Post by QPR Report on Jan 21, 2009 0:39:40 GMT
James Lawton/Independent: Blinded by foolishness to true colour of money
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Oscar Wilde might have said that while losing one Brazilian superstar may be regarded as a misfortune, losing two, and on the same day, looks rather like carelessness.
Unfortunately, the folly of Manchester City cannot possibly be compressed into either category.
Their foolishness surely ran as deeply as their humiliation when, on top of the news that football's ultimate mercenary, Robinho, had jumped training camp in Tenerife, they were told that Kaka had looked at the colour of their money and found it rather less beguiling than they had hoped.
How do you extricate yourself from such an embarrassing denouement? In the case of City's chief executive, Garry Cook, you come up with a statement of mind-numbing fatuity in which you accuse Silvio Berlusconi, who owns a large chunk of Italy and as prime minister once lifted the pressure on himself by simply re-writing the constitution, of "bottling it". Bottling what? Presumably, the job of persuading one of the world's best players that his true destiny lay not with one of the top teams in Europe but the other football outfit in Manchester, the one whose only significant achievement since the days of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison more than three and a half decades ago has been to receive a blank cheque from a sheikh who apparently believed, right up to around 10 o'clock on Monday night, that everyone has his price.
Kaka, it seems, did not. Kaka, we have to believe, took a careful look at his options, asked himself who he was, what he was, and then decided that he just couldn't go along with all that balderdash about football only being about money. Football, the creator and scorer of beautiful goals concluded, was more importantly about his greatest means of expression, of developing the success he had already achieved at a club where great players like Franco Baresi, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, Paolo Maldini and, now we see plainly, Kaka, are embraced not just for their brilliant talent but also their character and their understanding of the place they occupy in the hearts of a great public.
City's crude assumption that their money would override these considerations simply because they scented Milan's willingness to move on their star player in exchange for an unprecedented amount of ready cash is shredded now.
It would be encouraging to their long-suffering and freshly dismayed fans to believe that, along with their vast resources, they have picked up in this shattering experience a modicum of wisdom. Nice, for example, to think that now they will begin to recognise that if they want to sign the world's best players they have to do a little bit of team-building, of making a football environment in which someone like Kaka, as opposed to the endlessly mobile Craig Bellamy, might find himself comfortably at home.
Judging by Cook's first reaction to the gut-wrenching news that not only had City failed in their mission, they had also been made to look like gauche intruders into a world of which they knew so little, the immediate portents are not good.
Cook, while avoiding the central issue that Kaka had said "no deal", declared, "We had gone through a three- or four-stage process in which Milan made it quite clear Kaka was for sale and we made it clear we intended to bring him to Manchester City. As we got to the next stage there were questions they could not answer and I think the public and political pressure made them change their conditions. We never ever met the player. We met his representative, his father, but we had discussed commercial terms only. The agenda we thought we were on was about Kaka coming on a journey with this club, but at the end the only journey they were on was a fiscal one."
Delicious irony enough, you might think, this suggestion that while City were hoping to replicate something as noble as a crusade, Milan would only grub around in the counting house. But there is more. Here is Cook again: "[Kaka's] father was very interested in the project and we talked about humanitarian factors, but then those issues took a back seat and financial demands came to the fore."
Imagine the shock to the system of the City officials. There they were in Milan with everyone assuming they were hell-bent on seizing the pride of the city's football and at least doubling the existing world-record transfer fee, when really they wanted to chat about the verities of human existence. Shame on Milan, we have to say, for dragging City back to the tawdry world of high finance.
Where City must go now, of course, is straight back to football reality. Having encouraged the belief in the essentially naive theory that, because of your heaving pile of donated cash, you can cherry-pick the world's best players and make them into a more or less instant force, they have to accept that football really doesn't work like this. Great football teams are not shaped this way. For the most recent example we have only to consider the shambles Real Madrid became when they embraced the idea of los galacticos.
Nearer home, of course, is the lesson of Manchester United, the serial creators of great teams built, invariably, from the foundation stone up.
City thought they could take a short cut. They have been savagely separated from the illusion. This is not because arguably the most ruthless, and certainly least easily shamed man in Italy "bottled it". It is because Kaka exerted his right to continue to play football at a much more appropriate level.
