The Arsenal footballer Ben White has been on the end of a fair – or should that be unfair? – amount of vitriol following his decision to step aside from playing for England. That’s not just on social media, either, because many apparently serious journalists have taken umbrage with him. And on the face of it, you might think the critics have a point. Why would a multimillionaire sportsman turn down the opportunity to play for his country, something the vast majority of us can only dream of doing? Well, the answer to that is we don’t know.
Not a helpful answer, perhaps, but the only honest one I can come up with. It could be that White simply isn’t interested in playing for England, or there could be something deeper. I promise you I am not speculating when I say that for all we know there may be very personal reasons at play. Family stuff, maybe, or even some kind of mental health condition. But even if it’s as straightforward as the boy simply not wanting to play for his country, isn’t that his own business and no one else’s?
We should know by now how this intrusive clamour for information ends, through the prism of the royal family, where Kate Middleton felt the need to go public on her cancer diagnosis. The ghoulish side to our nation came to the fore, from the grizzled hacks of the national media to nosy parker wastrels in cyberspace.
Just imagine it was you or me having our private lives pulled apart by people we don’t and will never know, who demand every single detail about your life? Imagine if Facebook was a place where we openly speculated about people’s mental health or their cancer diagnoses, with literally no regard for their real wellbeing? I could definitely imagine something like that happening given that social media sites like Facebook are not real life. And the fact that so many people are happily prepared to believe things that aren’t true and indeed share untruths with others they don’t really know, makes it all the more possible.
I suppose what I am saying is that White has made his decision and that is the end of it. That he is a wonderful, multi-talented footballer who would surely be a shoo-in for England’s squad for the Euros goes without saying, but can we not just leave it like that? I repeat: we do not know what goes on behind closed doors and we have no right to know. I’d just hate it that if there was more to it than meets the red tops’ collective eye that the player should feel forced to tell us something we really don’t need to know.
