Overstatement?

Football always gets too much coverage, or at least, too much serious coverage, and this is surely one of the best over-the-top examples, comparing Rio Ferdinand to Abraham Lincoln:

"The shock of the new, wise Rio comes across best in his new, wise face. Gone is the air of a man in a perpetual struggle to remember his own pin number. In its place is a mask of piercingly elemental forensic intelligence. It's tempting to compare wise Rio with a young Abraham Lincoln. This doesn't go far enough. What we've got here is the old Abraham Lincoln: furrowed, long-suffering, a vision of parched and forbidding integrity."

Quite.