Heinze : "In the end you just give in" (or not)

In the end, Phil Chisnall's record is preserved - and given the tenacity which United displayed this time around, likely to last a good many years longer. But I don't think he'll be the answer to many quiz questions for quite a while - it's become much too easy a question.

Strange that no-one ever mentions how much longer it is since Liverpool sold anyone to United.

In the end, Liverpool's lawyers have been proved fallible (I hope it was the club paid them, not Gaby, for I doubt it was "no win, no fee"), Benitez makes a fool of himself, United are (apparently) paid more than they had any right to expect and Gaby is given the chance to take over from Roberto Carlos. And I don't imagine his agents will lose by the deal either, more's the pity.

So why does so much bitterness appear to linger? Gaby himself seems to have shrugged his shoulders, so I almost wonder if it was just a fight on principle, because he (or his agents) objected to being told what to do. Keano pointed out to Jaap Stam the unpalatable truth that footballers in the end are slabs of meat, but I fail to see why footballers are expected to like the fact and to fawn over the shopkeeper.

And, personally, I am also not at all clear why fans should expect a foreigner who has been in Manchester (or rather in the rich ghettos of Cheshire) for three years, to share their irrational hatred of a club down the road. Loyalty is a rare quality in the modern era; it can't be expected of many owners, directors or players and, frankly, not of all fans. SAF clearly defines "loyalty" as doing what he tells you to do. It is a personal relationship (rather like The Godfather). Perhaps Gaby grates because, for one season at least, there were fans who had the perception that he was different.

From what SAF has been saying since, that perception was probably largely illusory. If it hadn't been for the injury, it would have been obvious his "people" were wheedling to get him away years ago.

Ferguson told MUTV the player's agent was agitating for a move virtually as soon as he had arrived. "We signed Gaby in July 2004 and he immediately went off to play for the Argentina Olympic team, and then onto some World Cup qualifiers," he said. "We didn't get him until September, so in that first year he probably played about five months. At the start of the following season, a day before he suffered his cruciate injury against Villarreal, his agent came to see me and said he either wanted a transfer or for me to double his wages. That immediately sent out the wrong signal. Throughout his rehabilitation, his agent was asking me to sell him."

And in classic Ferguson-speak "You wonder whether the lad actually wants to play for you and in the end, you just give in."

That reminds me of the passage in The Godfather where Don Vito throws up his hands and says "but who can reason with this man", and the chap goes very pale and turns up in a New Jersey swamp a few weeks later.

The club shows the players little enough loyalty. When their time has gone, we unload them without a qualm. Even players who have been fans since they were children. The stories abound of the ruthlessness of Busby et al. He, in particular, had a fear of those he discarded coming back to haunt him. One player he sold commented that he liked to sell people "outside the Manchester Evening News circulation area".

The thing to do is celebrate the rare instances when loyalty is to be found, when players share in the irrational accumulation of desire that makes up United. The rarity is what gives it the value.

And in the end, to what are we giving the loyalty? Clubs have changed their names, their strips, wound up and re-formed, changed grounds. They have been bought and sold like slabs of meat themselves (sometimes by butchers - both literal and metaphorical butchers).

Norman Mailer in The Siege of Chicago tries to explain why Lyndon Johnson (and other US politixians) could never deal with Ho Chi Minh. "A good politician ... can deal with any kind of property-holder but a fanatic, because the fanatic is disembodied from his property. He conceives of his property - his noble ideal - as existing just as well without him. His magic partakes of the surreal."

Players, managers and owners may all prate about the club being "bigger than anyone",but they don't really mean it, don't feel it the same way, except in occasional instances. Their loyalty is the loyalty of cosa nostra and the shared backscratcher.

It is unfair to expect a player to be a fan. Only fans understand the magic that exists just as well without them.

The Retirement Sweepstake

Sir Alex Ferguson is still cagey about the exact date he might retire. The only clue he seems to have given is that he doesn't intend to be there when he's seventy (31 December 2011, as a matter of interest).

One date that might hover in the reaches of his mind is 2010, the point at which he will have been manager for longer than Sir Matt Busby, who lasted 24 consecutive seasons as United manager, before ushering in that period of gloom and destruction for the club that was the early 70s. (He also spent an additional period as manager after the interlude that was Wilf McGuinness).

