For Rooney, See Torres

As the latest updates from what must certainly now all but be confirmed as this summer’s long running will he/won’t he/do we even care anyway transfer saga come through and we prepare ourselves to hear constantly from each of the three parties involved one thought overrides all the others, haven’t we been here before?

Here with Rooney sure (his desire to ask to be put on the transfer list already established when he used the same tactic a couple of years ago to snag the mega contract that Man Utd are so apparently so comfortable running down, something to think about the next time you hear him talk of feeling unwanted) but also here before with Chelsea.  The drawn out signing of Torres in January 2011 was another time Chelsea targeted an established Premier League striker quite fancying a move away and who’d been successful at his present club (with both players being similarly less prolific in the period leading up to their potential transfers).  As with the Torres transfer what looks like both weakening a rival and a decent piece of business could end up as an unmitigated failure.

He’s a special case is Rooney.  He was one of the last street footballers that came through (more through his playing style than his background) before Premier League youth prospects seemed uniformly to adopt a kind of drummed in conformity; a kind of technically gifted, Playstation playing, slightly boring ubiquity.  When Rooney came through it was different.  After his debut there were stories that David Moyles literally had to drag him away from playing football with his friends in the street.  He slept with grandmas.  Can’t see Theo Walcott doing that.  And on the field he played as if he make anything happen.  And often it did.  With all the excellence of Rooney once he’d moved to Man Utd and settled down, and at his best he really was one of the best in the world, (156 goals in 292 appearances in the Premier League, 34 goals in 2009-10 alone) he seemed to have had either lost that sense of unpredictability or had it coached out of him.  Which however he finishes his career will always be the biggest shame about it.

Chelsea signed Torres just as he went through the kind of mid career slump that must still have him waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.  The El Nino they signed and the one that started playing for them were two different players.  Even now and after a season where he scored 22 goals there’s the sense that he’s lost that extra yard of pace that once made him so explosive.  With the benefit of hindsight Chelsea overpaid for a player prematurely leaving his prime, possibly due to playing so much top level football at such a young age.  They may be about to do exactly the same with Rooney.

The similarities with them don’t end there.  At 29 Torres is two years older.  He moved to Chelsea at 26, one year younger than Wayne is now.  Both of them started early, Wayne bursting into the first team at Everton when he was 16, Torres playing regularly for Atletico Madrid at 17.  They were both fixtures in their international teams in their teenage years.  The old accepted wisdom over footballers entering their prime was around 27-28.  As the great football thinker Indiana Jones says it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.  Both of them have a lot of miles under the clock.  With players starting earlier, playing more football and the possibility of burnout we could see that dropping by at least a few years.  Speaking frankly, Rooney like Torres could very well have already seen his best years.

The suspicion that Rooney has lost something about his play, that extra bit of desire that let him impose himself on games, had been in the background even before Fergusson left him out the team before the Real Madrid game.  Everyone points to the signing of Van Persie as the moment Rooney fell down the pecking order but at least as significant was the signing of Kagawa.  After Shinji’s first season settling in he should be a good bet for a run in the number 10 role behind Van Persie this year, something Moyles pretty much said outright when he talked about Rooney featuring if anything happened to the Dutchman (and this is without them yet making a signing this year, Cesc Fabregas’ arrival would make the queue at ten even longer).  With a World Cup looming and facing no longer being first choice it looks ever more likely he’ll be leaving.

It’s been a very twenty first century transfer saga so far, with updates given from Thailand, Malaysia and Australia and twenty four hour news updates on nothing much happening with claims and denials crawling out at a snail’s pace and everyone apart from the people directly involved thoroughly bored of the whole thing already.  Although it’s the first thing that landed in Moyles’ in-tray Fergusson’s fingerprints are all over this.  From dropping him, implying he was carrying a bit too much timber then declaring after his last game that Rooney had handed in a transfer request (something the player still denies) Fergusson has done most of the heavy lifting to ensure Rooney can be moved on while making it look like the club weren’t the ones agitating for the move.  It would be extremely naive to think that three weeks into the Moyles era he isn’t still in contact with Fergusson.  Moyles’ press conferences have managed to walk this line perfectly, giving lip service to the idea of keeping Rooney while offering him no assurances on his role this season. 

