Inhaling hippy crack, millionaire football star who sums up all that’s wrong with the game
Aged 20, Raheem Sterling is refusing a £100,000-a-week contract as his wild lifestyle puts his career at risk. He fathered a daughter at 17 – but can’t even remember her birthday. Some role model!
THE flags will fly at half- mast and the church bells will toll 96 times. And at 3.06pm today, at the blast of the Mersey ferry’s horn, the whole of Liverpool will fall silent and contemplate the unspeakable tragedy that befell 96 fellow citizens at a football match, at that moment, 26 years ago. As always, the players — past and present — who have represented the famous reds will take a special place in the annual Hillsborough memorial service, standing in solidarity with supporters at the club’s Anfield stadium.
Among them, no doubt wearing the soberest of his expensive designer suits and observing the occasion with exemplary solemnity (as befits someone who says he is a Christian and who crosses himself whenever he takes to the pitch) will be the club’s latest prodigy, raheem Shaquille Sterling.
during his roller- coaster three years in the team, this 20-year- old Londoner — the role model for thousands of young fans who dribble balls around the back-streets of Liverpool and far beyond — never tires of expressing his pride at playing for the most successful team in a city where soccer is woven into the social fabric.
He has kissed the famous Liver bird badge after scoring goals — as footballers do these days, supposedly to prove their undying loyalty to a club — and voiced his gratitude to team captain Steven Gerrard; ironically for showing him how to conduct himself as a Liverpool player.
Evidently, however, the adrenaline rush that comes with performing in f ront of thousands of delirious supporters — and being rewarded exorbitantly — isn’t enough.
AS PROVED by shocking pictures and a video posted this week on social media sites, he feels the need to inhale nitrous oxide — laughing gas to you and me, ‘hippy crack’ to the i ncreasing number of young people who use it.
In the video footage, a giggling Sterling is seen at his home sucking the gas from a balloon at a late-night session with two friends — before demanding another hit.
He then turns to the camera grinning widely. Later it shows him either unconscious or asleep.
As well as nitrous oxide, Sterling has been photographed smoking a hubble- bubble hookah pipe on several occasions.
Today in our sports pages, the Mail publishes pictures of him holding a shisha pipe — joined by his teenage Liverpool team-mate Jordon Ibe.
The images, believed to have been taken in a London bar earlier this season, show the stars, casually dressed, sitting on a sofa in front of a table with shisha pipes, cans of fizzy Fanta and a portable music speaker.
As for nitrous oxide — a so- called ‘legal high’ — health experts warn it can be deadly.
It works by starving the body of oxygen and can cause loss of blood pressure, fainting, a coma and even heart attacks. Not ideal for someone whose j ob depends on being in perfect physical shape.
It is not clear whether the video footage was passed on by Sterling’s friends — which would suggest he is a bad judge of character — or whether it was taken off a social media site where it had been posted publicly.
Liverpool fans who remember the iron rod with which the legendary manager Bill Shankly once ran the club shudder to imagine what the clean-living Scottish disciplinarian — who often reminded his players of the privileged position they held — would have done if one of his players had acted so irresponsibly. He would have been out on his ear. Contrast this with the response of the current Liverpool manager, Brendan rodgers (whose own colourful love-life has featured in the redtop tabloids). ‘I don’t think it’s something he should be doing,’ he said lamely, adding that he would be ‘speaking’ to Sterling to hear his side of the story.
I bet the player is sitting in his Southport mansion pondering these words and quaking in the bright orange boots that Nike pay him a fortune to wear. By not condemning Sterling, his manager exposes the fundamental amorality at the heart of the football.
The reaction of the professional Footballers’ Association (pFA) was even more pathetic. It dismissed his use of the so-called ‘legal high’ as ‘a minor blip’.
Sterling is the product of a broken home. His father was shot dead in his native Jamaica when the boy was just nine. He s uffered behavioural problems and had to be moved to a school for difficult children.
At 17, he fathered a daughter — the product of what is usually referred to as ‘a brief relationship’.
