Celebrating Emile Heskey, altruism and the beauty of the ugly assist

You may have read, somewhere on this terrible hellhole of infinite (dis)information that we call the World Wide Web, that Emile Heskey got more Premier League assists than Paul Scholes.

We are here to inform you it’s not true – at least not according to the Premier League’s official records. While Heskey managed to set up an admirable 53 goals in his 516 top-flight games, Scholes just pipped him with 55 in his 499 outings.

Not much in it, to say the least. Heskey’s 0.102 assists per game. Scholes’ 0.110 assists per game. You’d struggle to slip a gnat’s eyelash between them.

But, even if you were dextrous enough to place that gnat’s eyelash in the tiny little gap between Paul and Emile, why would you want to?

Surely there are better things to do. You could practice your arpeggios on that Casio keyboard that’s collecting dust in the attic. You could join a political pressure group and campaign for an end to Third World debt. You could even just wash that massive pile of dishes next to your sink.

Or don’t. Just get back to it, comparing Paul Scholes’ number of assists to Emile Heskey’s. Why? Well, there’s a social media debate that needs ending, isn’t there? Not just any, but perhaps the definitive social media debate, the ultimate distillation of football’s Twitter-age discussions. Paul Scholes: genius or fraud?

It’s still there, if you look hard enough. It still pops up on your feed from time to time. But at its peak, the Scholes-off was unavoidable. Just open the godforsaken bird app and there it was in front of you, a new, entirely fictitious quote about Scholes fantasticalness.

You remember the sort. @ShitFootballFanSite mocked up an image of the little red-haired fella in the famous red shirt. Across it, the words: “‘Scholesy’s right peg could end world hunger if only Sven-Goran Eriksson was brave enough to play a 4-3-3.’ – Pope John Paul II, 2003.”

“Look @BigDaz10999200”, tweeted @GaryUtdTilIDie in the replies, “I told you Scholesy was better than Gerrard and Lampard [eye emoji].”

Andres Iniesta on Paul Scholes pic.twitter.com/LeuKiGGb4C

— Football Tweets (@FutballTweets) April 30, 2018

So frequent and mind-numbing did the Scholes Twitter sycophancy become that an equally hyperbolic reaction became an inevitability. Scholes wasn’t actually all that, was he? Scholes was overrated. Scholes? Nothing more than a hyped-up Steve Sidwell.

Then it came, the ultimate riposte to Pope John Paul’s…