Aston Villa fan Stan Collymore admits he’s torn over Emi Martinez’s World Cup final antics — unsure whether it’s all part of the spectacle of football or ‘s**thousery on a scale the game just doesn’t need’.
Martinez’s behaviour during the penalty shootout between Argentina and France has split opinion.
He threw the ball away before Aurelien Tchouameni’s spot-kick, which was subsequently missed, and was booked for attempting to approach and engage with Randal Kolo Muani ahead of his. All the while playing up to Argentina fans in the 4-2 shootout win after the 3-3 draw.
Martinez has a history of employing the dark arts to put off opponents during penalties, too, having done so before in the Copa America in 2021.
And former Villa, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest striker turned Mirror Sport pundit Collymore said: “I have mates who support Aston Villa but don’t like Emi Martinez because of his s***housery and I must admit I’m torn on what I saw from him in the World Cup final because I’m not sure football needs those kind of antics on that scale.
“If he’d done it in a Villa match to win us a cup or, God forbid, Champions League game I’d probably be all for it, but if I supported the team he’d helped us beat I’d probably think he was a bit of a berk.
"He started it around the Copa America and I saw a few younger Villa fans at the time going, ‘Epic s**thousery from Martinez’. And then I saw some of the older ones saying, ‘Nah, I don’t like this, it’s not sportsmanship’.
“I’m still confident he will get a good reception from the Holte End when he returns, and I was thinking the other night as I watched it all unfold that it would be a bit like when Ray Clemence went back to Liverpool with Tottenham and the Kop gave him a rousing ovation.
"And while I like the fact he’s Villa’s keeper, he's also no Jimmy Rimmer or Nigel Spink, and just because he has won the World Cup, that doesn’t translate to my club.
"So the fan in me thinks one thing and the ex-pro thinks another, and what I can say wholeheartedly is that if I was taking a penalty against him as a senior pro, and he started messing around, I’d like to think I’d have the confidence to tell the referee I wasn’t taking it until he started behaving.
“France had a lot of young penalty takers and he obviously got to them. And while the referee Szymon Marciniak had a very good 120 minutes, I didn’t think he had a good penalty shootout at all.
"As a referee, you’re supposed to say, ‘Stay on your line’, but Martinez was taking two strides off it, doing all the gamesmanship and gesticulating. That was one of the low points of an almost 10/10 night for the ref.”
