5 things... that may have caused Yaya Toure to unintentionally drink alcohol

Tue, 13 Dec 2016, 2:30 pm

1 Alcopop dyslexia
Luckless Manchester City midfielder Yaya Toure has been hit with an 18-month driving ban and a £54,000 fine after he unwittingly consumed alcohol and then got in his car and drove it. It was a hugely unfortunate turn of events for the four-time African footballer of the year, who as a devout Muslim does not drink and therefore obviously did not break the law on purpose. Toure admitted on Tuesday that he consumed alcohol before being stopped by police in Dagenham, east London on 28 November, but added that it was “not intentional”. He has not, however, revealed how this mix-up occurred. Consuming alcohol by mistake is a common hazard for most people. We have all, at some point in our lives, found ourselves suddenly inebriated without knowing why. In Yaya’s case, there are many possibilities for how this happened. The most obvious one is that he got WKD confused with J20 and downed three bottles of it, failing to notice the alcohol because of all the sugar.

2 Pudding
Another innocent explanation is that Yaya had been enjoying Christmas festivities with friends and had a bit too much pudding. In addition to the brandy that infuses the dessert, it is also traditional to drizzle a dollop of booze onto the cooked cake and then set it alight to create an exciting mini inferno. It’s possible that Yaya had gobbled down several bowls of this treat without realising he was eating something with more alcoholic content than a bottle of Corona. Most of us can handle a Christmas pudding, but if you’ve never drunk alcohol in your life then a couple of helpings could get you totally smashed.

3 Gangsters
The most surprising element of Toure’s arrest was not that he had been caught drink-driving, but that he had been in Dagenham. Not only is the downtrodden cockney district very far away from his house in Manchester, it is also impossible to imagine a plausible reason for him wanting to be there. It is almost guaranteed that Toure was not in Dagenham by choice, and it therefore seems more likely that he had not chosen to be drunk either. How these two events occurred is a complete mystery, but it seems possible that bad gangster men are somehow to blame. Like the ones that chased Andy Carroll on motorbikes in nearby Chigwell.

4 Aftershave
Another possibility is that Yaya had not actually consumed any alcohol in the traditional sense, but had come into contact with a substance that contains it. The average bottle of Hugo Boss Selection, for example, is roughly 50 per cent proof – although this is not normally noticeable when you just slap a bit on your cheeks. But Yaya may have got a bit carried away when applying his cologne, particularly if he was going on a hot date with a girl or Pep Guardiola and had launched an audacious bid to smell better than any man has ever smelled. Yaya is a big man with a large surface area, and by covering his entire body in aftershave he could have used up an entire bottle and made himself toxic.

5 Accumulation
In fact it’s not just aftershave that has alcohol in it despite not being a beverage; there are actually numerous household items that contain traces of booze, such as hand sanitizer, mouthwash, hot sauce, sugarless chewing gum, windscreen wiper fluid and overripe fruit. In a series of incredibly unlucky coincidences, Yaya might merely have been doing completely normal things in his daily routine – washing his hands, rinsing his mouth, having a spicy meal, eating some fruit, chewing some gum, drinking a refreshing glass of windscreen wiper fluid – and all of a sudden he was over the drink-drive limit. It’s a warning to us all that we should think more carefully about what we consume, or else we could end up drunk through no fault of our own.

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