Leboeuf, Emerson and Van Hooijdonk have all shown how a timely moan or refusal can drown out the noise of panic elsewhere at a club
These are bumpy days for the Premier League’s answer to Doogie Howser MD, André Villas-Boas. The boy-gaffer of Stamford Bridge is under scrutiny and I can’t help thinking his age – or lack of it – is being held against him. In Europe the prevailing trend is for young managers – Pep Guardiola is 40 and Jürgen Klopp, who led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title last season, is 44, the same age as Massimiliano Allegri, coach of the Serie A champions Milan.
In England, sinking jowls and shrinking hair are viewed as the key to success. If you are not old enough to recall just who the bloody hell Doogie Howser MD is, and maybe even whistle the theme tune, you are likely to be viewed by pundits as too callow to be entrusted with handing out the bibs, never mind standing at the edge of the technical area doing that single-finger-of-each-hand-raised-switchover motion.
Witness the continued suspicion among the sofa-summarisers of flagrantly juvenile Roberto Mancini compared to the happy glow surrounding the reassuringly crinkled and increasingly bird-like Kenny Dalglish. The feeling seems to be that you can’t really rely on anybody who didn’t have a primary school crush on Ayshea Brough. These days, even to be mentioned in connection with the England manager’s job you have to be old enough to be a law lord.
Nobody, not even those of us who can never quite remember which one of his names doesn’t have an “S” on the end of it, would wish Villas-Boas ill. But at this stage of the season I really feel he needs to put his idealism aside, give experience its greying head and put his faith in his veteran players. Or at least one of them – Nicolas Anelka.
Like many stars who cut their teeth on the fresh rusks of the Premier League, Anelka is well adapted to the ways of the press. Over the past 20 years the pace of football has increased off the pitch as well as on it. Space is at a premium, not just during a game, but before and after it, too. It’s hard to make comparisons, but frankly one wonders how such heroes of yesteryear as Stan Matthews and Tom Finney would have coped against the bigger, stronger and more mobile media of today.
Top-quality players such as the French striker have become adept at making important decoy runs, even when they are not playing. On the pitch a well-timed diversion can create a scoring opportunity for a colleague, off the pitch it can take the public’s eye momentarily off a club crisis and create room in which those around or behind him can operate.
In the past Anelka has shown himself a master of the art of drawing attention away from the real problem. At the end of the last millennium the striker moved to Real Madrid, where an opening volley of criticism directed at his new team-mates distracted press attention from Real’s poor start to the campaign. As the journos followed the striker’s wonderfully executed decoy run down a blind alley, the recently appointed coach Vicente del Bosque was able to ghost into the resulting gap and engineer a revival.
To show he was no one-day wonder the Frenchman was soon off again, refusing to turn up for training despite being fined five million pesetas a day for doing so. “The boy is sick in the head,” was the verdict of Real’s president, Lorenzo Sanz. No football man, Sanz was clearly unaware that the Parisian’s selfless attention-seeking was dragging opponents with him and away from the club’s financial turmoil. Though he got little credit for it at the time, it was plain to those who understand the game that Anelka’s work was what created the gap that allowed Real to stave off ruin and usher in the era of the galácticos.
To some great players, such vision comes naturally. Perhaps the first footballer fully to appreciate the importance of off-the-field movement was that force of nature George Best. During the early-70s the Ulsterman’s weaving dribbles away from Manchester would frequently lure as many as a thousand journalists and photographers from the steps of Old Trafford and on to the patio of a Marbella love-nest, leaving United’s directors free to create gilt-edged chances for managers such as Wilf McGuinness and Frank O’Farrell. Sadly, no British player has ever been able to follow in Best’s unevenly spaced footprints. Instead it has been left to imports to demonstrate the efficacy of the technique.
Frank Leboeuf, Emerson, Emmanuel Petit, Robinho and Elano have all shown how a moan about the food here, or a refusal to come back off holiday there, can create the sort of media-hype belch that drowns out the noise of panic elsewhere. And during his time at Nottingham Forest, for example, Pierre van Hooijdonk gave a bravura performance at, or rather not at, the City Ground. In the role modern coaches term the proactive scapegoat, the Dutchman went on a series of diversionary whining dashes that completely distracted everyone from events on the pitch, allowing the Forest board to go clean through on relegation.
Anelka has been remarkably quiet, but I believe the magic is still there when it is needed. If not, then Villas‑Boas can always make a bid for Carlos Tevez. Though given Manchester City’s recent reversal against Napoli, of course that may be just the sort of smokescreen Mancini is hoping for.
André Villas-BoasCarlos TevezChelseaGeorge BestHarry Pearsonguardian.co.uk
