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One of the more entertaining happenings in the world of football recently is the one in which Frank Lampard picked up his telephone and called in to a small-time radio talkshow host named James O’Brien.
And no, he wasn’t calling to guess the secret sound.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend listening to the full conversation on YouTube.
Meanwhile, I’ll bring you up to speed.
The Chelsea star’s sister had overheard O’Brien calling her brother “weak scum”, based on what he opined was Lampard’s cruel domestic neglect of his children.
Seeing how distressed this had made his sister, Lampard made the unusual move of actually calling the radio host live on air during the talk show discussion to take him to task.
O’Brien, an ex-tabloid hack himself, having wormed his way up to the lofty position of shock jock, had taken the story verbatim from a local tabloid newspaper, fashioned it into a nasty barbed personal attack on Frank Lampard, and hurled it out into the ether to hit what it may.
Kind of like a ten year old chucking rocks.
Tellingly, the particular tabloid he used as his source is the same one which published photos ‘exposing’ shocking abuse of prisoners by British soldiers. It was found later that the pictures were mocked-up fakes.
Quite reliable, then. Not even slightly iffy.
Said tabloid quoted Lampard’s ex-partner, Elen Rives, who had had a few words with someone in club Bungalow 8 in West London at a time when Frank Lampard said she was “a little bit drunk and down.”
Lampard later explained that the person she had aired her feelings to had conned her, taking advantage of her in a moment of weakness while unbeknownst to her they were actually a tabloid journalist doing a bit of muck-raking.
The first mistake O’Brien made was not checking his facts and assuming (or more likely, not caring) that the information in the tabloid was the gospel truth.
The truth of the matter, it turned out, was that Lampard cared for his children equally with his ex, in as much as a week can be equally divided, and they shared time living between his home and Rives’.
He is also paying for a lavish 3.5 million pound home Rives will soon move into.
Not ideal circumstances, I agree, being a child of a broken home as are many of us. But surely calling that child neglect is almost as outlandishly melodramatic as Christiano Ronaldo being likened to a slave.
The second mistake the hapless radio host made, and the one that caused a certain football star to bypass the lawyers and reach straight for the phone, was O’Brien’s oafish timing.
The day he chose to go on live radio to gleefully paint Lampard a weak man unwilling to fight tooth and nail for his family, the day he called him out as a seedy scum who lived in a lavish bachelor pad while his neglected children lived in squalor, forced to filch handkerchiefs to buy stale bread, or some other similarly dubious contention, on that very day, a year ago, Lampard’s mother died of pneumonia.
Choosing any particular day to mount his high horse, casually slag off Lampard’s family values and as an afterthought fire off a pompous damnation of Lampard’s moral fibre across the radio waves is bad enough. To do it on the first anniversary of his mother’s death was absolutely inexcusable.
Considering that most of the UK press were informed enough to realise the import of the date, it qualifies as moronic as well.
Although the headlines screamed about “Lampard’s On-Air Rant” it is actually a passionate, emotional but quite calm and even understated rebuke.
Considering O’Brien’s constant interruptions, self important interjections and patronising use of “Frank” as if on a first bane basis with the star, calling Lampard “my friend” at one point, Lampard controlled himself admirably, and eloquently explained the facts of the situation clearly.
Despite the baiting by his host, the strongest language he used for him was “idiot” when Lampard urged O’Brien:
“What I’d like you to do in future is think when it becomes the personal issues, about people’s families, about people’s kids, and you’re degrading them as human beings. I grade myself as a human being as how I look after my kids. I have to wake up and then listen to idiots like you say ‘I read this and this is what he is doing’. And it is wrong. But I have to put up with it and I keep my mouth shut.”
O’Brien may not get off so lightly if he blurts such unsubstantiated rubbish about persons he does not know and has never met in future. However, as Lampard warned him:
“Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them because you are speaking about personal people now. Next time I’ll speak to you man to man, forget the radio show, I’ll speak to you man to man about that.”
Obviously not grasping his meaning, O’Brien smarmed in a manner he no doubt imagined to be ingratiating,
“I’d welcome that opportunity,” perhaps envisioning many a cozy future evening sipping port at his new famous friend’s mansion, “Frank.”
Later, an unrepentant O’Brien was interviewed on Sky TV by Kay Burley, on the one hand admitting that his timing was “the only element of the exchange for which I apologised to his sister”, and at the same time rolling his eyes at the mention of the death of Lampard’s mother.
Smirking, injecting blatant plugs for his own show and playing dumb to rile his interviewer, the man showed himself to be a first class prat.
Enjoy your fleeting period of reflected fame, “James”. I imaging it will last a week at the most.
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