Busby is the longest serving football club manager of the modern era (although Dario Gradi came very close to surpassing him).

All of them have a long way to go to come near the longest serving manager of all time. Fred Everiss of West Brom was appointed in August 1902 and apparently spent 46 seasons in charge (I suspect they have cheated, because I don't think they called them managers in those days and, indeed, WBA themselves didn't call anyone "manager" until Everiss had retired).

Anyway, the closer he comes, SAF would hardly be human if he didn't find that bit of history enticing. Well, perhaps he is hardly human, of course.

Source

http://www.leaguemanagers.com/manager/longest-historical.html

The Ends of Warwick Road

In my younger days, I spent a lot of time at the other end of Warwick Road. Because of the nature of cricket, the players are less remote from the audience. There are large portions of any match when they are not actively involved and you are quite likely to come across them doing other things. At grounds other than Old Trafford (smaller opposition grounds, like Buxton and Chesterfield, or the out-grounds like Blackpool and Liverpool) this was even more true. And of course they didn't have a separate training ground.

The footballers by contrast seemed to sweep in for matches and then sweep out again. And the explosive nature of a football match is more like their being on a stage, apart from those watching. And of course the experience of watching football itself is shorter, more intense, whereas a cricket match, even a one-day game, unravels itself on a wholly different time-frame.

So I have never quite rid myself of this difference, that football is a performance, something that lifts you out of yourself, whereas cricket is part of the real world, entwined into its fabric. Maybe it is just the time a match lasts. After all, within the compass of a county championship match a man could be condemned, crucified and rise from the dead (and these days still have a day free to spend on the golf course).

Even before the amounts of money made footballers so separate, cricketers were much less remote as a species. Is is sad, perhaps, that it's no longer possible for players to pursue professional careers in both sports; Botham's little excusion with Scunthorpe was an eccentricity, no more. Even in my day, they were a dying breed. I saw Chris Balderstone play both games and Jim Cumbes.

Now we just wonder how good a cricketer Phil Neville might have been. He has, of course, had a successful football career and made himself a very rich man, but he has never really been the stuff of legend, even if he has been there whilst they we were being made.

I sometimes wonder if he might not have sacrificed a good part of his football career for one match winning performance in a Test match against Australia.

Although I doubt if he would have sacrificed any of it for the chance to bring the county championship back to Lancashire, much more important though that might be to an awful lot of people, who still hope to see it in their lifetimes.

Argentina

Of course, Argentina failed miserably against Brazil. It always worries me when I see attacking talent stifled, caught on the counter-attack and becoming increasingly frustrated and bemused at an inability to create anything significant. It reminds me all too forcefully of our bad days.

Now let's be clear, the United supporters' chant of Ar-gen-tina never had much to do with Veron or Heinze, but was an assertion of what all supporters know to be true, club is much more important than country ever can be. Players, of course, can have a different perspective.

Even without the folk memory of the chant , supporting Argentina was inevitable, with Heinze, Tevez and Veron involved (and Anderson not moving off the Brazil bench). All were supposed to have had good tournaments, with words like "revitalised" and "inspirational" being used in reports. As it turned out, Tevez appeared lost, Veron reminded us only of his peerless ability to lose the ball in a crucial position and Heinze, whilst not as impulsively kamikaze as at the end of last season, still didn't convince. Since his return from injury, he appears to have lost his outstanding ability to head the ball, as well as being increasingly reluctant to press over the half-way line, perhaps because he's not as confident of getting back.

Although his form may return, it's not surprising the club is unwilling to offer him a new contract at this stage (particularly now Ronaldo appears fully committed to staying - until then I'd have offered Heinze a new contract simply on the basis he was Ronaldo's best friend - "attention to detail" you see).

And Argentinian players at present do seem to come with a disconcerting amount of baggage, relatives, agents, companies, which seems likely only to fill the pockets of Maurice Watkins and his learned colleagues.

Of course, no-one wants Gaby to go to Liverpool, although I can see the attraction from his point of view, particularly if he's settled in the North-West.

But it would hardly be fair to Phil Chisnall, to rob him of his fame in his retirement. As Phil says, “I’ve become the answer to a quiz question in recent years”, and that is something that should not be sacrificed wantonly, and I'm sure it is the main reason the club is being obstructive.