Daily Mail

Provocatio­n is only a smart phone away for today’s players

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IT HAS not been easy to watch or read about the story that Jamie Carragher has been caught up in this week. I played for Liverpool and England with ‘Carra’ for a good few years and, though some people might not want to hear this, he’s a great lad. He doesn’t need me to say what he did was totally wrong and he knows better than anyone that his actions cannot be defended. But let’s be clear that the incident started with provocatio­n and I wanted to try to give an insight intonto the kind of world that footballer­s footlive in now — one where provocatio­n apme. is only a pointed mobile phone away.

Carra ( right) crossed the line but there are points when we are all taken towards it.

Believe me, it happens all the time. Whether you are sitting itting in a restaurant, travelling ravelling on a train or standing outside a stadium, the cameras are there.

I’d like to think I’m an approachab­le fella and if someone wants me to pose for a picture, I’ll always say ‘yes’ even when I’m with my family.

What I can’t abide, though, are the sly photograph­s that people take without asking. You can spot what they are doing a mile off; they make it look like they are browsing on their phone but, really, you know they are trying to capture an image of you in an offguard moment. I can’t work out why you would want to do that but I really learned that lesson four years ago when someone filmed me throwing a few shapes on the dancefloor in Ibiza; I woke up the following morning to discover that I had gone viral! Some who try it give you a laugh. They think they are being discreet but it’s hard to be discreet when they have left their flash on! When you point that out, they quickly turn red and make out as if it was a mistake. When I’m out and about, those types of incidents happen quite often. In ssome respects, thouthough, I am lucky. I dondon’t tend to get ababused but there aare some people wwho will get abused everywhere weverywher­e they go. Most of the time yyou brush it off bbut there are ococcasion­s when yoyou are pushed to the llimit and want to have a go back. The woworst experience I had of something like this came during my time playing for Liverpool. My wife Abbey and I decided at the end of one season to head over to Ibiza, so we decided to get a late-night flight with a budget airline from Manchester. It shouldn’t have been a problem but from the moment we went through security, I knew things could go wrong. A group of Manchester United fans started chanting and we exchanged some harmless banter. The majority of them were good-humoured but, unfortunat­ely, a minority of them escalated things and started to become quite abusive.

I knew if we had got on the plane it would have been absolutely unbearable, so we made the decision not to board.

But just imagine if I’d reacted to some of the things that we were subjected to — who would have made the headlines? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been the stag do.

Don’t take this as me saying life in the public eye is a hardship. It isn’t. I’ve got the best job in the world and I know I’m in a privileged position but we are now in an era where the scrutiny and the potential to be involved in controvers­y has never been greater.

When I first started playing, the only time you knew you would get photograph­ed was if the paparazzi were outside a smart restaurant in town.

Now, literally at every moment you are away from home or the training ground, you can have a lens pointed at you.

For that reason, the kids who are in academies are trained about social media — what to do and what not to do — and educated about the issues that could arise. You have to be attuned to the potential for problems at all times.

At the end of the day, though, we are all human.

Jamie Carragher will be devastated that he did what he did last Saturday in what he called a ‘moment of madness’.

But in the face of provocatio­n, it is hard not to react.

 ??  ?? PETER CROUCH
PETER CROUCH

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