It’s all been set up perfectly to force Rooney to admit he’s looking to leave before he’s sold, perfect revenge for Fergusson after failing to deal with his transfer request properly the last time (paying an alleged £250,000 a week to a player asking for a move has proven one of his more debatable decisions).  Sympathy for Rooney will be in short supply, mainly because with demands like that he’s done as much as any other player as to provide us with plenty of opportunity to be cynical about modern football.  It may just have been because watching him go from an unpolished sixteen year old to a managed entitled professional was always going to be disappointing but he’s not helped himself along the way.  In short, he’s come across as a bit of a knob.

Mourinho seems to be enjoying the whole thing, far more than Moyles.  For him he’s in a win/win situation.  Sign Rooney and he’s taken a marquee player from one of his main rivals.  Fail to sign him and he’s managed to ruin their preparation for the new season.  Since his opening salvos back in English football were so unthreatening it’s a relief to see him get his teeth into something he can really have fun with again. 

The actual transfer being a success is harder to predict.  Jose would be gambling on his management being able to restore Rooney to something approaching his peak, no certainty by any means.  It’ll also be, by proxy, an admission that he doesn’t think doing the same will be possible with Torres.  Chelsea will play in the same 4,3,3/4,5,1 that Real Madrid did last season.  Rooney and Torres would be in direct competition with each other for one spot (as well as Demba Ba and Romelu Lukaku).  Chelsea could find that if they sign him Rooney could well end up in a similar run of form as the man he’s intended to replace.

In Praise Of... Kim Kallstrom

It’s something when a player who’s won four league championships in two different countries, played just under a hundred games for his country and been a fixture in the Champions League for years can be considered a disappointment.  But Kim Kallstrom can.  Mainly because he was the first Championship Manager prospect who I then followed in real life.  He first popped up on CM2001 as a 17 year old AM/FC with already ridiculous stats and a stupidly low value.  You bought him immediately wherever you started your game.  Within a year he was the best player in your team.  Within three or four the best player in the world.  Everywhere you went you’d use that old formation, which was basically just this:

                                                                                   GK

           

                         RB                              CB                                    CB                             LB

                                                  CM                         DMC                      CM

                                                                           Kim Kallstrom            

                                                                    FC                           FC

As long as you had Kimmy in there then your team would click.  As the game went on he’d provide as many assists as he would score goals.  His name would inevitably pop up on the flashing commentary more than anyone else’s.  In (slightly) later editions he was listed as the deep lying playmaker that he became in real life but it still didn’t stop him running games, scoring screamers and freekicks from distance seemingly at will (this was in the first edition of the game with ‘highlights,’ the unbridled joy I found in watching the dot with Kallstrom’s number power them in may never again be matched).  And then back in the real world he moved to France, first to Rennes and then on to Lyon and we all waited for him to become a world beater.  And instead he was merely very good.  Forever a disappointment because he didn’t live up to a computer programmer’s idea of how good he would become at 17.  A large part of me will always love him.

* In mitigation during that Germany–Sweden game that they were losing 4-0 and came back to draw Kim was on the pitch from halftime and set up three goals.  And also he was responsible for these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ESE_N10zIc

He really has been a very good player (and still is, he’s only 30 and doing well at Spartak Moscow).  He’ll just never be as good as a generation of massive nerds thought he should have been. 

In Praise Of... Inter Milan in the 1990s

Ah Inter in the 90s.  The decade in which they proved that when it came to spending money without achieving success that they were head and shoulders above anyone else (unless you count their three UEFA cups, which obviously no one does).  They were in a bad way before Massimo Moratti took direct control in 1995 (only escaping relegation by one point the season prior).  Across the city Arrigo Sacchi had built AC Milan into one of the greatest club sides of all time.  Moratti’s plan was to spend money like a teenage Arab and hope for the best. 

