RAIN, TEARS and saliva – they all swelled the Moscow River during the Champions' League Final, and that was bad news for Chelsea and especially John Terry.
The captain slipped, he cried, and then he was accused of spitting at Carlos Tevez. That was unfortunate. For up until that point, we'd been encouraged to feel sorriest for the self-styled "JT". He'd missed the crucial penalty and pictures of him blu
bbing like a bairn were everywhere.
Personally, I was more sorry for Avram Grant. His Champions' League Final suit was already soaked right through and he really didn't need Terry sobbing on his left shoulder, ruining what was left of the lining. But he bore this stoically. Not for Grant the Madchester kagoul sported by Sir Alex Ferguson (with Fergie's trusty Bazooka Joe bubblegum in the secret sleeve-pocket normally used to store Es). Not for Grant the Steve McClaren umbrella (ella, ella) even though, like the former England coach, his demise seems imminent. No, he withstood the rain and Terry's tears with quiet dignity.
He deserved better than being made to walk so far behind his players to collect his loser's medal, a forlorn, almost already forgotten figure. And he deserved better than those chants, a few weeks previously, of "You don't know what you're doing" – especially from the kind of fans who trudged away from the Luzhniki Stadium muttering about the defeat being the worst they'd experienced with Chelsea. That lot probably only started going to games in March.
But if we're supposed to laugh at nouveau riche supporters of "footie", what is the correct response to the sight of yet another display of uncontrollable, inconsolable greetin' by a player from a country once justly famed for the stiff upper lip?
Elsewhere in your Scotland On Sunday, I write about the Duchess of York's surprise at seeing ordinary Britons weep. Such uncharacteristic displays of naked emotion in TV reality shows are often blamed on the Diana Effect: the torrent of grief that followed the death of Fergie's sister-in-law. But Gazza's tears in Turin predated that tragic event by seven years. And, if I'm not mistaken, Chris Waddle's chin wobbled that night and Stuart Pearce was distinctly puffy-cheeked. English footballers, practitioners of what we're told is a "man's game", have been bawling for ages.
I'm not picking on the Sassenachs. If a penalty shoot-out is the scenario most likely to result in football tears, then Turin, Lisbon, Gelsenkirchen and the rest are proof that England and English players are the world champs. No one else misses like them, or wails like them.
You would think they've had enough experience of missing to know their likely fate, and steel themselves. But it's almost as if crying has become part of the big drama of being a big player, as if their media coaches are giving them lessons in losing it. English football is so showbiz now that I wouldn't be surprised.
Forty-two years ago, Bobby Charlton was the only English player who cried, possibly the only Englishman full stop. Now it's like Wembley is the Big Brother House, Simon Cowell is chairman of the FA and Jade Goody and Kerry Katona are England's first-choice strike partnership.
Terry cried in Gelsenkirchen along with David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand but Moscow was the most sustained demonstration of football howling I've ever seen. I've no doubt he felt terrible when his penalty squirted off the post. If I was being kind I would say: "Come back stronger." If I was being unkind I would say: "You earn £135,000 a week. Get over it."
And if I was Frank Lampard I would say it's only a game. "I can probably speak better than anyone about that at the moment," added Lamps. I don't know, didn't Avram Grant deliver an address to 10,000 Jews at Auschwitz recently, because didn't his father have to bury so many of his family during the Holocaust? The English may have a monopoly on bad penalties; they don't have one on sadness.