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/james-lawton-blinded-by-foolishness-to-true-colour-of-money-1452160.html
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Oscar Wilde might have said that while losing one Brazilian superstar may be regarded as a misfortune, losing two, and on the same day, looks rather like carelessness.
Unfortunately, the folly of Manchester City cannot possibly be compressed into either category.
Their foolishness surely ran as deeply as their humiliation when, on top of the news that football's ultimate mercenary, Robinho, had jumped training camp in Tenerife, they were told that Kaka had looked at the colour of their money and found it rather less beguiling than they had hoped.
How do you extricate yourself from such an embarrassing denouement? In the case of City's chief executive, Garry Cook, you come up with a statement of mind-numbing fatuity in which you accuse Silvio Berlusconi, who owns a large chunk of Italy and as prime minister once lifted the pressure on himself by simply re-writing the constitution, of "bottling it". Bottling what? Presumably, the job of persuading one of the world's best players that his true destiny lay not with one of the top teams in Europe but the other football outfit in Manchester, the one whose only significant achievement since the days of Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison more than three and a half decades ago has been to receive a blank cheque from a sheikh who apparently believed, right up to around 10 o'clock on Monday night, that everyone has his price.
Kaka, it seems, did not. Kaka, we have to believe, took a careful look at his options, asked himself who he was, what he was, and then decided that he just couldn't go along with all that balderdash about football only being about money. Football, the creator and scorer of beautiful goals concluded, was more importantly about his greatest means of expression, of developing the success he had already achieved at a club where great players like Franco Baresi, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, Paolo Maldini and, now we see plainly, Kaka, are embraced not just for their brilliant talent but also their character and their understanding of the place they occupy in the hearts of a great public.
City's crude assumption that their money would override these considerations simply because they scented Milan's willingness to move on their star player in exchange for an unprecedented amount of ready cash is shredded now.
It would be encouraging to their long-suffering and freshly dismayed fans to believe that, along with their vast resources, they have picked up in this shattering experience a modicum of wisdom. Nice, for example, to think that now they will begin to recognise that if they want to sign the world's best players they have to do a little bit of team-building, of making a football environment in which someone like Kaka, as opposed to the endlessly mobile Craig Bellamy, might find himself comfortably at home.
Judging by Cook's first reaction to the gut-wrenching news that not only had City failed in their mission, they had also been made to look like gauche intruders into a world of which they knew so little, the immediate portents are not good.
Cook, while avoiding the central issue that Kaka had said "no deal", declared, "We had gone through a three- or four-stage process in which Milan made it quite clear Kaka was for sale and we made it clear we intended to bring him to Manchester City. As we got to the next stage there were questions they could not answer and I think the public and political pressure made them change their conditions. We never ever met the player. We met his representative, his father, but we had discussed commercial terms only. The agenda we thought we were on was about Kaka coming on a journey with this club, but at the end the only journey they were on was a fiscal one."
Delicious irony enough, you might think, this suggestion that while City were hoping to replicate something as noble as a crusade, Milan would only grub around in the counting house. But there is more. Here is Cook again: "[Kaka's] father was very interested in the project and we talked about humanitarian factors, but then those issues took a back seat and financial demands came to the fore."
Imagine the shock to the system of the City officials. There they were in Milan with everyone assuming they were hell-bent on seizing the pride of the city's football and at least doubling the existing world-record transfer fee, when really they wanted to chat about the verities of human existence. Shame on Milan, we have to say, for dragging City back to the tawdry world of high finance.
Where City must go now, of course, is straight back to football reality. Having encouraged the belief in the essentially naive theory that, because of your heaving pile of donated cash, you can cherry-pick the world's best players and make them into a more or less instant force, they have to accept that football really doesn't work like this. Great football teams are not shaped this way. For the most recent example we have only to consider the shambles Real Madrid became when they embraced the idea of los galacticos.
Nearer home, of course, is the lesson of Manchester United, the serial creators of great teams built, invariably, from the foundation stone up.
City thought they could take a short cut. They have been savagely separated from the illusion. This is not because arguably the most ruthless, and certainly least easily shamed man in Italy "bottled it". It is because Kaka exerted his right to continue to play football at a much more appropriate level.
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/james-lawton-blinded-by-foolishness-to-true-colour-of-money-1452160.html