The Times
December 05, 2005
The Footballer's Wife
By Joanna Taylor
THE FIRST RULE OF being a footballer’s wife is not to go on national television and say that your husband fancies a move abroad and has a “peachy bum”. Sheree Murphy’s comments on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! have put Harry Kewell in the headlines and he’s not even having to eat bugs in a jungle to get them.
I’m sure that when she comes out she’ll regret having talked about her husband so freely. In fact, I did hear her say the other night that Harry Kewell would probably be cringing about what she had said. I don’t know if he was or not, but it was no surprise that he was quoted in the paper a couple of days later saying that he was very happy at Liverpool.
I have met Sheree a few times and she is very nice and down to earth. She is not what you might term a classic footballer’s wife. I also feel a bit sorry for her. The rest of the contestants in that jungle camp are talking about their partners, so I suppose she wants to do the same. Why should Bobby Ball be able to talk about Vonny but Sheree can’t mention Harry? But Danny would be furious if I started saying things like that. I think it is just common sense.
Another footballer’s wife in the news has been Louise Redknapp, who is helping Jamie with his new magazine project. ICON is apparently produced for footballers and their wives, but as we have not received our copy yet, the first thing they need to do is to sort out their distribution.
I respect Jamie and Louise for attempting such a venture and I am sure it will be really interesting. The first edition had Frank Lampard on the front and Coleen McLoughlin inside. I like Coleen. She gets a bad press, but I think she has managed to relaunch herself recently. She’s a young girl who has had to deal with an awful lot, from Wayne’s alleged extracurricular activities to bitchy comments about her figure. She did seem to be in danger of becoming a classic footballer’s wife for a while, but all recent pictures I’ve seen of her show a much classier girl.
Over the past few years she has received a lot of criticism, particularly from female writers, for shopping too much, but why should she work if she doesn’t have a job she enjoys and she doesn’t need to? Life is too short to do a job that makes you miserable if you can afford not to. I don’t want just to make mortgage repayments, but I know how lucky I am to be in this position. I’ll look forward to reading the article on Coleen to see what she has to say.
It has been a big week for the Redknapp family as a whole, what with Harry leaving Southampton. A lot of people have said going back to Portsmouth would be bizarre, but if you look at it from a practical point of view, it just means he will not have to move house.
I always think it is odd when you watch a game and the home fans are hammering a player from the visiting team. I’ll ask Danny after the game why that was and he’ll say it’s because he played there five years ago. Because of this I am not sure about the wisdom of going back to an old club, but from Harry’s point of view the move would mean managing a Premiership side in a more peaceful environment compared with the politics he had to deal with at Southampton.
I just hope that the Liverpool fans’ memories aren’t quite so good when it comes to Sheree’s comments about her husband. From one footballer’s wife to another, I wish her well. She gets my vote, but I’ve put my money on Carol Thatcher and Jimmy Osmond.
