose.
The upshot was that once every 12 months there was a kind of extended basketball blitz, in the course of which one of the two rotating sides endured the added ignominy of having to don a set of musty old green and gold jerseys which were excavated annually in a forlorn bid to add some pageantry to the occasion. (Now that I think about it, I have to conclude that there must have been some Kerry divilry afoot in the staff room).
So picture the scene: the basketball game is in full swing, the touchline is thronged with pupils and teachers, the pong from the jerseys is truly toxic — and into this very public cauldron gingerly steps that recognisable phenomenon of all our schooldays: The Guy Who Was Absolutely No Good At Sport.
Off the bench he came — shuffling, unwilling, ungainly, manifestly out of his comfort zone — to be confronted, almost immediately, by a loose ball which bounced up invitingly in front of him. That he managed to grasp it between two hands was considered by all a wonder in itself, but what happened next was truly momentous. As if suddenly possessed by the spirit of someone who could actually play basketball, he set off on a rapidly accelerating run the length of the court before almost casually tossing the ball in the direction of the board — and straight through the hoop.
For a moment, he remained rooted to the spot, his wide eyes fixed firmly upwards, as if unable to comprehend what had just happened. Then he let rip with what, to this day, remains the wildest, most uninhibited sporting celebration I have ever witnessed in the flesh.
There was nothing thought-out about it, nothing choreographed: it was simply a demented explosion of joy that saw him repeatedly leap up and down on the spot while violently windmilling his arms and — lost in a moment that was entirely beyond language to describe — issuing a succession of great guttural roars from the very depth of his being.
But all was not as it seemed. Coming back down to earth, as it were, he couldn’t help but observe that he was not being mobbed by his team-mates. And the throng on the touchline were not, he had to concede, acclaiming his great shot with cheers and applause: instead, they were having to hold each other up, practically helpless with laughter, with even the teachers visibly struggling to keep the infectious hysteria at bay.
When grinning opponents began slapping him on the back, the awful truth dawned for our hero: he had managed to run the wrong way and score the basketball equivalent of an OG.
That’s the kind of thing that could scar a person for life, I suppose, but I like to think that, since he was academically way smarter than the rest of us put together, yer man is probably now a dot.com squillionaire or some similar master of the universe, his long ago misadventure in sport an incidental cameo in a life of otherwise serial achievement. Or so I hope.
But all I know for sure is that, in my book, his short-lived moment in the sporting sun is an indelible memory and right up there with the greatest goal celebration of them all — which would be Marco Tardelli in the 1982 World Cup final, of course.
