A Look At Zlatan & Onuoha’s MLS Bust-Up

If you’ve ever played a game of football in your life then you’ll probably be well aware of the fact that tensions can sometimes get a bit too much. It’s completely understandable in the heat of the moment, because it’s the kind of game that gets you hyped up in ways you otherwise wouldn’t think of in everyday life.

We can sympathise with that ideology, and we can also, in equal measure, understand why people get frustrated with professional footballers doing the exact same thing. They seem to believe that they should be immune from these kind of actions, primarily due to the extravagant wages that they are paid on a regular basis – but that isn’t how it works, folks.

The odd encounter

By now you’ve probably all heard the story of what happened at the weekend between Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Nedum Onuoha, in a game whereby the result didn’t really seem to matter in the aftermath. As reported by JOE, for those of you that aren’t aware of the issue, Zlatan and Nedum got into a few heated exchanges throughout the course of the game – as is usually the case when a striker and a defender battle it out.

Then, when the Swede actually scored, he celebrated directly in the face of Onuoha and continued to mock him. In the process he seemed to earn the title of ‘worst gloater ever’, and then later on after it had all been said and done, Zlatan went and tried to apologise to his counterpart in the locker room.

As you can probably imagine, as reported by The Guardian, Nedum didn’t take too kindly to the offer for an apology. He’d quite clearly taken what had happened to heart, and to be perfectly honest, it does seem like doing this directly after a game has finished isn’t the primary way of calming down the tensions.

Making the right choice

On one hand we can understand the argument from Onuoha, because let’s face it, it’s not cool to behave in the manner that Ibrahimovic did. He absolutely shouldn’t have taken his tactics this far, and it just makes him come across as a really unlikeable individual. That make seem harsh, but all you really need to do is go back and look through some of the things he’s pulled in the past to see that this isn’t uncommon for him.

Then you’ve got the argument of ‘well, you need to be able to take these things on the football pitch and remain calm’. For the most part the former Manchester City defender actually did a pretty good job of keeping his cool (in our opinion), but when the game is all said and done, it’s entirely up to him to decide how he wants to deal with the situation.

If he doesn’t like Zlatan’s personality and doesn’t appreciate his actions, then who are we to say that he should accept the apology? Nedum is his own man and he makes his own decisions, and we have to appreciate his professionalism in comparison to Zlatan’s behaviour here.