Don’t get me wrong here, I am not saying it was OK for England fans to boo Harry Maguire this week during England’s match against Ivory Coast. In fact, I have no idea why they were booing him and I also do not agree with booing your own players.
I don’t think it was right to do this and for me to want to boo any player in the team I support, they would have to have done something very bad. I think booing players from your own team can be too detrimental and against what you are trying to achieve – your team to win.
Booing the team collectively off the field at the end of the match after maybe a long run of terrible form and you can visibly see they have given up, is a different story for me. But booing Maguire this week was just odd. And I have felt the same for many Chelsea players over the years.
However, I also don’t agree with many publications and people making such a huge deal out of things like this. As a football player it’s nothing new to be criticised, or go through tough periods of supporters losing their trust in you.
That is absolutely normal in this sport and something you have to put up with. As I say and I’ll remind you again, I don’t agree with booing Maguire this week, but I do agree with fans being allowed to voice their criticism.
I think as a paying supporter you have a right to do this, and players need to know this is part of the game. Abuse? Absolutely NO room for that anywhere in the game, but I think criticism is absolutely all just part of it.
Unfortunately, in football you are always going to get the idiots that go too far, like booing Maguire this week. And I’ve seen it many times at Chelsea as well. But what makes a player stronger and better is to come through things like this and let your football do the talking.
I’ve seen historically the media get on England (and Chelsea) players backs time and time again, and as much as it’s wrong to do and a lot of the time it is targeted harassment, I think that it is something that is always going to be there as wrong as it is. They constantly went for player like Wayne Rooney and David Beckham back in the day, but they both ended up becoming two of England’s best ever players.
Footballers are humans at the end of the day and you have to have a tough shell to put up with this kind of stuff, especially the abuse. But I do think that making it (not the abuse, that needs to be highlighted a lot more) such a massive thing can have a detrimental effect, I think players need to try and rise above it the best they can and use that to drive them on and let the football prove people wrong. They’d soon be cheering Maguire’s name if he headed in the winner in the World Cup final this November, right? Then he would have won, and he would have had the last laugh.