For England footballers caught playing away, there's nothing like an Arabian holiday paradise to ease a man's marital woes. But is a fortnight in the sun all it takes to persuade a wronged girl to kiss and make up for the paparazzi? Our culture critic looks at what the pictures really say?
Football ought to be synonymous with churned mud, not baked sand; with woolly socks and cleated boots, not Speedos. So how come John Terry, his colleagues and their attendant Wags are spending so much time on the beach?
In Terry's case ? as the snaps from his break in Abu Dhabi with his wife, Toni, earlier this month testify ? a holiday is PR, an exercise in exposure. Terry and his kind are celebrities, which means that their private lives belong to their gossiping fans just as their professional activity is owned by the barracking supporters in the stadium. The is beach where footballers go to act out the little marital dramas that keep them visible in between matches or after the season ends, and their antics while sunning themselves are today's equivalent to the binges of randy Olympia gods in classical myth, re-enacted so opulently in the Renaissance when Titian painted Bacchus ravishing Ariadne or Botticelli showed an unsated Venus impatiently waiting for Mars to wake up from his post-coital snooze.
Last year, Toni learned that Terry had allegedly been cheating on her with Vanessa Perroncel, a French lingerie model. Cosily enough, Vanessa happened to be Toni's friend, as well as the former girlfriend of Terry's England team-mate Wayne Bridge. Ah, how short a distance it is from the matey scrum of the dressing room to a wife-swapping party in the suburbs! Toni ? describing herself as "gutted", her glottal stops vouching for her choked grief ? did what any humiliated wife would do when her husband has erred: she scooped up her twins and flew (or "jetted") to Dubai.
Those with broken hearts or shady pasts used to flee to the desert, like Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah and Morocco, so the sun could dry their tears or cauterise their wounds. Dubai, however, is an Arab Vegas, where the desert has been replanted as a golf course or paved over by swanky hotels and shopping malls, and Toni's therapy consisted of spending Terry's money and burnishing her tan to a brighter shade of orange.
Her chastened husband soon followed her to Dubai, and they staged a show of reconciliation in the grounds of Le Royal M�ridien resort, which does its best to keep its guests ignorant of where they are by serving them Mexican and Italian food, or pampering them in a spa named after the Caracalla baths in imperial Rome. Who knows whether Terry and Toni enjoyed the M�ridien's fusion cuisine, or submitted to the spa's tri-enzyme resurfacing facials? They spent little time indoors, preferring to canoodle beside the pool or take their kids for bumpy camel rides on the beach, all the while ? according to onlookers who hurriedly transmitted a report to the Mirror ? "exchanging kisses, gazing into each other's eyes and giggling like children".
The public display of affection began beside a swimming pool when Terry shucked his T-shirt. The rest of him ? notably the "endowment" that so impressed another of his "gobsmacked" (or gob-challenged) girlfriends, "36DD glamour girl" Jayne Connery, with whom Toni reportedly caught him cheating before their marriage ? remained modestly under wraps in baggy trunks.
Terry's body is branded by the products he endorses, so his removal of the T-shirt signified that, for the moment, he was not the logoed personification of Umbro and Samsung, Nationwide and King of Shaves, but simply a contrite husband who craved forgiveness. Toni, costumed for the rite in a turquoise-sequined bikini, anointed him by smearing suncream on his back. Her touch, apparently, was "tender". They semaphored renewal by gazing at each other's wedding rings, like characters emoting in a silent movie. In other photographs, Terry begged for Toni's sympathy by pointing to the grazes on his knees and legs ? the stigmata of the footballer, playground scratches and scrapes that entitle him to pretend that his sport is as existential as bullfighting or skydiving.
Earlier this month, Terry and Toni were back in the Gulf, this time in Abu Dhabi, where ? despite the official primness of the Emirates, which has criminal penalties for French kissing and outlaws the flagrant display of flesh ? they worked through a series of clinches that might have been used to illustrate the Kama Sutra. As the cameras clicked, they embraced by one of those waterfalls that in more euphemistic days served as a shorthand for a sexual climax in Hollywood films.
Every so often they retired to change their clothes. Terry tried out some pink trunks, and Toni alternated between bikinis that would have caused her to be lashed or decapitated had she been outside the precincts of the resort, as well as a garment that the Daily Mail ? briefed about her briefs by whichever designer tied the skimpy threads together ? described as "a one-piece consisting of a split-front tie halter top and string thong". This she accessorised with a vault's worth of bling, including chunks of precious rock to catch the sun and a snakey bronze bracelet. In one bit of strenuous choreography, Toni gripped Terry's waist with her knees and dug her heels into his buttocks to anchor herself. People might copulate this way in movies, but I fear for Terry's lumbar region and I worry about the thong's abrasion of Toni's privates. Perhaps because the fans at home were preoccupied by the gallivanting of Ryan Giggs, online commentary was unkind to this display of slippery acrobatics. "Yuck!!" said Victoria from Kent, while Eileen from Ireland spluttered "Pass me the puke bucket!!"
