- Achilles falls…
Of all the hundreds of thousands of images we’ve had over the years of David Beckham, how tragic that this is the one that may well become the definitive, iconic one. For here, in his AC Milan shirt, on an Italian football field, during an inconsequential match, the lion-hearted ex-captain of England was brought to his knees. Not in jubilation at being part of the England World Cup Squad. Not in triumph after converting one of his signature free-kicks that lead his side to victory. Not even because he was felled by a jealous opponent, but in agony, having torn his achilles tendon which is the strongest tendon in the body (it joins the heel muscle to the calf). The pose is as beautiful as it is tortuous: the clasped hands, the hidden face, the back arched as the whole world collapses on top of it. And how appropriate that, if this injury does indeed end Beckham’s career at the top flight, that it should be the achilles tendon that causes it. As everyone who studied Ancient Greek at school knows (or, in my case, checked it out in The Orchard Book of Greek Myths by Geraldine McCaughrean) Achilles was the Greek warrior whose mother, Thetis, dipped him in the magical River Styx to make him invincible. Unfortunately, the bit where she held on to his ankles to dip him wasn’t covered so - to cut a long story short involving battles, death, Troy, Hector etc - he died when he was pierced there by an arrow (or two). A Greek God torn asunder. A footballing hero felled.
No wonder the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has commemorated the incident. It is altogether a fitting and appropriate thing for her to do, though no doubt she’ll be criticised by those who don’t understand about sport for misusing her position. Not so. As the inspirational sports’ journalist Simon Barnes writes in today’s Times: ‘Sport is a living mythology played out before us by a dizzying succession of heroes and heroines.’ And Beckham is up there with the best of them.
Here is Duffy’s poem:
Achilles ©
Myth’s river - where his mother
dipped him, fished him, a slippery
golden boy flowed on, his name on
its lips
Without him, it was prophesised,
they would not take Troy.
Women hid him, concealed him in
girls’ sarongs; days of sweetmeats,
spices, silver songs…
But when Odysseus came with an
athlete’s build, a sword and a shield,
he followed him into the battlefield,
the crowd’s roar,
And it was sport, not war,
his charmed foot on the ball…
But then his heel, his heel, his heel…
Brilliant, Duffy. Hats of to yer, lass.
