Why Emmanuel Adebayor might not have a leg to stand on

Posted Friday, November 19, 2010 by theguardian.com

The more Manchester City's Togolese striker stands around looking disgruntled, the more I stare at his elegant pins

Why Emmanuel Adebayor might not have a leg to stand on
Manchester City's Emmanuel Adebayor, centre, appears to have two flattened beer cans jammed down his socks.

On Tuesday I read that a scan of Andy Carroll's groin had "found nothing serious". Naturally, I was pleased. Because when you are as young as the Newcastle United striker there is no earthly reason for your groin to be serious. It should be light-hearted – frivolous even – and filling life with its joyful exuberance. There is, as Andy will discover, plenty of time later in life for a groin to knuckle down to the serious and solemn duty of waking its owner at 3.30am and compelling him to go to the bathroom. For the moment, let Carroll revel in its capricious zest.

Anyway, enough of Carroll's nethers, let us instead focus on Emmanuel Adebayor and a couple of things that dangle from his torso. I speak, of course, of his legs. A magnificent pair they are, and so undeniably willowy that should the tall Togolese ever stand by the banks of the Trent, mere seconds would elapse before some fellow chopped them down to make into cricket bats.

The African has been much in the news of late having apparently had a series of disagreements with the Manchester City manager, Roberto Mancini. Quite how the Italian can tell when the gangling striker is disagreeing with him is not so easily explained. As you may recall, during the World Cup in South Africa Adebayor was on TV-punditry duty and delivered his verdicts in a rapid, murmuring monotone that was about as easy to decipher as the whisper of leaves blown on an autumn breeze.

I imagine that in the Eastlands dressing room, when Adebayor begins to speak, it is like one of those situations where you wake up at 4am in a foreign hotel room with the feeling that you can hear voices coming through the air conditioning – a constant low hum punctuated by the occasional twitter of something indiscernible that might be an insidious argument, or just a piece of lint flicking through the motor.

Still, the sensitive Mancini has apparently picked up negativity in Adebayor's mumbling and responded in kind – probably by wrapping tissue-paper round a comb and blowing through it. As a consequence the newspapers in recent weeks have been filled with pictures of Manu standing on the field looking peevish, drawing my attention to his elegant pins, or more precisely to the fact that he appears to have two flattened beer cans jammed down his socks.

No doubt they are not beer cans at all, but some hi-tech shinpad called "The Ronin+" or "Ninja-Tempo" and made from all sorts of trademarked materials with names like clymidiaikonozene that claim to "absorb hacks, deflect boots and wick pain away from the affected areas, replacing it with a warm expectant tingle". The problem is that when you have limbs as long as Manu's, the shinpads mask barely a third of the target area. They become the lower-limb protection equivalent of a thong or a nipple tassel – more for highlighting than coverage.

Looking at the photos of Adebayor in his tiny shinpads, I was reminded of my own first pair of this unjustly neglected accessory. They were bought for me by my grandmother and were made from vinyl stuffed with horsehair to which, judging by their weight, the horse was still attached. When it rained the shinpads absorbed moisture like a peat bog. By half-time, on damp days, I was about as mobile as a Belfast sink. By the time the game ended my legs were so heavy I was sinking into the earth. I soon discarded them, and thus unfettered, capered about with my socks around my ankles like a dysfunctional version of Dave Thomas (QPR).

Adebayor may not want to bother with his either, but these days Fifa compels players to wear shinpads whether they want to or not. This is further proof of the strange priorities sports' ruling bodies attach to human body parts.

When I was a boy I recall once playing cricket on the north-east coast, on a wicket as green as leprechaun snot, against a young bowler who later turned out to be PW Jarvis (Yorkshire and England).

Having witnessed one batsman after another having seam marks dented into his upper legs, a friend of mine went out to bat with his SMP maths book stuck down his trousers as a makeshift thighpad. He was promptly ordered to remove it by the umpire on the grounds that it made him look effeminate (that at least was the gist of what the umpire said – his exact terminology was a little more robust). My friend lasted for 17 deliveries and came back with so many bruises his front leg looked like the world's biggest plum.

Back then you weren't allowed a batting helmet either, of course. It was just pads, a box and gloves. The clear implication being that when it came to the male body it was necessary to protect the lower legs, the groin and the hands, but nothing else. As far as life is concerned, it seems a man needs his fingers, his genitals and his shins – his brain he can do without. There's probably some link from here back to Andy Carroll, but sadly I've taken too many bouncers to the bonce down the years to fathom what it is.