When remembering former footballers, it’s easy to become misty-eyed about their playing days, particularly the early years.
Take Frank Lampard, for example: Chelsea’s all-time top-scorer, a midfielder with a simply unheard-of haul of 211 goals in 648 appearances for the west London club.
Not forgetting, of course, his countless other attributes beyond scoring goals that constituted one of England’s great central midfielders.
You could misremember that Lampard was always a prolific, 20-goals-a-season, box-to-box midfielder, when in fact he amassed double-figures only once before leaving West Ham for Chelsea in an £11m transfer in 2001, and once before he was 25 years old.
In Lampard’s first proper season, during which he turned 20, he ended the campaign with nine goals (although those figures were massaged by a hat-trick against Walsall in the League Cup and an FA Cup goal against non-league side W & Emley).
He gave a glimpse of his goal-scoring potential at the turn of the century when he nabbed 14 in 40, but it would be another three years before he perfected those devastating late runs into the opposition’s penalty box and regularly hit 20-plus goals per season.
With that in mind, look at the progress of another similar midfielder who came through West Ham’s academy, made it into the first-team as a teenager and is attracting the attention of every elite team around, and it feels as though Declan Rice is on the very cusp of superstardom.
What’s wonderful about Rice – still only 22 – is that he does not come across like your archetypal modern footballer. He is not moody, nor seemingly disconnected from reality.
Rice has the air of a cheeky schoolboy about to slip out the back of science class to smoke cigarettes stolen from his sister’s bedside drawer. In fact Rice appears perfectly content trying to remain unnoticed in whatever he does, letting others take the credit for his sublimely simple football, his diligent work rate and his control of midfields that on paper are far superior to West Ham’s.
Yet it is hard not to deduce that, well-drilled and cohesive as West Ham are under David Moyes, their third-place in the Premier League table a quarter of the way through the season owes a great deal to Rice orchestrating affairs, defensively and offensively, from the middle of the park.
Rice does not top the Premier League stats lists in any category. But compare him to other midfielders and he is up there in all of the desirable categories of his position: he has played every minute of league football for West Ham this season and is fifth-best for most touches of the ball, fourth for passes, third for tackles.
Perhaps the only thing Rice’s game lacks is goals. And even then, he has scored four in 18 appearances this season and could well hit double-figures by the end of May.
It’s worth remembering that Steven Gerrard, another of English football’s great central midfielders, only reached double figures once before the age of 24.
It’s arguable that in an England team now full of the world’s leading players, Rice could be the country’s most important player now and for many years to come.
Arsenal turn to men to advise women’s team
Arsenal’s newly formed 12-man advisory board, whose remit includes “the growth of the profiles of Arsenal Women and women’s football more generally”, met for the first time over the weekend.
I use “12-man” in the literal sense, for there are 12 men on the board, and no women. How good of Arsenal to pool the opinions of all those men to tell their women’s team how they can grow their profile. Oh, and for good measure, they will throw in some tips for women’s football generally, too.
You wonder why the women’s game would want to follow the men’s, anyway.
There is much to celebrate about men’s football, but an awful lot that is wrong with it: allowing super-wealthy human-rights abusing states to own clubs, the grotesque financial disparity in the pyramid forcing clubs out of business, the decline of local fan engagement. I could go on.
Women’s football has a clean slate, a chance to avoid all the myriad mistakes men’s football has made. Perhaps it is men’s football that could benefit from a few different perspectives.
How much are social media ‘gurus’ being paid?
The approach adopted by footballers’ social media teams posting after victories, draws or defeats has become so bland and formulaic as to render them virtually pointless.
Indeed, the most entertaining of the genre’s recent tweets was posted on Saturday when “Bruno Fernandes” wrote “Gooood vibes” following Manchester United’s defeat to Manchester City earlier in the day.
If the peculiar reaction to a derby defeat was not a giveaway that it might be someone else, a closer look at the picture accompanying it showed Gabriel Martinelli, the Arsenal forward, and his Arsenal teammates smiling in a huddle before they faced Watford. It was later deleted.
Knowing that social media professionals are so quickly churning out these inane posts for multiple players that they forget who they are posting for somewhat takes away the sheen of authenticity.
Even when they get the right player, and the right result, the incessant need to post some meaningless excuse after a loss appears only now to infuriate the fans they are attempting to appease.
Manchester United’s online fanbase are tired of seeing Harry Maguire’s latest excuse for a defeat. Maybe sometimes silence is worth a hundred tweets.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3CYnNry
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