Turns out that it ended as the only decade when Inter failed to win at least one Scudetto (in fact it took the match fixing claims then titles and points being stripped from Juventus and AC Milan before they’d claim their next one, in 2005-6).  Moratti had two moves during this time, spending big and sacking the manager.  He used both liberally.  Inter broke the world transfer record twice, paying £19.5 for Ronaldo and £31.5 for Christian Vieri.  Fair enough I suppose, although neither of them really lived up to their full potential when they were there, and they definitely didn’t as a pair.  He also made Alvero Recoba the highest paid player in the world.  Now as much of a fan of El Chino as I am there’s not an argument that can be made supporting that.  Unless it was a result of his debut as coming on with twenty minutes to go and scoring twice so that your team wins 1-2 is pretty much as good as it gets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bd2s3XT5UA

After that though he frustrated more often than he delivered.  Later on they signed Hakan Sukur and a teenaged Robbie Keane in the same transfer window for big money then promptly decided they didn’t really want either of them.  The piece of business that deserves to haunt Moratti until the day he leaves is swapping Clarence Seedorf for Francesco Coco.  The club then had to watch as Seedorf led AC to Serie A’s and European Cups.  Coco did not.

And it’s not like spending loads of money to build teams wasn’t working in Italy.  Inter had to watch Lazio spend big under Sven Goran Eriksen then break the Juventus-Milan 90s hegemony to win the league in 99-00 (of which more in a later article, I’ve always had a soft spot for that Lazio team).  The difference in their spending was it seemed to fit a plan.  They had Alessandro Nesta, Marcelo Salas, Roberto Mancini, Juan Sebastian Veron, Pavel Nedved, Diego Simone, Dejan Stankovic, Sinisa Mihajlovic and a pre Middlesboro Alen Boksic.  They formed a team where Inter could not.  And in the season after, when Inter came into the final day of the season in first position, needing only a win at Lazio to make sure of the title (and even the Lazio fans were supporting them, not wanting the third placed Roma to win at all costs) Inter threw away a 2-1 lead to let Juventus win it once again.

Their record in the Derby della Madonnina was almost uniformly awful, one that culminated in a 6-0 loss in 2001, a performance so bad that after the match Inter fans smashed up restaurants owned by the players.  Moratti didn’t help by not realising that sacking managers every season may have a destabilising effect on his team.  Even a Marcelo Lippi then still firmly in his imperial phase couldn’t deliver success.  And when managers were doing well Moratti sacked them anyway, pulling the trigger on fan favourite Luigi Simoni the day after he won manager of the year.  Lippi went after the first game of 2000-01 season.  All in all they had fifteen managers in ten years (including Roy Hodgson twice).

It says a lot that their recovery from this time took the hobbling of their two biggest rivals and an uncompetitive league post Calciopoli (although in fairness to Inter they had already begun to become more of a threat under Mancini and won a still record seventeen league games in a row the first season they actually ‘won’ the title).  Their current existence post Mourinho as an underperforming, disjointed squad could be as much reverting to type as their title wins were.

In Praise Of... African Football Ages

“Do you want my football age or my real age?”

A question that apparently is fairly standard in African football, where historically players have often claimed to be younger than they actually are to make themselves more valuable to potential clubs.  Not surprising when you consider the motivating factor is an escape from poverty and that forging of official documents is often as easy as getting them through the proper channels.  This led to thirty year olds playing in under 20 matches and allegedly grandfathers and grandsons in the same match.  Before implementing magnetic resonance scans on players’ wrists FIFA’s own figures estimated that a third of previous Under 17 international tournament players were older than they claimed (when the scans were announced before the 2010 World U17 competition Nigeria suddenly and without any further explanation dropped fifteen players from their original squad).  Yes it’s cheating and yes it completely goes against the point of youth football but it doesn’t half lead to some unbelievable claims about famous players’ ages.

The main rumours go as follows:

Nwankwo Kanu is nine years older than he claims.

Jay Jay Okocha is ten years older.

Obifemi Martins is six years older and on signing for Newcastle had three passports with three different years of birth.  He told them that the one that made him youngest was the correct one.

The reason John Mensah and Michael Essien keep getting injured is because they’re at least five years older than they claim (this came from the ex-Ghanaian team doctor).

Roger Milla doesn’t know how old he is.  He may be older than he thinks (which given that he was 42 at Italia 90 would be quite an achievement).

