Peter Crouch is Currently Reliving a Night Out From Three Years Ago on the Internet

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

When you wake up after a massive bender, jolted from your restive sleep by a heady mix of dehydration and regret, the last thing you need is to be confronted with physical evidence of the previous night's misdemeanours. You want to be left alone with your debilitating nausea, not confronted by a three-hour long Snapchat story that includes footage of you pulling shapes, snogging someone in Chicken Cottage and sleeping with your mouth open on the top deck of the night bus.

Sadly, the modern world steadfastly refuses to let bygones be bygones. We might be totally unknown among the general public, and yet each and every one of us is five seconds of handheld phone footage away from becoming an exceedingly popular gif.

If that applies to the nobodies among us – the fortysomething accountants who end up being known as 'XTC Man' just because they might have taken a few disco biscuits on a mate's stag do – imagine how wary professional footballers have to be. All it takes is for a couple of partygoers to snap an underachieving player huffing up hippy crack, and all hell breaks loose. When a footballer gets out of bed after a huge night out, he is straightaway compelled to tap his own name into Twitter's search bar, just to check footage of him puking in Vodka Revs hasn't been shared several million times among complete strangers.

That is the sad reality of being a famous person. You earn obscene amounts of money, but you can't even go out on the piss without a sponsored Twitter account turning you into shareable content.

If anyone understands the cruel reality of modern fame, it's Peter Crouch. When he woke up this morning, footage of him raving it up in Ibiza was all over the internet. Here he is, allegedly "off his cake" in a club. Here he is, dancing like a bloke who's practiced his moves in the mirror a thousand times but never actually danced in public. Here he is, enthusiastically trying to pick people up on the dancefloor. Here he is, the spirit of a first-year uni student possessing the body of a man in his mid 30s.

Peter Crouch absolutely off his cake pic.twitter.com/YCx4X0sdiu
— Nathan Jain (@NathanJain_) May 23, 2016

It's not even like this footage is from last night. According to Crouch himself, it's roughly three years old. When he checked his phone the morning afterwards, he must have thought that he'd got away with his big night out on the strip. Now, three years later, a clip of him losing his fucking mind on an Ibiza dancefloor has appeared from nowhere, and been turned into an unstoppable torrent of online bants.

Yes I'm a mover but this was at least 3 years ago I'm afraid
— Peter Crouch (@petercrouch) May 24, 2016

This is the heartless and arbitrary nature of being a celebrity in a nutshell. Peter Crouch is currently having to relive a night out from three years ago on the internet, all because some joker has decided to share it with the world. He almost certainly can't remember a thing about that evening, and is now desperately scouring his memory for some incriminating incident that might be about to resurface. Did he piss on the dancefloor at Amnesia? Did he barf on that bouncer at Es Paradis? Did he do the bloody robot again? God help him, he just doesn't know anymore.

If most of us feel a rising sense of dread when we look at our morning-after Snapchat story, imagine how Peter Crouch feels right now. He is suffering for a bender that happened in 2013. He is being ritually humiliated by a vestige of his past self. He is being haunted by the ghost of a night out; the phantom of an evening spent drinking fishbowls of WKD and asking the DJ if he's up for playing some Avicii. Nobody deserves to be publicly derided for going excessively large three years ago. Please, let there be an amnesty. Please, leave Peter Crouch in peace.

@W_F_Magee