Beckham acted like a drama queen

Hot shot: Wayne Rooney fires in England's equaliser

14 April 2012

If you live in the kind of unreal theatrical bubble that David Beckham inhabits, then perhaps it should be no surprise that you sometimes end up behaving like a terrible drama queen.

On the night when Wayne Rooney became England's youngest-ever goalscorer here in Skopje, how wearisome that his captain should eclipse the boy in the headline-grabbing stakes by doing his best to turn his team's fairly routine triumph into a one-man soap opera complete with a shock, horror pay-off line about death threats.

Here was pointless attention-seeking. There was absolutely no need for Beckham to reignite the few flames which he had already done his best to successfully douse out there in the City Stadium.

He had led by example with his usual passion, determination and glimpses of quality above most else on view; he had buried the winner from the spot; he may very well have been the man of the match.

Spiky opponents and the Macedonian flagburners had been subdued. Wasn't that enough for him for one night?

Apparently not. In the stadium tunnel, he conducted two interviews just seconds apart, first to English reporters and then to Macedonian radio, offering quite different personas-One was inflammatory, the other a model of diplomacy. It was a weird performance. To us, he seemed strangely enthusiastic to volunteer how Macedonian players were spitting at them and how he'd been told by an unnamed player "Be careful, you're going to die tonight". To Macedonian radio, he just raved about England's opponents having some "very good players".

To us, he referred to the familiarly depressing racist grunts aimed at Sol Campbell and Emile Heskey from the terraces as being "terrible" and explained how he'd been geed up by seeing the burning of a giant English flag by a few volatile home fans.

For the locals' consumption, this then became: "The atmosphere was very good out there. Macedonian people have been very friendly to us, the hotel was very lovely and the people around the hotel were lovely."

Did he really think that his other ill-judged outburst wasn't going to picked up by his outraged hosts? When I yesterday talked to Artim Sakiri, the Macedonian captain who'd ended up having to be separated from his adversary at the final whistle, he clearly found it exasperating that what he'd seen as nothing more than a minor private drama had been turned into a potential international incident.

Even if Sakiri had made such a threat - and he says neither he nor any of his teammates did - he rightly pointed out that what gets said in the heat of a feisty encounter on a football pitch is usually intemperate, not designed to be taken literally and certainly not worth raking over afterwards.

"I don't know why he said it," insisted Sakiri. None of Beckham's team-mates saw fit to mention such dramas.

The atmosphere in Skopje's neat City Stadium was not overly-threatening or unusually intimidating. And Macedonia's players didn't offer anything wilder than Beckham's kick aimed in the direction of Georgi Hristov which earned him a first-half booking. It could have been worse if he'd connected.

Indeed, Beckham again displayed what an effective irritant he can be, especially in the dying seconds when he played keep ball by the corner flag to waste about five minutes.

Earlier, his fist-pumping goal celebration underlined his passionate will to win. We still desperately need that. What we don't need, though, is any more of the sort of post-match fare which would be better served up in the Queen Vic.

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