The thing is, if you’re a professional footballer playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world, you have to be careful what you say. Even if you’re thinking ‘I really can’t stand where I live very much’, stating it out loud is not going to sound great to the millions of fans who pay to watch you play and have your name on the back of their shirt. For tens of thousands a week, keeping one’s mouth shut is not a tall order.
Nemanja Vidic appears to have had his wrists slapped after comments appeared earlier on Wednesday, where the Serbian basically said that Manchester was a poor city in which to live, due to its rainy microclimate and the fact that everyone was too busy working to have fun (yeah sorry about that Nemanja, sadly most people can’t finish training at 2pm and go shopping). The Daily Mail report that Vidic is now backpedalling quicker than Usain Bolt over his alleged comments.
While Vidic admitted an initial struggle with the weather – despite enduring the Russian winter for two years – and cultural differences, the defender ‘feels compelled to clear up’ the matter.
‘I’d like to clarify that I did not make these particular remarks. I spoke about the difficulty I had settling in to life in Manchester, but that does not reflect how I feel now,’ Vidic hastily backtracked.
‘I enjoy my life very much as a footballer at Manchester United and I’m very happy to be a part of this great club,’ he added, Ferguson’s hairdryer whirring in the background.
‘I think I show that in the way I play every week. I also have far too much respect for the people of Manchester, and England, to criticise them in this way,’ Vidic told www.manutd.com.
Once again, we have the classic example of a footballer talking to a foreign publication, not realising that his comments would feed back to England’s national press. It’s almost as if a country’s borders prevent news travelling in the puny mind of a player!