Football gets a bad name, mostly because of the conduct of those within it.
Every supporter, of every club, can cite examples of players they didn’t like, those who specialise in winding up the opposition and being a general pain in the backside. They don’t necessarily cause trouble on or off the field, but they know how to wind people up.
Scott Brown is one of them. Barry Ferguson was another. Rival fans don’t necessarily hate these guys – most of the time there is a mutual respect – but they’re never going to be loved.
El Hadji Diouf is not one of these guys.
He’s the Genuine Article, a scumbag, a bigot, a thug, a man who’s spat on rival fans and rival players, who’s not above making insults about a man’s family on the pitch and who, today, is blatantly deceiving to the media about the treatment he received in Scotland, where he stayed for five minutes but let an impression like a guy who cuts a noxious fart at a party and then leaves by the nearest door.
Diouf is one of those guys you know would do alright for himself if he hadn’t made it as a professional footballer, for a while anyway.
He’d be the sort you see in certain parts of London and Manchester of an evening, riding in an SUV, dealing drugs with a shooter in easy reach. The sort who would wind up on the front pages of the tabloids after a drive-by in which he either got what was coming or put some other wannabe in a hole in the ground.
In other words, Diouf is a genuine low-life, on a whole other level to football’s usual sort.
I don’t know what his motivation is today, telling the Senegalese media how he was sent bombs in the post whilst he was here, but I do know that he’s full of it. The police have already denied ever having received reports of such incidents, as well as scorching reports that they had a meeting with him and his family to discuss the threats.
This is nothing but a slur on the Celtic supporters, and one without the smallest fraction of truth.
It’s an insult to the police, and to those who, like Neil Lennon, have dealt with legimate threats.
It’s also a slur on Scotland as a whole, one that shouldn’t be allowed to stand.
He said that when he left Glasgow “half the city wanted to cut my head off”, which shows you how overblown his sense of self was.
Most of the Rangers support were happy to see the back of him; he was a leech, sucking marrow off the bones of their club at a time when they could ill afford it.
Celtic fans gave a collective shrug.
He’s best known, by us, for the embarrassing way he behaved at Celtic Park and for Brown’s marvellous celebratory gesture towards him at Ibrox.
Yet there’s that other section of the Ibrox crowd that remembered him fondly and still does to this day, and that should give you some insight into their state of mind.
This vicious, arrogant, thuggish clown represents something to them, some part of their collective Id, marking them down as the very kind of people who would send parcel bombs to others they didn’t particularly like.
I can recall few individuals in the history of the Scottish game so absolutely unworthy of any kind of commendation or fond remembrance.
This must be one of the few corners of the global game where Diouf is recalled with something other than revulsion, and then by a mere handful of people too stupid to see that an association with him is the last thing any civilised football club would ever want.
This’ll be the last thing I ever write about him.
He’s not worth the time or the effort, but I thought that those comments today needed challenged.
He is, not to put too fine a point on it, lying through his spit-smeared teeth.