The good and the very bad of Emmanuel Adebayor

What a mixed day Emmanuel Adebayor had at Eastlands playing for Manchester City against his old team Arsenal. If ever a man has let emotion get the better of him, this was it.

Adebayor had a ‘love, hate’ relationship with the Arsenal fans during his time with the club. Well actually, more often than not it was a ‘hate, hate’ relationship. In fact, he often seemed to fall out with team-mates as well, most famously appearing to fight on the pitch with Nicklas Bendtner.

Good side

Let us look at the good side of Adebayor’s day first. City won 4-2. He scored. He played really well and very nearly created the goal of the season with a run of pace, power and enormous skill. All sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, the good side of his day was totally overshadowed by the bad side and the repercussions of that bad side may yet be very damaging for him.

The first matter on the bad side we need to look at is the goal celebration after he put City 3-1 up in the game. I have never scored a goal in the Premier League so I can only begin to imagine the excitement and emotion that you feel. Having said that, to sprint over ninety yards to make sure that you can slide along the ground to celebrate directly in front of the opposition fans who dislike you so much, is nothing short of stupid.

Ugly

With crowd violence beginning to rear its ugly head again a little in England the players have an enormous responsibility to behave in an appropriate manner on the pitch. What Adebayor did was thoughtless, reckless and potentially dangerous. He was rightly yellow carded for his antics.

On the positive side, Adebayor realised what he did was wrong and he made a very clear public apology about it afterwards saying that the emotion of the moment had got the better of him.

Madness

If that apology takes some of the heat off him for that ridiculous celebration, no amount of apologising will make up for the other moment of madness he produced during the game. In an incident that wasn’t seen by or punished by the match officials Adebayor appeared to deliberately stamp on the head of Robin Van Persie.

Van Persie put in a terrible reckless challenge on Adebayor that was worth at least a yellow card, but Adebayor appeared to react by scraping his studs on Van Persie’s face. The more times you see the incident, the more deliberate it looks. Van Persie was in no doubt. In a statement he released on the Arsenal website he said he was “sad and disappointed” by Adebayor’s “mindless and malicious stamp on me”.

He went on to say,

“He set out to hurt me today. I do feel lucky that I have not received a greater injury. I knew he was aiming for a collision because he changed the angle of his body to allow contact to be made. He moved backwards when his natural momentum would have taken him forward. I find that deeply disrespectful. The contact was only centimetres from my eye. I have not received an apology from him, there were no words exchanged afterwards. He had his own agenda today and that is bad for football. It’s bad for the game we all love. We are both professional footballers and I know that the game is physical. I, too, have made hard and sometimes mis-timed challenges but never with the intention of hurting an opponent. I have not received an apology from him, there were no words exchanged afterwards. He had his own agenda today and that is bad for football. It’s bad for the game we all love. He has shown a real lack of class today, to me and the fans. We do not hide from the disappointment of losing the match but I need to speak out about his behaviour.”

Whilst apologising for the goal celebrations, Adebayor told Sky Sports that the injury caused to Van Persie was an unfortunate accident.

“I was trying to kick the ball. I see him tackling and I don’t have time to take my feet back because I’m trying to kick the ball. My feet touch his head. I feel sorry for him and even straight away, and at the end of the game, I said sorry.”

These were two very unsavoury incidents in what was enthralling game of football, especially in the second half. It is a shame that such a good game will be overshadowed by the behaviour of one player, but I do feel action is needed to be taken against Adebayor. He was totally out of order.