EPL Bizarro World: Alternate Realities for Rooney, Terry, Tevez and More

It’s an interesting prospect: Consider what your favorite EPL player would be doing if he weren’t playing football.

Imagine an alternate reality in which Wayne Rooney was never interested in sports, England’s Brave John Terry chose the corporate life and Robert Green spent his days swilling lager at the local pub.

What a world that would be. Here is your EPL Bizarro World…

West Ham keeper Robert Green is an attitudinal fellow.

He flips off journalists, screams his face red on the pitch, stalks between his posts like an aggravated badger protecting its den and, if this week’s match at Reebok Stadium serves any indication, is ready to punch his teammates in the face to force them into accepting his worldview (He quite nearly came to blows with Mark Noble following some shoddy defending on Noble's part.).

If Green weren’t a professional footballer, his home would be the pub. Monday after work?

Time for a pint. Thursday lunch break?

Time for a pint. Sunday morning, time for 10 pints.

As he slipped into enveloping inebriation, Green would become increasingly irritable. He would start arguments with other customers at the pub. He would push and grumble and makes gross accusations.

And, if all goes according to plan, he would end up engaged in brutal brawls in public places, involving everyone from constables to hooligans to pensioners to nuns to Chris Headley, and maybe even the odd wild animal.

Fernando Torres is a pretty boy. He keeps in good shape (the job demands it, really), and he’s got a face that men and women can love. If Torres weren’t a football star, he’d be an underwear model.

But not just any underwear model. A Calvin Klein underwear model built in the mould of a more effeminate Mark Wahlberg.

You’d walk through Herald’s Square in New York City, and you’d see him pouting at you from the façade of Macy’s, his pursed lips and downcast eyes striking a balance between “come hither” and Zoolander.

Alternate Reality Torres would parlay his smooth countenance, boyish looks and general charm into a career as a daytime soap actor and, eventually, major player on vacuous television dramas such as “CSI” or “Gossip Girl,” on the latter of which he would play the reoccurring Spanish love interest of socialite Serena Van Der Woodsen.

Robert Huth, aka The Berlin Wall, is tall, broad and sports a unique facial structure. Were he not an integral cog in the machinations of Stoke City FC, he would undoubtedly be a character actor in gangster films.

Remember Errol from “Snatch?” That’s the kind of guy we’re talking.

Large, broad, muscular, wearing a leather jacket and a button-up shirt with a broad and open collar, with maybe ten or so lines of dialogue to his name for each film.

Huth would stand about, look intimidating, smash some heads a few times here, a few times there. Or, he’d chase a lithe lead actor like Jackie Chan or Sarah Michelle Geller, only to lose him or her at the giant fence in the alleyway that he can’t climb because he’s too cumbersome to get over it.    

Eventually, Huth would move on to the role of the seasoned wingman for the headline gangster in an HBO original series, get killed in the third or fourth season, become a cult figure and parlay that popularity into higher-profile parts in major motion pictures.

In an alternate life, Wayne Rooney would be a tough-as-nails barkeep with a wife and kids at home and a full stable of bar girls reserved for after-hours relations in the pub.

You can see it now: a few days' growth of stubble, a tucked-in shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Taciturn, jaw clenched, quietly drying pint glasses with a small towel he keeps over his shoulder.

Rooney the barkeep would nod to the regulars, drawing pints before the old fellows had a chance to ask for one. Things would never get out of hand at Sir Wayne’s pub, because everyone knows what a taciturn fellow with a clenched jaw and receding hairline is capable of when push comes to shove.

Were he not the EPL’s second-best left back, Leighton Baines would be an analyst.

What does that mean? He’d be the polite, easy-going, peripheral figure in your group of friends who has a good job and dresses well, but no one for the life of them knows exactly what it is he does.

Is he an accountant? No, he doesn’t work for a financial firm. Hmm. An economist? No, that’s not quite it. Oh, a banker! No, no. Maybe a government consultant?

Baines would take the tube to work every morning carrying his briefcase, wearing his nice suits and his expensive, but tasteful, watch. And when someone in the group finally got up the nerve to ask him exactly what it is he does, Baines would simply reply, “I’m an analyst.”

There are two types of graduate students: the pretentious ones with skinny jeans, checkered shirts from secondhand shops and square spectacles that study some insulated and irrelevant branch of the liberal arts, and the ones who gel their hair, wear fashionable clothes, regularly go clubbing and study fields that will someday soon have them changing the world: engineering, physics, economics and government.

Nani would be the latter. There he is at the club, having a drink and dancing to the new Tinie Tempah track.

But lo! Not 12 hours later, there he is in a classroom discussion, defending his fiercely-held belief that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund could forgive all developing world debt without undermining the international financial system. 

What a guy. Always there with the assist to his friends, and sometimes scoring himself, if you catch our drift.

It’s not hard to imagine: David Luiz never picked up football as a career, preferred it as a hobby, really, and never joined Chelsea. Rather, he regularly partook in the herb all through high school, sneaking a smoke behind the school or in the bathroom.

Can’t you see it? There he is at Bonnaroo in Birkenstocks and a faded Phish t-shirt, laconically nodding his head to Ben Harper and smoking an enormous doob.

In his hippie reality, David Luiz is known as Bobby, because his friends are devout Simpsons fans and can’t get over how much Davy’s hair looks like Sideshow Bob’s.

The footie skills Luiz picked up as a youngster would make him a feared presence in the hacky-sack circle.

Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas would be the cool guy in the bar in our EPL Bizarro World.

What does that mean? He’d be the guy in the tight-fitting leather jacket who’s always leaning on the end of the bar, smoking cigarettes. The guy with the vintage Bowie and Stooges t-shirts. The guy who always puts just the right song at just the right time on the jukebox.

No one knows if the enigmatic Fabregas has a job, other than being cool. Does he ever actually pay for drinks, or does he get them for free because he’s so enigmatic and handsome? Sure, he’s a little short, but he makes up for it with that swarthy stubble and gelled hair.

Rumor has it that Cesc was in a wild, anarchist punk band in his youth and was known as being the toughest brawler in the scene. A modern-day Henry Rollins, if you will.

This one isn’t really much of a stretch, because the kumbia (a form of Latin American music) band Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez is in with his brother has experienced mild chart success in his native Argentina.

If Tevez hadn’t devoted himself completely to football, he’d be home in Buenos Aires recording popular kumbia tracks and appearing on morning talk shows to promote his albums. In publicity photos, the band would remain seated so no one would get wind of the fact that Tevez’s bandmates each stands a full eight inches taller than he does.

Once every few years, Tevez and the band would do a full world tour, hitting up cities with large Argentinean expat communities, such as Mexico City and Guayaquil, Ecuador.

There’s no doubt about it, folks: If John Terry weren’t captain and central defense for Chelsea and the England squad, he’d spend his days working a high-paying management position in anonymous corporate climes with blaring fluorescents, his afternoons with lager and sausage rolls and his evenings philandering.

Even more annoying than the fact that you’d find Terry’s brightly-colored knickers caught up in your sheets following a violent tryst he had with the former love of your life, he’d have a nicer flat than you, a flashier car, expensive brand clothing and one tastefully placed gold tooth.

He would speak in platitudes, but be charming and vigorous enough that only a select few would realize that he’s a very pretty windbag.

But, well, that’s life.