David Beckham - hero or villain?
David Beckham is an extremely talented footballer who is the epitome of someone who has been on the receiving end of the fickle nature of press and public opinion. Hero one minute, villain the next.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the contrast in the reaction to his performances against England's arch rivals, Argentina, in consecutive World Cups.
In 1998 he was vilified after being sent off, in 2002 he captained the side to victory, scoring the winning penalty. In his book, David Beckham: My Side he describes the feeling after scoring:
"In those few seconds after the ball had settled in the back of Argentina's net, I could see the flashbulbs fire off around the ground. As each little explosion died against the blur and colour of the stands, it took everything that had happened, everything that had been said or written since my red card in Saint-Etienne, away into the night sky with it. The look on my parents' faces at Heathrow when I got back to England, that picture of an effigy of me hanging outside a pub, the snarls from the crowd at Upton Park, and all the rest of it: gone ..."
Of course, since he wrote that Beckham, normally the master of free kicks and spot kicks, missed two crucial penalties in Euro 2004.
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