Taribo West finished playing in his fifties.

All of these are real claims, put forward mainly by Nigerian journalists (who believe that this is the main reason their country, which contains a fifth of Africa’s population, has struggled to dominate at international level).  Undoubtedly there’s some truth to these.  Evidently there’s also a healthy portion of bullshit.  More than anything though if any of those are halfway true you can’t help feeling impressed.  When Jay Jay was lighting up the Premier League he was apparently north of forty years old.  I thought that Taribo had lost his pace as he neared thirty.  Turns out it was because he had just turned fifty.  Kanu always looked about ten years older than he was.  Now we know why.  If anything proves that age is just a number it’s this.  Shame of it is that we’ll never know for sure just how old that generation of players where.  Which puts us in exactly the same position as Roger Milla.

The Javi Martinez Interpretation of Defensive Midfield

Amidst all the (well earned) praise for Bayern Munich’s almost total dominance last season there hasn’t been nearly enough for the player who was the last piece of the jigsaw, the signing that turned a team that lost Champions League finals into one that won them.  Without Javi Martinez they wouldn’t have seemingly eclipsed Barcelona as the most formidable team in Europe.

‘It’s a lot of money for a water carrier.’

So said Uli Hoeness when they signed him, adding that he thought that at €40 million he was about €10 million too expensive.  Three trophies later it’s a safe bet he probably doesn’t still feel the same way.  In one sense you can see why Hoeness was reticent to spend the money, after all in Luis Gustavo they already had a defensive midfielder to slot alongside Schweinsteiger, one good enough to perform the same role for Brazil.  In Martinez though they have a defensive midfielder currently performing the role like no one else (in fact he’s as much of revelation as Toni Kroos is threatening to becoming further forward in the playmaker role or Thomas Muller as a self declared interpreter of space, it’s enough to make you wonder what if anything Guardiola will attempt to change).

On first impressions it’s easy enough to appreciate why Martinez is a good player.  Technically he’s excellent.  His long legs propel him across the ground quickly.  His distribution is as good as you’d expect from a young Spanish midfielder.  What makes him exceptional, and quite possibly currently unique, is his combining of this with the physical side of the game.  As football has allowed less and less contact the job of screening midfielders has become less about tackling and more about interceptions.  Javi Martinez is excellent at both.

It’s in his positioning that he’s truly exceptional.  It can be hardest thing to appreciate, watching on TV, of how hard it is to constantly be in the right place at the right time both with and without the ball.  Martinez has always been good at it.  In the early days of his career at Bilbao he would only very occasionally get caught out.  The arrival of Marcelo Biesla as manager and his temporary conversion to centre back as allowed him to fine tune his positioning even further.  For evidence of how important he is to systems played with an emphasis on pressing just look at what’s happened to Athletic without him (I also can’t help thinking that if Barcelona had signed him instead of Bayern he’d have spent time all season at centre back, an odd thought given that Pep will be managing him next year).  Previous models of defence midfield success in Europe have been pure water carriers like Claude Makelele or in England all action running midfielders like Roy Keane.  Martinez shows how much the game has moved on since then.  With importance placed on quick transitions goals are scored from moves with fewer and fewer phases.  Midfielders like Javi are able to win the ball quickly and cleanly and distribute it to dangerous areas.  What would have taken two players in the past he’s able to do by himself.

Compared to other midfielders in Europe his stats in the Bundesliga for interceptions and tackles aren’t all that impressive.  This can be attributed to Bayern’s almost complete dominance of their league.  The more possession they have the less there is for him to win back.  And his arrival has allowed Bayern to maintain the second most possession in Europe.  Last season in the league Bayern averaged 65.7%, behind only Barcelona with 70%.  Martinez’s screening and physicality combined with his distribution has allowed Bayern to win the ball back more effectively and move it on to dangerous areas quickly. 