Do these contrived tableaux look familiar? They ought to, because this is a path well trodden by footballing philanderers. Last October, Peter Crouch stayed at Le Royal M�ridien, Dubai, with Abbey Clancy, the model (yes, of lingerie) who was then pregnant with his child. The purpose was expiation, because just after the 2010 World Cup, Crouch had allegedly hired an Algerian prostitute called Monica Mint, in Madrid. Abbey, "devastated" of course, cantered off to an "upmarket equestrian centre", and was papped as Terry's Toni, another horse fancier, consoled her in the stables: polo may be the sport of princes, but dressage is the pastime of Wags.
Abbey's fanbase goaded her to dump the love rat, but there were other considerations. Though we think of trophy wives as male possessions, the wives and girlfriends also accumulate trophies, and in their glitzy economy there is probably a fixed price ? like indulgences that the Catholic church used to sell ? for the remission of sins committed with hookers. Abbey forgave Crouch, who took her to Dubai to advertise the fact for the cameras. When they paraded their togetherness on the compulsory beach walk, the striker's attenuated physique introduced some variants to the Terry-and-Toni formula. On a building site behind them, in the humid murk, skyscrapers with growth hormones mixed into their concrete seemed to vainly attempt to outgrow Crouch; while the Terry brood rode on camels, Crouch and Clancy merely photographed other trippers doing so, since if a camel carrying Crouch had got up from its knees his feet would still be trailing through the sand.
The Rooneys were also in Dubai last October, at the Burj Al Arab, a resort whose seven stars reduce Le Royal M�ridien to a B&B. Rooney wasn't making amends to Coleen for his reported romps with whores during her pregnancy; his purpose was to hold Manchester United to ransom during contract negotiations. Nevertheless, when they posed in the pool for some supposedly candid photographs, their postures summed up the balance of connubial power. Hydrating herself with some pink fizz at noon ("one glass of wine is �40", reported The Mirror), Coleen lolls on the poolside above him, perhaps punishing Rooney with a foot that is invisible under the water, while he bobs about like a suppliant castaway who pleads to be allowed on board.
Things look more tense between the Coles, holidaying on the Costa del Sol in 2008. The tabloids had documented Ashley's alleged adulterous forays with seven women, and followers who were dismayed by Cheryl's clemency (or her venality) nicknamed him Cashley Cole, pointing out that he'd bought a pardon from his wife with a trip to Spain, a bargain-basement destination. This undercut the market in penitence, since the usual requirement is a long-haul flight. All the same, the photograph makes Ashley look like a whipped cur, and Cheryl, advertising her supremacy with a straw cowboy hat, mimes shoving his head below water-level with her hand while her foot gets ready to kick him in the kidneys.
In this company of shameless or shoddily remorseful adulterers there is a single exception: the unwed Cristiano Ronaldo. He, too, uses Algarve beaches or swimming pools in Los Angeles and Las Vegas to indulge in what the journalist Mark Simpson calls "sporno", which is sport redefined as soft porn. Like a mahogany odalisque, Ronaldo arranges himself on a recliner and allows the sun to lap him all over, except for the narrow band covered by his ever more abbreviated shorts; unlike Terry, pinioned by Toni's tenacious legs, he can do without a female accomplice.
Of course Ronaldo needed a member of the opposite sex to help him reproduce a smaller version of himself, but ? like the Holy Spirit renting a virgin womb ? he assigned the biological chore to a surrogate mother, an American waitress whom he recruited with a chat-up line a bit cruder than that used by the angel who announced Mary's good fortune: "Me, you, let's fuck," he is alleged to have said. When his son was born last summer, Ronaldo handed the child over to his own mother, buying the waitress's agreement to his "exclusive guardianship". His current girlfriend, the Russian model Irina Shayk ? who, like Vanessa Perroncel and Abbey Clancy, is paid to clamber in and out of underwear ? knew better than to interfere with this experiment in cloning.
No dramas of irate betrayal and smoochy forgiveness will ever vex Ronaldo. When he's on holiday, perched beside a pool and boyishly dangling his legs in the water, an adoring fan may at best be allowed to approach so she can photograph a fantasy. But narcissism is a solitary business: how could any woman ever compete with his infatuated self-love?
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