Oliver Holt's Top 10 most interesting people of 2011 part 2, starring Rio Ferdinand and Jack Marshall

By Oliver Holt in Mirror Football Blog

Published 10:00 23/12/11

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We asked our Chief Sports Writer Oliver Holt to name the 10 most fascinating people he'd met in 2011. The resulting piece was so good that we've decided to split it into two separate instalments. You can read part 1 starring Jack Wilshere, David Beckham and Kieron Dyer here.

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5) @jamieredknapp_ss
I got a message on Twitter from Jamie Redknapp in the autumn. I was pleased to see he'd joined up. He's someone I like and admire. I sent a message back.

A couple of weeks later, one of my colleagues phoned me to say Jamie had heard about the exchange and wanted me to know it was a fake account. It wasn't him. He wasn't on Twitter and had no intention of ever being on Twitter.

I forgot about it for a couple of months until @jamieredknapp_ss tweeted something about me.

It was a critical post, responding to something I'd written about Luis Suarez. It claimed I was biased against Liverpool and Suarez and generally suggested I was fairly useless.

It peaked my curiosity.

I had a look at the Fake Jamie's timeline. He had more than 40,000 followers, all people who thought he was the real Jamie.

But there was other stuff, too. A week or so earlier, he had tweeted Brad Jones, the reserve Liverpool keeper whose son had just died of leukaemia. Pretending to be Jamie, Fake Jamie had offered Jones his sympathies.

There were also messages thanking people for inquiring after his 'dad', Harry Redknapp, and saying that he was recovering well after his heart operation.

This was not an obvious or funny parody account like @TheBig_Sam. It was deception, pure and simple, and the guy was getting carried away. The tweets about Harry Redknapp and Jones meant he had crossed a line. It was getting sick.

I posted a tweet saying it was a fake account. Fake Jamie became most indignant, still attempting to maintain the subterfuge. When more people began to realise what was happening, they let him know what they thought of him.

Finally, Fake Jamie let the mask slip but he still did not see he had done anything wrong.

"They think Redknapp is giving them hope," Fake Jamie tweeted. "They're happy. Someone called Ollie then ruins there mood. Whose(sic) the bad guy?"

Then there was another. "Everything I do, I've done with a good heart," Fake Jamie wrote. "Your messages have prompted death threats to me and I'd like an apology."

It made me think. What if he was right? The reason he had more than 40,000 followers was that people wanted to believe it was Jamie Redknapp. Why shatter the illusion?

And the truth is that if he hadn't irritated me by criticising me when I knew he wasn't who he was purporting to be, I wouldn't even have noticed he was still living out his fantasy.

But when I saw, he had begun to stray into darker territory with his tweets about Jones and Harry Redknapp, it was clear his deception had taken a more sinister turn.

Twitter can do that. Like other forms of social media, it can provide you with enough cover to pretend that you are someone you are not. That can take many forms. Just being a little more aggressive than normal, like a timid man who turns into a raging beast at the wheel of a car.

Or being a troll, a keyboard warrior who dishes out abuse they would never say to someone's face.

Or using Twitter to bolster your ego, retweeting complimentary things others might have said about you.

Fake Jamie took it one step further. He subverted his own personality like an actor. He tried to override what he must have seen as the banality of his life by pretending to be a celebrity. Fake Jamie tried to become someone else.

Soon after, the account was stopped and Fake Jamie disappeared back into the ether. I wonder if he lives his own life now or whether he is playing a new character.

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4) Rio Ferdinand
Here's a funny thing. I actually like Rio Ferdinand. He's an intelligent bloke and a brilliant, cultured defender.

So it was a not altogether pleasant surprise to get home from a family holiday last June, switch my computer on and see a message from him that began, "You fat prick".

Rio wasn't happy that I'd got dragged into a Twitter conversation with some Manchester City and United fans about Kolo Toure's drug ban that also dredged up his missed test eight years previously.

I don't really blame him. It was ancient history. But it was a debate about the length of punishment for drugs-related offences and it was inevitable his name was going to come up.

In the rest of the message, he said I had had the chance to speak to him about the issue several times but never had.

Well, England were playing Switzerland at Wembley the next day, so I took him up on his offer. After the game, in the Mixed Zone where journalists wait to speak to players, I loitered near the exit until he came through.

