Life's gone from Dench to stench as Emmanuel Frimpong drops out of the limelight

 
4 February 2014

You have to feel for Emmanuel Frimpong. One minute you’re the boy about north London, enjoying the kudos that naturally accrues to a 22-year-old who has spent the best part of a decade at Arsenal: trading ‘bants’ with Jack Wilshere, hanging out with Lethal Bizzle, running an amusing clothing label called ‘Stay Dench’, etc. The next you’ve been transferred for an undisclosed fee to Barnsley. Yes, Barnsley.

I don’t want to come over as an unreconstructed metropolitan snob but, actually, why pretend? Barnsley is about as un-Dench as it gets.

The step down in footballing prestige is bad enough: from bit-part player at the Premier League leaders to the first XI of a team bumping along at the fag-end of the Championship, one place above Yeovil. But the indignity of moving from grimy norf London to the brass band capital of south Yorkshire? Well, that’s just a kick in the you-know-wheres.

“How am I gonna draw girls now?” wailed Frimpong on Twitter, a diplomatic three nanoseconds or so after his move was announced. Well, Frimmy, have you thought about taking up the tuba? I reckon it’s either that or buy yourself a whippet.

To say that Frimpong’s face in his official Barnsley signing-up picture resembles a smacked a**e would be an insult to a**e-smackers across the country. He wears the look of a man who has just caught a whiff of dog mess trodden into his new living-room carpet: a combination of nausea, disgust and resignation.

Things didn’t get much better on Saturday. Less than 24 hours after signing, he was running out in a derby game against Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough. Within half an hour, alas, he was running back down the tunnel, having been sent off for two yellow cards.

Barnsley were subsequently denied a penalty, had another man dismissed and conceded a 97th-minute goal, losing the South Yorkshire derby 1-0. “Sorry To you fans,” Frimpong tweeted, later in the weekend but only once he was done watching the Arsenal game.

Now, I don’t want to riff too hard here on Frimpong, a promising player who has had several key developmental years of his career screwed up by nasty ligament injuries in his knees. He seems basically to be an amusing character, who doesn’t take life too seriously, and who was also a genuine fan of Arsenal and loved being associated with the club. And I will confess an interest: I own a Stay Dench snapback, which I occasionally wear. It doesn’t fit and it looks ridiculous but it does really annoy my wife.

Rather, I think that Frimpong’s case serves to remind us that for all the generalisations we make about ‘football’ and ‘footballers’, life outside a relatively small elite can be mundane, parochial and unglamorous.

It doesn’t take much of a drop out of the established Premier League elite for the riches and prestige to fall alarmingly away. There are 92 clubs in the top four divisions of English football but probably not more than 25, tops, where employment really supplies the means for a life of fast cars, bad-taste mansions, ill-advised experiments in personal brand-building and first-name terms with the madams of the best brothels in suburbia.

By no means is playing professional football a bad job to do. Often, although not always, it is well remunerated. It beats going down the mines. But all the same, the life of a lower-division journeyman, which can drop upon you unexpectedly and at the grand old age of 22, is as far removed from sporting superstardom as is the life of a manager of your local HSBC from that of the Wolf of Wall Street.

All of this would appear already to have dawned upon Emmanuel Frimpong and as funny as his swiftly deleted “how am I gonna draw girls” tweet was, there was a sharp stab of truth in there, too. We won’t lie to you, #Frimmy, it’s going to be a struggle. And things won’t get any easier if Barnsley go down to League One this season — if that happens, you may as well cut it off, old boy. But I suppose that’s an incentive, of a sort. Better knuckle down and play.

Jose’s little horses arrive at the gallop

‘Two horses and a little horse. A little horse who needs milk and to learn how to jump.’ Jose Mourinho’s analysis of Chelsea’s position sounds rather like the instructions for one of those hand-dances popular at raves in the early 1990s — think, ‘big fish, little fish, put it on the shelf.’ But kudos to his team for giving Manchester City a tactical schooling at the Etihad last night. Mourinho has a lot of chops. But at their best, his teams are mightily impressive to watch.

It’s less tyre-some if Seb hits a flat spot

Sebastian Vettel of Germany and Infiniti Red Bull Racing drives on his way to winning the Japanese Formula One Grand Prix at Suzuka Circuit on October 13, 2013 in Suzuka, Japan.
Clive Mason/Getty Images)

It would be pretty churlish to wish failure on a Formula One team before the season has even started but it’s almost encouraging to hear of Red Bull’s problems in testing at Jerez. Does anyone really want to sit through another season of total dominance by Sebastian Vettel and pals? Problems for Red Bull will mean a more open, competitive tour in 2014, and even the possibility of the drivers’ championship going down to the last race or so. And that is in everyone’s interest.

Don’t give Joshua another punchbag

Anthony Joshua

Anthony Joshua pummelled the lights out of another punchbag opponent within two rounds this weekend. His professional record now reads four fights, four wins. Joshua’s introduction to the heavyweight game is being handled cautiously, and rightly so, because there is plenty of technical work for him still to do. But the quality of opposition now needs to improve, or British boxing fans — who all want Joshua to succeed — are going to start losing interest.

The joy of six keeps tempers at bay

The pub in which I watched France v England in the Six Nations on Saturday evening was largely for the English. But there were a few French and Welsh in there, too, loudly bellowing for Les Bleus. They went doolally when Gael Fickou scored the winning try. But there was no fight, no cross words and no one left the bar room via the window. It’s tiresome to bang on about The Things Football Could Learn From Rugby but still. Imagine if we’d been watching the (soccer) World Cup.

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