da doce： Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a football team that were really, really average. They were not particularly good at football, and they weren’t particularly bad either. Won a few, lost a few, drew a few. The players were average too – had some ability, never hit the heights of their profession, but there were worse players out there.
da luck： To some who follow the beautiful game, such a team does not exist. Such players do not exist either. Because everything is one extreme or the other – either a player/team/manager (delete as applicable) is world class, or one of the biggest disgraces the sport has ever seen.
Take Aleksandar Kolarov at Manchester City. He hasn’t had a good start to his City career, getting injured within 30 minutes of his debut, and on his return some months later, putting in some uninspiring performances. Now City fans have a proud tradition of slagging off our full backs – in fact if you asked some you’d think we hadn’t had a half-decent one in over twenty years. And thus, many have already written him off. I’d consider a reasoned analysis to say that he has so far been very disappointing, but should not be written off, as he is in a new country, has had injuries, and needs time to settle – he should be judged fully next season. He may of course continue to be rubbish, but let’s not transfer-list him just yet. But no, such a middle-ground seems a rarity nowadays. Everyone is brilliant or they are rubbish and our club should “get rid”.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic is another interesting case. There’s a popular saying about him that many quote – “I’ve never seen him have a good game”. The ultimate “Marmite” player who is either loved or loathed, I too cannot recall him having many wonderful games, and I’ve seen him a fair few times. But I’m not one to jump on the “he’s rubbish” bandwagon as he clearly cannot be. Inconsistent perhaps, but few players play at the top of their game week in, week out.
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The Daily Mirror’s Twitter feed has a running joke commenting on THE WORLD’S GREATEST, referring to Gareth Bale, a comment on the ridiculous hyperbole that has surrounded the player after a run of excellent form. The sky’s the limit for Bale, no doubt, he’s triffic, a top, top player, but let’s hold back on the knighthood for now. Jack Wilshere is next, and Wayne Rooney has been there, got the T-shirt, and then went backwards for a year.
The tabloids are good at this, as modern journalism is all about getting hits on websites on top of selling papers, so being “controversial” and having extreme views garners a big response. And if you just don’t like someone, like the sports writers of The Sun don’t regarding Fabio Capello, then everything he does wrong is highlighted (or everything they perceive as being wrong), everything he does right, anything that goes well, is met with a muted response. Hence, the furore over who had had a phone call off Capello and who hadn’t was greater than the outrage at a Chelsea player bringing an air rifle into work (neither demanded that much attention, to be honest). As I have mentioned many a time, some managers can do no wrong (the English ones with a good sound bite, usually), while some can do little right (the less forthright ones who don’t count English as their first language, usually).
The treatment of national managers has often shown how the press deal in extremes. Maybe not the broadsheets as much, but the tabloids especially deal in sensationalizing everything. Has England ever had an average manager? Neither brilliant nor inept? If you drew up conclusions using tabloid coverage, you’d think we had stumbled from one buffoon to another. From a turnip to a swede to a wally with a brolly. Yet that wally took a small team to the Dutch league title. But then the England team has always been built up and knocked down – a team that has been quite good and nothing more for decades has been labelled as future World Cup/European Championship winners before every major tournament and then utterly useless after the inevitable penalty shoot out defeat.
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As for England friendlies, they are a complete and utter waste of time, and the fans are disgustingly short-changed when the England manager names a weakened side. But then the game turns out to be rather good, and entertaining, and suddenly history is re-written, and no one has a bad word to say about the particular fixture. Except to comment on how useless Lescott is of course.
Back to Manchester City. The view of the sheikhs and the likes of Garry Cook have always veered towards extremes. You can do this with a lot of owners, especially American ones it seems. When City were taken over it came totally out of the blue, giving journalists and fans little time to re-adjust. But re-adjust they did, and soon City were almost universally condemned as classless. Moneybags Citeh and their crass owners, killing football, having first ruined it, slowly strangled it, before kicking it in the nether regions. There seemed no middle ground. You either despised what they had done to our beautiful, perfect game, or you were a blinkered City fan. And many still feel this way of course. But after De Jong broke the leg of Ben Arfa, the extreme reaction of parts of the press (most notably Stan Collymore demanding De Jong be “drummed out of the game”) led City’s communications department, which had already been very proactive with journalists, to step up their “education” programme. The De Jong tackle caused extensive legal correspondence winging its way to newspapers and certain “outspoken” radio stations, with the rumour that one newspaper was banned from the ground altogether. But suddenly the tide turned. Henry Winter suddenly started talking very positively about City, their structure, community work, and plans to bring through academy products. Then one of the Custis brothers (I can no longer distinguish between the two) appeared on the hilarious Sunday Supplement programme batting away any criticism of the club and strongly defending how we went about our business, despite having spent the best part of two years doing the exact opposite. Journalists had been fully “educated”. Now City were no longer Satan himself in football-club form, but a shining light in English football to some in tabloid-town. But how pitiful is it that they had to be educated in the first place, and are not capable for seeing a club for what it is.
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It’s the same with Garry Cook. A few unfortunate comments have him regarded forever now as something of a buffoon. I’m not about to passionately stick up for him, but anyone who thinks this way has no idea of what he has done for the club, and how much he has invested behind the scenes. The Sheikhs don’t tend to employ idiots on multi-million pound contracts.
But there’s little middle-ground in football. Mancini is either useless and the dullest manager in football history, or a strong man building a legacy for the club and doing things his way. Most think the former. Mark Hughes either very harshly sacked or an utterly useless manager out of his depth. Wayne Rooney was last year the greatest player in the world, but is now rubbish. The FA are universally inept, and useless, FIFA is completely corrupt, City’s football is always dull, Spurs’ is always electric, referees are biased and incompetent, certain newspapers hate certain football teams, and certain footballers are a complete waste of space. Somewhere in the middle, lies the truth.
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