MEMORIES ARE SHORT BUT REALITY ALWAYS WINS OUT IN THE END, CHRIS WADDLE.
When one reads the reviews for the film “JACK REACHER” one would think Tom Cruise had made a film where he rips each page out of the novel and wipes his arse with it. Of course many critics rip into the height difference between Cruise and Reacher, hell even the hair colour is different. I mean why doesn’t Cruise portray characters more like his own height like Humphrey Bogart did in the old days, right?
WRONG!!!
Bogart played Sam Spade in the classic movie “THE MALTESE FALCON” but in the novel Sam Spade is blonde and 6 feet tall. You see that’s the thing about memory, it tends to let people down, people rewrite history until it fits what they think it is and very rarely do we see things as they are until way after the fact.
For example, in the seventies ABBA were regarded as good, in the late eighties crap and from the nineties onward, good. The same is true of The Bee Gees and now David Beckham, in a sporting capacity, is going through what ABBA and The Bee Gees went through earlier with Chris Waddle stating that Beckham wouldn’t be considered in the top 1000 Premiership players or players of the last fifty years, or twenty years (Jesus, Chris, talk about moving the goalposts, just pick one!) a bandwagon that many people have also jumped on, no doubt while burning ABBA and Bee Gees records while stating why The Arctic Monkeys will have far more cultural significance than either of those groups in twenty years time. Many people reluctantly point out that he made the most of what he had, that all he could do was cross the ball, had some dead-ball skills, but that was it and the rest was all just PR, hype and branding.
I hate PR, I don’t particularly like hype and I goddamn hate branding!
I would not buy a perfume because some over-paid star had their fisog on it, I detest the way celebs are used to get people to part with their hard-earned cash.
So therefore if I was to offer a different opinion on the issue to the learned Mister Waddle I would have to feel pretty confident in that opinion. Chris is, or was, a highly-rated pundit and I do not wish to pour scorn on his view-point as he is far better placed than me, Mister Chatable, to know what does and does not make a great, or even, world-class player. But, as I said, memory can be affected by many things, I have seen it myself with footballers over the last twenty years, as pundits and newspapermen come up with stuff that now seems like madness. In fact it wasn’t that long ago that various bods in the press were saying the Alan Shearer shouldn’t be playing and that Andy Cole should take his place on a regular basis. Of course now, with what we know looking back, we recognise this for the bollocks it was, but often people’s judgement gets clouded, by a desire for instant results at the time, and later also plain old dislike and jealousy.
The haters all look at why he shouldn’t be included as one of the top players, BUT, let’s do the opposite, let’s look at why he should?
Let’s analyze what makes a great player, but wait, we can’t, because on that pitch their are 11 players and each one needs different skills to be good at their job. For example, Chris Waddle would probably say that Zinedine Zidane was a better player than Claude Makelele. Zidane had a bucketful of tricks up his sleeve and was one of the most skillful players the game has even seen and probably the best I have seen in my lifetime. But without Makelele at Madrid, the trophies dried-up for Zidane. Makelele wasn’t a trickster or a wizard and he wasn’t particularly pacey BUT, he could really pass the ball and he had vision.
Vision is something that most of the great players have, the ability to see what will happen before it does. Beckham had that.
The ability to pass the ball and dead-ball skills are things that Waddle mentions glibly, almost as though they should be ignored and forgotten, the great thing about this as far as Beckham is concerned is that the England team in his absence proved just how much of a skill this is as a largely Beckham-less England forgot how to pass a ball, seemed to lose the ability to take corners and made free-kicks seem like something from the other team to take the ball back and score from. MacLaren may have wanted to show the press he was his own man by dropping Beckham (and after a couple of easy wins the press where certainly all “David Who? A-ha ha ha!) but that was arguably the decision that came back to bite Stevie MacDutch in his short tenure as England manager.
If the England team proved anything without David Beckham it was that passing and dead-ball skills were skills in themselves (even though in pictures he looks a right spanner when performing one of those free kicks, as you can see!)
And now for the last, you see, as I said at the beginning, people tend to have short memories and the one thing that I cannot forget that a lot of people have is just how intimidating he was on the pitch to the oppostion, because, like all great players, not GOOD ones, GREAT ones, they are a threat everywhere on the pitch and this was what Beckham, at the height of his skills, was and I can say this hand on heart because I just watched what was probably one of his greatest games, Germany 1 England 5. At his best this was what made him a great player because it didn’t matter where he was, he could be a threat anywhere on the pitch almost and launch defense into attack, differently to Makelele, but just as effective.
If you’re looking at a top England eleven in terms of positions then Becks would be in most people’s on the right of the pitch (Sorry Chris!) and if he wasn’t (in favour of sir Stan, of course!) then he would be in most people’s England top 22 for sure.
I was going to conclude this by pointing out that memory tends to be comprisable and that time would show us what was real, stripped of both PR and branding AND also the similarities between Bryan Robson and Beckham in that Robson was probably unappreciated to some degree when he was playing for England and that time would show us what we’ve missed. Thankfully I don’t need to do that. Last night’s friendly did that for me. Since those heady days of 2001 we have lost far more than we’ve gained both in terms of Premiership quality and also National ability, but I’ll save that rant for another post.
I’m Mister Chatable, I’ve been unappreciated and hated today and will certainly be so tomorrow.
A tribute to the greatest living Englishman: Chris Waddle!
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