The British public are so highly-strung these days. Honestly, you make one phonecall to a bloke who used to take the mickey out of a Spaniard and the whole of society crumbles. While I’m not right wing enough to use the phrase ‘hell in a handbasket’, I’m worried about our sense of perspective.

David Norris, for example. That’s an incident worth re-evaluating. In case you missed it, after scoring the winner against Blackpool on Saturday, the Ipswich Town striker ran over to the Ipswich travelling support and raised his hands over his head, crossing them at the wrist. Had you not been aware of the back-story, you might have considered it to be just another celebration.

Norris’ friend Luke McCormick is currently serving a seven year sentence for a drink-driving incident which resulted in the deaths of two young boys. The event happened after McCormick drove home from Norris’ wedding in June. The gesture, therefore, was widely interpreted as a sign of solidarity with his jailbird mate, and as such offensive to the Peaks, the name of the family that lost their two little lads.

While it’s not this site’s place to discuss the rights and wrongs of drink driving, what we are concerned with is footballers and their public personas. Norris has since denied the claims, been fined by Ipswich and made a private apology to the Peaks, which is as it should be, but at no time has Norris made clear what his gesture is supposed to have referred to. Incident closed.

However, it pinpoints a facet of public sport in which we expect our sportsmen to be role models for our young, and in an age where we can accept celebrities taking drugs, having sex on telly, going from prison straight to rehab and generally acting like arse-heads, the moral tone levelled at footballers seems a little like it’s from an archaic age.

Norris’ actions are being treated like they belong in a borstal of some kind by ignorant fans and the media, who are so desperate to be offended on the public’s behalf that they scream and shout until we all start listening. Norris could easily have made a lame excuse like ‘I’m a big Adam Ant fan’ but chose to maintain a silence, of which we make what we will. I have my own opinions about the morality of any support for McCormick, real or imagined, but I’ll decline to share them.

But since when were footballers the big moral arbiters of the nation? We in England seem to accept any failing in our dramatic talents and the leaders of our populous but find it loathsome to discover the bad lad streak in anybody of athletic worth. Does this stem back from players like Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright, through Bobby Moore and Gary Lineker, or is it common to all sports? The famous quote contrasting rugby and football about the former being a game for thugs played by gentlemen and vice versa shows our split personality when it comes to sporting morality. We expect our footballers to act like cads, and then get on our high horse when they prove us right.

What I’m suggesting is that the David Norris gesture, mysterious as it is, is not in the same ball-park as what his dear friend managed to do. While I appreciate that any public support of a convicted killer isn’t perhaps the most sensitive or sensible thing to display, the ambiguous gesture was way too open-ended to get this uptight about. What about that butterfly thing Nicolas Anelka does with his hands? He’s never, and apparently will never, said what it means. This is equally ambiguous – Anelka was raised in a tough Parisian district, so of all the myriad possibilities, could he perhaps be using it as a gesture of solidarity to somebody society finds unsavoury? Could be. But he’s never been linked to anything like that so we whistle and go about our merry way. Similarly, that ‘A’ sign that everyone did last season could have been anything, until it was discovered to be an Andy Johnson-backed scheme.

It’s an odd idea that Norris could be condemned in this way for being silent, while he could have just made a cheeky face and a sub-Dickensian couplet and got away with it like Russell Brand. When all’s said and done Norris has been damned by our society’s reversal of the traditional ‘innocent until proven guilty’ cornerstone of our laws and it’s wrong. Because of his link with McCormick, he’s now assumed to support manslaughter in some way. If Norris had backed up this absurd assumption, we may have cause to get angry, but the people involved who need to know already do. The Football League are already demanding an explanation, but shouldn’t this impetus come from the Peak family? After all, they’re the ones with every right to be offended. They have accepted Norris’ apology and therefore the Football League have as much right to an explanation as I do, which is the square root of bugger all.

Footballers are humans who make human errors and Norris has discovered that over the last couple of days. Just because he plays a sport, it doesn’t make him a monster to admit that he made a mistake. Who knows what the man sitting next to you at the football is really like? Yet he screams at players like Norris for being insensitive.

So basically, it’s nobody’s place to judge David Norris because he did nothing wrong. His friend did, was judged and resides in prison for it. Who cares what anybody else thinks outside the main cast of that unavoidable tragedy in June? Not me, but then again I let my brain do the thinking and not the headlines I read.

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