BRIAN GLANVILLE
writes for worldsoccer.com each week.
SEEING THE LIGHT
23/04/08
At last Arsene Wenger has seen the light, finally and belatedly starting Theo Walcott on the right flank rather than bringing him on as a belated substitute. As such, of course, he splendidly and speedily set up European Cup goals home and away against Milan, then electrified our football scene with his astonishing 80 yard run against Liverpool at Anfield.
On the morning of the match against Reading, he was quoted in a long newspaper interview as saying how much he wished he could be given full games. After his display against Reading, Wenger somewhat patronisingly remarked that “next season began today for him.” Surely if one is going to talk in those terms, it had “begun” several matches earlier. Even Fabio Capello consumed as he so sadly is by a severe dose of Beckhamitis, eulogised Walcott after that run at Anfield.
One is given again to wonder why Wenger, if he did not believe that Walcott had the stamina to last the whole game, had not brought him on from the kick off, rather than late in the game, with the option of substituting him were he to weary. The argument being that by the time he went off, Arsenal might have established a winning lead.
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Last Saturday, yet another two goals for big Luca Toni gave Bayern Munich a 2-1 victory over Borussia Dortmund in the German Cup Final.
Toni’s somewhat romantic, highly Italian, story is of yet another once rejected player ultimately scaling the heights. Even the dizzy heights of a winning World Cup medal. Yet his beginning was obscure to a degree. Born near Modena, he was spurned in his two blank seasons at the local club, then in Serie C1. At Empoli in Serie B, he had just three games and a single goal. Back to C1 for two seasons, better times in B with Treviso, elevation to Serie A with Vicenza and scant success, on again in A to Brescia where his second season brought him just two goals in 16 games. Success and salvation came in Sicily at Palermo, for whom his cornucopia of goals brought them out of Serie B, while he continued scoring ad lib in Serie A. So to Fiorentina and now Bayern.
At 26 years old, the Neapolitan Marco Borriello is another striker who, so to speak, has come in from the cold. Two seasons with Treviso, who didn’t give him a game in Serie B. Little luck at C2’s Triestina, back more successfully to Treviso, then in C1: 10 goals in 27 games. But when he played for them in Serie A, he got only five goals in 20 games. In 2002, Milan gave him just three Serie A games before lending him to Empoli: just four games, at Reggina, a miserable two goals in 30 games. Three spells at Milan, where in 2007, he was suspended for several months for using cortisone. Which was used so recklessly and dangerously for years, in English football.
This season, however, with Genoa, a modest team indeed, he has been lethally effective with foot and head. Milan still have a half share in him, but why would he want to go back there with so much competition up front, all the more if Ronaldinho arrives this summer from Barcelona? And he is now an Italian international. Ernest Hemingway I believe once opined that there were no second acts in the lives of American writers. No so among Italian footballers. Remember Giafranco Zola? But in England.
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The prospect of a World Cup in South Africa in two years’ time, seemed all the more alarming when even a woman minister in their Government, in her desperation, urged the police to shoot criminals dead. No doubt players, officials and the media will be driven around in armoured buses, but what of the poor, vulnerable fans, in a country where the rate of rape and murder increases exponentially year by appalling year? In 2006, the eccentric action of an elderly New Zealander saved football’s World Cup from South Africa, can it be saved now?
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Guus Hiddink was very quick to deny rumours that he might take over at Chelsea, preferring to see out his contract with Russia’s international team. I admire him for that but was slightly surprised not only because I think he would be an excellent replacement for the lugubrious Avram Grant, and his silly self defeating monosyllabic press conference at Everton, but because he has the stature and prowess to do well at Stamford Bridge, yet seemed potentially in thrall to Roman Abramovich, whose money enabled the Russians to appoint him. It was hard to understand the word that the Chelsea job might go to Frank Rijkaard, who has had such a tumultuous season at Barcelona, where he seems to have “lost the dressing room.”
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It would be sad and debilitating if Aston Villa lost Gareth Barry to Liverpool, next season. Long a Barry man, who could never understand why he had to wait so long for a regular England place, I have to suggest that Villa might be hoist with their own petard. For, years ago, they quite blatantly and ruthlessly filched Barry from Brighton, who had discovered and developed him. With the then Villa manager John Gregory crudely mocking the Brighton chairman, saying that he wouldn’t recognise the player (I believe it was) if he were standing with a seagull on his head. Villa compounded their crass behaviour by initially refusing to compensate Brighton, but the Sussex club went to the authorities and Villa very properly were obliged to pay them a substantial sum.
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Meanwhile, we once again have the prospect of the irreplaceable Steven Gerrard moving from Liverpool to Chelsea. But would the gangsters of Liverpool, who, with their threats to his family, supposedly aborted the initial move, permit it this time?
There is not, of course, the smallest stain on Gerrard’s exemplary character, but the strange recent episode in which he gave epistolary evidence for a well known hard nut on trial- one who had supposedly called off another hard-nut – took on dimensions of farce when, despite Gerrard’s friendly letter, the criminal absconded from court. Shades of those Hollywood films, probably starring Jimmy Cagney, in which two friends grow up together in the city slums, one turning into a copper, the other into a gangster. Personally, I hope Gerrard stays at Liverpool.
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Strange that, days before they were due at Nou Camp, Johan Cruyff should accuse Manchester United of being a long ball team; with accompanying but unconvincing chapter and verse.
With the likes of Carlos Tevez, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo in the side, surely United are the very opposite of long ball-ism. Cruyff also declared that the reason he didn’t play for Holland in the 1978 World Cup Finals was that when his house was burgled, his wife and children were threatened with a gun. And there we were believing that the real reason for his absence, which probably cost Holland the Cup, was that four years earlier, at Hiltrup, where the Dutch squad was based, he went skinny dipping in the hotel pool with a bunch of young women; only to be betrayed by a German journalist who happened to lurk among them, unperceived. To the fury and the veto of his wife.
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Brian's latest book is England Managers. The book is published by Headline and is available online and in all good bookstores.
A new revised edition of Brian Glanville's definitive World Cup book, The Story of the World Cup, has just been published and is available from all good bookshops.
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