Iain Morrison: ‘This is about the warped influence vast quantities of money can have’

And so to the English Premier League, where the shenanigans of the best-paid athletes in Britain continue to stretch the very best comedy brains in a way that makes you mourn the recent loss of David “Don’t tell him Pike!” Croft all the more keenly.

In a week when Sunderland’s Titus Bramble was arrested on sex and drugs allegations, barely meriting a mention, Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez, with typical selfishness, hogged the back pages of almost every newspaper.

If you imagined that the £250,000 per week that Tevez is said to receive from City is a pretty penny to play football, it now appears that the Argentine striker insists on being paid a quarter of a million quid every week NOT to play the game.

According to his manager, Roberto Mancini, when called upon to help rescue his club from a 2-0 deficit late in the midweek Champions League game against Bayern Munich, Tevez borrowed a line from the boxer, Roberto Duran, and insisted “no mas”. Admittedly, the parallel isn’t exact since the footballer hadn’t actually started playing before insisting he’d had enough.

The Argentine realised shortly after declining to showcase his very obvious natural talents in southern Germany that he may have overstepped some imaginary moral mark, though any ethical guidelines in Tevez’s head are surely sketched in pencil rather than indelible ink. He started to backtrack almost immediately and, in searching for an excuse, hit upon that classic politician’s get-out of calling the whole thing “a misunderstanding”. Hilary Clinton has a lot to answer for.

Admittedly, Mancini is Italian while Tevez speaks Spanish as a first language but they have more than enough English between them. Any “misunderstanding” was about as likely as the former First Lady of the United States being allowed to land at an airport that was under sniper fire, as she so readily “mis-remembered” some years back.

It’s been reported that the most that City can fine Tevez is two weeks’ pay and, while the sum of £500,000 would keep you and me and Billy Bunter in Milky Bars for a month or two, it won’t put too big a dent in the Tevez shopping basket. Not that he looks likely to suffer even this fine after his team-mates, in a show of misguided solidarity, insisted that the Bayern Munich stadium was too noisy for them to confirm their manager’s version of events on the night in question.

Compare and contrast Tevez’s behaviour with that of the Argentina vice-captain at the Rugby World Cup, Juan-Fernandez Lobbe. The flanker ripped the ligament in his left knee while playing against Scotland but, rather than make a song and dance of the injury (never easy on one good leg) opted to ignore it.

Although it’s not the treatment recommended in such cases, the Puma forward attempted to run off the injury for five minutes before he was eventually forced to concede defeat and hobble reluctantly from the field. One Argentine declined to start, the other declined to stop.

The sorry story of Tevez is not about South American clichés and still less is it a simplistic football-is-bad-and-rugby-is-good morality tale. This story is about money and the warped influence that vast quantities of the stuff can have on the mind of a young sportsman.

Tevez hails from Fort Apache, the most miserable, impoverished and downright dangerous favela in Buenos Aires and is still known in his homeland as “Apache” Tevez. He once claimed that, if he hadn’t become a footballer, he would be either dead or in jail or, just possibly, dead in jail.

Moving from abject poverty to earning a million pounds a month would twist out of all recognition the most carefully-constructed value system and no one can claim that “Apache” Tevez boasts that. There is no question that he was wrong, and badly so, but, as long as absurd sums of money are thrown at young sportsmen, he won’t be the last footballer to get his priorities muddled.

There is nothing to be gained from crucifying this Argy – not even an appalling Mini Metro.