I called over to him as he headed for the bus. He came straight over. He was up for a row so we proceeded to have one.

He said I shouldn't have allowed myself to become drawn into the debate. I said I could get involved in the debate if I wanted to.

There was a bit more name-calling and some finger-pointing.

Joanne Budd, who is just about the nicest, sweetest person on the FA staff, looked horrified and tried to step between us. Rio was not up for being mollified. In the end, a Wembley security guard shepherded me away.

There was a postscript, too. I wrote about the message and the exchange in my column the following week. Rio thought that was pretty low, too.

He and many others pointed out it had been a Direct Message on Twitter and therefore deemed confidential.

My view, in common with some of my colleagues, was that if you write someone an abusive letter, you don't have a right to expect it to remain confidential. We'll have to agree to differ on that.

Another postscript: I promised myself I'd go on a diet after that. Still haven't.

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3) Tom Cleverley
I met Tom Cleverley a couple of times last year at his agent's office in Altrincham. One thing above all others struck me about him: he has an old head on young shoulders. It's a Manchester United thing, I think.

Cleverley is still making his way in the game but he has a maturity, a purposefulness and a single-mindedness that suggests he is going to become a star.

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2) Franco Baldini
Franco Baldini is, by common consent, a charming man. Urbane and clever, Fabio Capello's sidekick is rightly popular with English journalists because he is always approachable.

But in February, just after the story had broken that Capello intended to reappoint John Terry as England captain, the FA held a lunch for journalists at San Lorenzo restaurant in South Kensington that turned into a bit of a comedy.

Capello and Baldini took it in turns to sit at different tables, Capello confirming he saw Terry as his leader only for Baldini to search desperately for diplomacy and say that no decision had yet been taken.

The Mirror illustrated the piece I wrote about it by mocking up Capello and Baldini as Laurel and Hardy. The words Another Fine Mess may also have been mentioned.

So inevitably, I bumped right into Baldini a week or so later at a hotel in Madrid before Tottenham played their Champions League game there. He was coming in the hotel door, I was going out. There was no escape.

"Thank you so much for your piece about Laurel and Hardy," Baldini said, his voice dripping with the heaviest irony he could muster. Which was plenty.

I said it was my pleasure, and we embarked on a relatively spirited argument, enhanced by the arrival of an ally for me in the shape of The Sun's Shaun Custis, a friend of the deposed captain Rio Ferdinand.

The argument became gradually more amiable. I think arguments with Baldini always do.

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1) Jack Marshall
I met Jack Marshall in the early summer. He was lying in his bed in the front room of his family's house in Scunthorpe, his head resting on a Manchester United pillow and his legs covered by a Manchester United blanket.

He was wearing a Manchester United top, obviously.

Jack was five years old. He was dying from a brain tumour but his spirit was undiminished.

As an infant, he had learned to walk by chasing a football around the house as his mum, Tracy, held him up by the arms. When the tumour was discovered, he had had an emergency operation that temporarily robbed him of the use of his legs.

But Sir Alex Ferguson had found out about his plight and sent him a football. Jack learned to walk all over again, kicking that United crest all over the house.

In April, the doctors said he only had a couple of weeks left and sent him home. But Jack defied them.

Rio Ferdinand invited him to the United training ground at Carrington to meet the players. He asked his hero, Wayne Rooney, for a kiss. Rooney obliged.

The first time he had ever been to a United game, he had rode on his dad's shoulders down Sir Matt Busby Way on a freezing winter night, so proud of his United shirt that he refused to wear a jumper over it.

Now, Jack, Tracy, his dad, Craig, and his brother, Josh, gathered round the television set when United played, allowing the games to give them some temporary respite from their sadness.

He could only speak in a whisper by the time I met him but there were still glimpses of the little scamp who used to dash around at the local Footy Monsters play group.

When I told him I once used to go regularly to watch Manchester City play, his eyes widened. "I don't like Manchester City," he said.

I saw him again at Wimbledon in June when Serena Williams, who had read about his courage on Twitter, invited Jack and his family to watch her play.

When I leaned down to say goodbye to him, he pulled me towards him and planted a kiss on my cheek.

Jack died in October in Tracy's arms, a brave, loving little boy who inspired everyone he met.

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Don't forget you can read Oliver Holt's column every Wednesday on MirrorFootball.co.uk and follow @ollieholtmirror on Twitter.

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