Role model

My favourite player of the World Cup so far is the Argentinian
midfielder Juan Román Riquelme. It was not love at first sight. I saw
him for the first time playing Arsenal in the Semi-Finals of the
Champions League, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He
didn’t have all that much of the ball, didn’t do too much with it when
he did have it, and missed a 90th minute penalty. Just another case of
a moody dead-ball expert being overhyped, thought I.

There was one thing, though. The camera was on his face when he ran up
to take that penalty—and Riquelme looked half-asleep, heavy-lidded,
even as he was about to strike the ball. ‘He knew he was going to
miss,’ was a friend’s comment. But that didn’t seem quite right. He
looked more like an athlete in a state of near-trance. Even though the
penalty was saved, he didn’t look as if he minded too much. He looked
like he was deep inside his own head.

He still looks like that, only now he is hitting balls through
opponents defences in that way that seems always to invite metaphors to
do with slicing, cutting, carving. (‘A left foot like a can opener.’
What the hell does that mean?) He’s also been compared to a slide rule,
a pre-digital age comparison which surely must be meaningless to anyone
under the age of 40. What all this boils down to is that he is very
good at hitting super-accurate, beautifully weighted passes into space
just behind opponents, just as his own teammates hit the space.

Riquelme is, though, going to have a disastrous effect on amateur
football all around the world. It’s a sad fact that about half the
players on any pitch in the world are, in their heads, secretly
pretending to be somebody else, usually a former great from their own
youth. No harm in that. But Riquelme  is the first great player—if he
is truly great; it might be a bit early to say that for sure, but let’s
just for the sake of argument—who almost never runs. Or rather, he does
run, but not usually for more than about ten metres at a time. I can’t
think of another great player about whom that was true: Pelé,
Maradonna, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Charlton, Neeskens, Netze—all of them
covered a lot of ground. They always seemed to have an uncanny amount
of time on the ball, but they got around the pitch too. Riquelme looks
like he just potters about, then hits perfect passes out of his
near-trance.

What this means is that every rubbish footballer in the world has a new
fantasy self. Denounced for idleness by teammates, they will, to a man,
say, ‘you don’t hear Argentina slagging off Riquelme for his work
rate’, or ‘you don’t see Riquelme rushing around like a blue-arsed
fly’, or ‘I’m like Riquelme, I let the ball do the work’. This great
athlete looks certain to become a role model for the older, slower, fatter, more delusional player.

Comments

[Kári Tulinius]

Wasn't Bernd Schuster a slow moving "can opener" in his heyday? Admittedly, having been a small boy in his heyday, I can't say I've seen him play much.

[John]

He was so slow-moving he didn't even make it to the World Cup in either 1986 or 1990.

[Kári Tulinius]

That was because he didn't want to play for West Germany. According to the excellent Tor! - The Story of German Football by Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger, Schuster wanted 1 million DM for participating in 86. The German FA was so desperate that they actually went to Adidas and asked them to pay Schuster. Adidas said no.

[Wez]

Riquelme is not a slow player, he's not a fat or a lazy player.
He's a Genius, he doesn't need the running thing.
I saw every match of Villareal this year, in every match i was surprised.
Riquelme can hold the ball without move it. Anyone else can do that?
Riquelme can see the perfect space in the perfect moment. He doesn't need to run, he need a couple of runners to make them score.