Wayne Rooney: “It was the strangest and worst feeling I have ever had in football”
David Beckham: “It was a stupid mistake, it changed my life”
Paul Gascoigne: “I was devastated”
Three iconic England players, all talismans for their country, who let their emotions get the better of them somewhere near the height of their powers during a crucial match for England at a major tournament.
Rooney and Beckham were sent off, Gascoigne was yellow-carded, cried and was too distraught to take a penalty a few minutes later. England lost all three games (all on penalties) and Beckham in particular was vilified for his actions. Rooney too, to a lesser extent.
Emotions and intensity are an integral part of top-level football. What unites all three is that they slipped off the cliff and channelled their emotions into the wrong place – specifically towards the body parts of opposing players.
The talisman of this England team is Jude Bellingham and on Sunday, at least according to UEFA, he crossed a line.
Bellingham’s crotch-grabbing gesture after the goal, directed towards the Slovak bench, has earned him a fine of 30,000 euros (£25,000, $32,000) and a suspended one-match ban. Bellingham insisted it was a joke aimed at his friends. UEFA was not laughing.
It was part of a torrent of emotions condensed into a matter of seconds: stretching out his arms as if it were the Second Coming, making a hand signal to suggest that people had been talking too much, and then the crotch thing.
This has nothing to do with what Bellingham did with those earlier high-profile incidents. It had no impact on that match and should have no bearing on the tournament in England.
But there are reasons to caution that it seems entirely fair to say that Bellingham, more than anyone else in this England team, is playing on the edge. He takes responsibility, like Gascoigne, Beckham and Rooney before him, for leading the team to victory. As he shouted after his overhead kick: who else?
It was guilt that dogged Rooney in 2006, even if Cristiano Ronaldo’s wink diverted much attention from Rooney’s petulant stamp on Ricardo Carvalho’s crotch. Ronaldo, Rooney’s Manchester United teammate at the time, absorbed the fury, and he and his teammates were criticised for surrounding referee Horacio Elizondo after — it bears repeating — Rooney stamped on Carvalho’s crotch.
Rooney sees red in 2006 (Stewart Kendall/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
“Look at the Portuguese players there, look, we never do that with referees, trying to put pressure on them,” Alan Shearer said in the BBC studio after the match. “I don’t know, are we being too honest? There’s every chance Rooney will go back to Manchester United’s training ground and play a ball past Ronaldo.”
Rooney’s red haze came 62 minutes into England’s World Cup quarter-final against Portugal. While there’s no way to predict what would have happened had he stayed on the pitch, it certainly reduced the team’s chances of winning. They survived until penalties, and then you know the rest.
“It was a reaction to the referee not giving me a free-kick,” Rooney said later. “There was a clear foul, Carvalho was pulling me and pushing me and Petit came in from the other side.
“Elizondo did nothing and I stamped on Carvalho. It’s one of those moments you don’t think about. I knew it was a red card and when I went back to the dressing room I watched the rest of the game on a small television and I thought: ‘If we win, I’m suspended for a semi-final and a final of the World Cup and if we lose, it will be my fault. ’”
The Rooney and Beckham incidents had in common the perception of provocation.
Rooney felt he had been fouled and was offended that he had not been fouled. Beckham was He committed a foul and was awarded a free kick, but Diego Simeone leaned forward to finish off some chances.
“I just remember them passing me the ball and then hitting me from behind,” Beckham said. “I remember Diego putting his hand on the back of my head, maybe even rubbing it or pulling my hair a bit, and then I just reacted.”
Beckham was sent off at the 1998 World Cup in France by Kim Milton Nielsen (Mark Leech/Offside via Getty Images)
Again, as with Rooney, the consequences in that game are hard to judge, but there were still 72 minutes to play, including extra time. Beckham’s momentary loss of control came at a heavy personal cost to him in the weeks, months and years that followed (“10 heroic lions, one stupid boy” was the Daily Mirror headline the next day, for starters), but that night England were harmed by the actions of one of their star players.
But what they were hampered by was Gascoigne’s booking in 1990. He may not have been sent off, but England played with 10 men for the remainder of extra time, and Gascoigne was tearful and remorseful, knowing that if England reached the final, he would miss it through suspension.
“I had to work really hard when Thomas Berthold came,” he recalls in his book Glorious: My World, Football and Me. “I gave it my all. It was the World Cup semi-final and I didn’t want to give them anything for free.
“To this day, I honestly don’t think I touched him, but he went down, rolling around like he was in pain. I bent down to make sure he was okay, and at the time, I didn’t think he was in trouble. There was nothing wrong with the challenge. Then, everything went into slow motion.”
“He (referee Jose Roberto Wright) put his hand in his pocket. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything. The world stopped, I just saw the guy in black. My eyes followed his hand, into his pocket, and then he took it out with the card. There it was, raised above my head. I looked at the crowd, I looked at Lineker and I couldn’t help myself.
“At that moment, all I wanted was to be left alone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone. My bottom lip was like a helicopter landing pad. I was devastated.”
Gascoigne, right with Terry Butcher, was heartbroken after the semi-final defeat to West Germany in 1990 (David Cannon/Getty Images)
Gascoigne’s tears endeared him to the nation, helping to change perceptions of masculinity and, as the classic English/British underdog, he was praised and celebrated – a reaction other countries would probably struggle to understand given Gascoigne was so emotional he failed to take a penalty in the shoot-out England lost. It was a markedly different reaction to Roy Keane’s yellow card for Manchester United against Juventus in 1999 which meant he missed the Champions League final and after Michael Ballack was booked in the World Cup semi-final and ruled him out of the final in 2002.
“The adrenaline gets to you,” Bellingham said after his heroics in Slovakia. “But it’s a combination of many things. Playing for England is a nice feeling, but there’s also a lot of pressure.
“You hear people say a lot of nonsense. It’s nice that when you do something, you can give something back. For me, football, being on the pitch, scoring goals and celebrating is my release. Maybe it was a message for some people, but it was a very happy moment, full of adrenaline.”
Bellingham has the enormous ability to inspire England to victory in Berlin on July 14. He will need adrenaline, excitement, the burning desire to win at any cost. He will also need to stay on the right side of the emotional cliff.
(Top photo: Stefan Matzke – sampics/Getty Images)