In the twisted moral world of modern football, players are grotesquely pampered and overpaid young men who must not be confronted, for fear that their delicate egos might be pricked and their performances might suffer — thus costing their clubs dearly in a game where money is all.
BuT had they the courage, the players’ union and his team manager would have told Sterling a few home truths. They might have started by reminding him that, between 2006 and 2012, 17 people are known to have died as a result of experimenting with hippy crack in this country. The father of one 17-year- old victim sa i d: ‘ Footballers s hould set an example.’
No wonder players are untouchables if they are treated to such widespread veneration. For example, last weekend, Sterli ng was c onsidered sufficiently important to be featured on the Sunday Times’s day In The Life page. There, he ignored any mention of nitrous oxide and shisha pipe. Instead, in pr guff, he told the
newspaper he dreamed that the Liverpool fans would confirm their love for him by way of a personalised chant.
But on Tuesday evening, during their most recent Premier League game, the country’s most famously astute football supporters delivered their response to Sterling’s request — with a derisory song that reminded him that his off-the-field behaviour falls far below the standards expected of their football heroes.
Somewhat kindly, we might think, the fans chose not to target their star player directly.
Instead, they aimed their fury at his agent, Aidy Ward, whom they not only blame for Sterling’s refusal to sign the generous new contract Liverpool have offered him — a deal that would almost treble his weekly pay to £100,000 a week — but also for advising him to go on the BBC in an attempt to justify his breathtaking greed.
When I first stood on the Kop, 40 years and more ago, he would not have got away so lightly. But then, given the latest revelations about Sterling, which have laid bare the way he conducts himself when he is relaxing with his dubious coterie of friends, he would no longer be playing for Liverpool at all.
In those dimly remembered days when — give or take a pint or two — footballers’ lives were as clean-cut as their hairstyles, true Liverpool legends (I’m thinking of men such as Roger Hunt and Ian St John, and later Kevin Keegan and Ian Rush) got their kicks simply from scoring, and winning.
Sterling’s apparent disregard for his position might have been forgivable if he hadn’t been given umpteen previous chances to correct his errant behaviour. Yet throughout his meteoric rise (he already has 14 England caps) controversy has never been far away from the baby-faced soccer playboy.
Besides his daughter, he has been forced to deny fathering multiple children.
HE SAYS he has cl ose relationship with two-yearold Melody Rose, although he did tweet her ‘ happy birthday’ a week early and was rebuked by her mother. Two years ago, a court cleared him of assaulting another of his past girlfriends, a model — naturally — who accused him of pushing her out of his Range Rover after sending a text message that upset her. A subsequent assault case collapsed.
He has also been fined for failing to insure one of his flashy cars, which perhaps says more about his inability to take care of his own, day-to-day affairs than his ability to pay the premium.
Indeed, when he was living alone in Liverpool, his life was in such disarray that his mother, Nadine came to live with him to restore order. Her heroic struggle to raise him single-handedly is acknowledged in one of his many tattoos (it reads: ‘Thank you mama for the nine months you carried me, though all the pain and suffering’).
It may be no coincidence he is in trouble again now she has returned South. His latest glamorous girlfriend, Paige Lee Hansel, 19, has moved in with him and he says: ‘I’m old enough to look after myself.’
Sterling’s stooges — who may include the two friends he was with when those damning pictures were taken — will doubtless leap to his defence. They will undoubtedly point to him being raised in a drug-blighted ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He arrived in Britain, with his mother and three siblings, aged five, and lived on one of North-West London’s worst sink estates. (Although, according to myth, the proximity of Wembley was his inspiration.)
His ‘anger issues’ had to be resolved in a school for difficult children — where one teacher predicted that, by 17, he would either be a football star or a jailbird.
Sterling’s troubled past is not to be denied, but he will not be the first young man to have escaped unpromising beginnings by virtue of his sporting talent.
I would argue that this merely makes it more important he leads the young people who idolise him — many of whom are similarly di s advantaged, though not fortunate enough to possess his dazzling skills — by example.
Raheem Sterling would do well to ponder this as he stands among the Liverpool faithful, whose hopes and dreams he carries, at 3.06pm this afternoon.