It’s in his partnership with Bastian Scheinsteiger that really makes Bayern tick.  In Bayern’s 4-2-3-1 they perform slightly different roles but have the ability to cover each other.  With that formation being so ubiquitous we’ve seen slightly varying interpretations with the two holding midfielders, the most common is to have one focussed more on screening and the other as a deep lying playmaker.  Broadly speaking this is what Martinez and Schiensteiger do.  Martinez’s ability to impose himself in the area in front of his back four has allowed Schiensteiger to dictate play more than he had previously (and with more freedom that he gets at international level with Sami Khedria alongside him).  What’s interesting about Bastian and Javi is that on occasion they’re not afraid to swap roles; Schiensteiger’s positioning is good enough to cover when Martinez strides forward and Javi’s distribution is good enough for him to influence play when his partner takes a step back. 

At 6 foot 3 and deceptively strong Martinez is imposing enough to use his physicality to influence matches.  With experience he’s learned to stay on the right side of using it without costing his team.  At Bilbao he was just on the other side of that line, amassing 58 yellows and 5 reds during his stay there.  This season at Bayern he’s kept it down to 7 yellows, probably judging it absolutely right on how close to the edge he could get.  His manner of being imposing while demonstrating technical excellence is probably closest to Patrick Viera of recent players.  If anything he’s even more of a complete player, demonstrated by his greater ability to read play and step back into defence.

It was against Barcelona in the Champions League semi finals that Javi demonstrated just how key he had become to the way Bayern can play.  For a team that was used to possession Bayern changed their tactics completely against the Catalans (as everybody does).  Across the two legs Bayern averaged 40% of the ball.  What they did without it was key.  In the first leg every player dropped deep to mark across the pitch, even Mario Gomez who was positionally the nominal front man.  This left Javi free to press across midfield.  He kept his basic position in front of the back four but was free to come out and chase the ball, harrying the Barca midfielders in a way that they haven’t had much experience of before.  Across the 180 minutes he made eight successful tackles and five interceptions, successfully breaking up Barca’s play and allowing his own team to launch their counterattacks.  His maturity was shown after he received his booking in the first leg.  He was still able to walk the fine line between making tackles but staying on the pitch.  It’s safe to say that without his pressing Bayern wouldn’t have been able to pick Barca off in the same way.

His long term chances of becoming a regular in the Spain team seem assured.  Even a country with such depth in midfield talent can’t ignore his talents forever (and it’s easy to forget that he’s only twenty four).  Del Bosque has described him in the past as the complete player.  He may have suffered from Sergio Busquets establishing himself as such a regular as it’s difficult to imagine them playing together, especially when normally so much of the team’s tempo comes from Xabi Alonso filling the other role at the base of the midfield.  Sooner or later they’ll have to find room for him.

Bayern’s success this season was derided by Jurgen Klopp as a Chinese system, meaning copying their style from other successful teams.  He was referring primarily to their wholehearted adoption of Dortmund’s pressing, something in the two previous season’s they were unable to cope with.  One of the main reasons this was achievable was the capture of Martinez.  There’s also a sense that Bayern have managed to co-opt some of the successful attributes of the Spanish system, as Javi optimises the excellent distribution and desire to win the ball back that is essential to their football.  With his physical style being ideally suited to the German league Bayern may well have found the player that gives them the best of both worlds.

In Praise Of... Bayern Munich in the 90s

It takes a lot to break Giovanni Trapattoni.  The most successful Italian manager of all time has won titles in four countries and managed two international teams with great distinction.  It took the 90s Bayern team two years to reduce him to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1sprC3-nmM

You can see where he’s coming from (the translation is apparently accurate by the way, poor Giovanni got himself so wound up his grasp of grammar slipped further than it normally does).  No team has ever managed to combine success with so much self destruction either before or since.  In the 90s they won the Bundesliga and the DFB Cup four times and one UEFA Cup.  They had players of the calibre of Elber, Mehmet Scholl, Jurgen Klinsman, Lothar Matthaus, Stefan Effenberg and Mario Basler.  And also Carsten Janker.  They were often so busy trying to outdo each other off the pitch they forgot how to win football matches.  It would be impossible for anyone else to lose a UEFA Cup tie to Norwich in the same year they ran away with their domestic league.  For 90s Bayern it was merely an appetiser.

The FC Hollywood name has become a bit overused of late, used to illustrate the glitz and glamour of Bayern against the rest of the Bundesliga.  The 90s was when it first surfaced, an era when you had players calling up papers to plant stories about each other, fights in training, players getting thrown out of bars and the club hiring private investigators to trail their own players.  If we’re honest with ourselves doesn’t that sound much more entertaining than the togetherness and ruthless unity they’ve shown this season?

Lothar Matthaus kicked the decade off by being nicknamed the loudspeaker by the German press for his outbursts, his most famous being the time he told a Dutch journalist that ‘Hitler must have overlooked you.’  Which is pretty hard to top.  He also famously had a running battle with Jurgen Klinsmann.  They hated each other so much a live TV debate had to be stopped when they wouldn’t stop arguing.  This then led to Klinsmann demanding Lothar was left out of the Euro 1996 squad.  He got his way but Lothar ended up outlasting him at Bayern to make life awkward for everyone else.

Even in a squad lacking in self-discipline Mario Basler was exceptional.  ‘Super’ Mario’s opinion of things like professionalism and time keeping where that they were fine for other people.  He once cheerfully admitted that, ‘50% of players hate me.’  Presumably they were the 50% he played with (in mitigation its worth pointing out how talented Basler was, in 1994-95 he scored 20 goals from midfield in a 33 game season, including two direct from corners).  After the 1996 European Championship he told Playboy the best thing about the tournament was the fact the players were allowed to have sex during it.  That and the drinking and smoking he got on with anyway.  Bayern eventually got so tired of Basler that they hired a private investigator to follow him around, a fact that was plastered all over the front page of Bild soon afterwards.  Eventually he walked out after they caught him drinking before a game one too many times.  In the 1999 Champions League final he was the best player on the pitch by miles.  When they lost he shrugged his shoulders and drank so much they found him dancing on a table.

So to try and calm things down they decided to resign Stefan Effenberg.  The press quickly dubbed Effenberg, Basler and Matthaus Le Trio Infernal and started reporting on each of them badmouthing the others in the press (Effenberg saved his best stuff, particularly about Matthaus, for his autobiography).  Der Tiger has always had the air of someone killing time until his next fight.  He played football like he was painfully aware it was beneath him.  His seeming contempt for a game he was excellent at has never been bettered.  At Bayern he managed to amass more yellow cards (109) in the Bundesliga than anyone before or since.  He also was fined after assaulting a woman in a nightclub.  His crowning glory has to be stealing his teammate Thomas Strunz’s wife.  Predictably the press had a field day and Effenberg made sure everyone knew he genuinely didn’t care.

It couldn’t last.  Ottmar Hitzfeld was brought in and eventually managed to calm it all down, mostly after Basler left and Matthaus and Effenberg retired.   And from that came the calm, thriving mega-franchise that we have today.  Even more successful but let’s face it, compared to the 90s, fucking boring.

In Praise Of... Fernando Redondo

First of all, this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvcdsDlT1MI

Most great players get a season or a competition that gets to define them.  Fernando Redondo managed to distil everything that made him exceptional into one game.  In April 2000 in the second leg the a Champions League quarter final with Man Utd The Prince played in central midfield in what was closest to a 3-3-2-2 formation that doesn’t make anymore sense thirteen years down the line.  That Steve McManaman was the closest team mate to him should help explain just how on his own he was.  It shouldn’t have worked.  And with anyone but Fernando it wouldn’t have.  Fabio Capello once described him as the tactically perfect player.  He wasn’t wrong.  Alex Ferguson said afterwards that he’d never seen Roy Keane so outclassed.  Without Redondo that formation wouldn’t have held together.  He did it masterfully.  You don’t really get midfielders like The Prince anymore.  He could do anything.  Defensive or offensive depending on what the game in front of him demanded.  The assist for the third goal is as good as anything you’ll ever see.  Magnets in his boots reckoned Fergusson.  Injury after his move to Milan robbed us of seeing more of him in his prime, although the fact he refused to accept his salary while injured and even tried to return a house and car loaned him by the club should give you an idea of why he’s held in such esteem.  That he’s often regarded as not fulfilling his talent after winning two Champions Leagues and the Primera Division twice should tell you how good he was.