IN AN ideal world, all of sport’s winners would be like Darren Clarke. Lovable, charming, brave, good-humoured. It is no surprise that Clarke is odds-on to be the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, even if the good old British yen for mischief could bring a late rush of votes for Sam Allardyce.
Zara Phillips was clearly a compromise candidate, while a worthy contender such as Nicole Cooke, the first British winner of the women’s Tour de France, was always fighting a losing battle, not least once Alastair Campbell had endorsed her campaign.
(Some readers may have missed Campbell’s latest foray into print, in which he accused Panorama of creating frenzy without the necessary evidence, an ironic statement from the man who helped to make the case for war over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction backed up by a dossier partly plagiarised — spelling errors and all — from an eight-month-old article published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. To recap: casualties of Panorama documentary so far: Kevin Bond, assistant manager of Newcastle United, dismissed yesterday. Casualties of military intervention in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that have never been found: 43,426 dead Iraqi civilians, plus 1,267 dead American troops and 232 dead coalition soldiers. Still, one man’s frenzy is another man’s greatest foreign policy catastrophe since Chamberlain, but back to the show . . .) The point is that Clarke and the rest of the Europe Ryder Cup team fit our perfect picture of sporting heroism. They played the game with courage and team spirit and when it was over they shook their opponents by the hand and led them to the bar. Great sport and great sports; elements that have hardly been constant companions through the years.
At Valhalla, outside Louisville, Kentucky, next time, the Europe team will rally round the leadership of Nick Faldo, a great Ryder Cup player but an individual whose coldness won him few friends during his peak playing days. The greatest motor racing driver is Michael Schumacher and no one in the sport has a good word to say for him. Nice guys do not necessarily finish last, but we should relish it all the more when they finish first. It will not often be that way.
Take football. If the season continues along its present path, the prize for player of the year will be contested by two of the Premiership’s bogeymen. Right now, there is no better goalscorer than Didier Drogba, of Chelsea, and no greater entertainer than Cristiano Ronaldo, of Manchester United. A way to go until the end of the season, mind, but white knights — men of noble bearing and unblemished character — are not in the frame.
The best footballers of the season so far are widely regarded as a pair of rotters. Sad, but true. Yes, it would be nice if Ronaldo had not been proactive in Wayne Rooney’s sending-off during the World Cup. Yes, we would prefer it if Drogba had not spent most of his first two years in England falling to the ground for no apparent reason. But that is the way sport goes. And that is what makes it so captivating.
FOR a further example of frenzy provoked without evidence, look no farther than the charges laid against Ronaldo after England’s World Cup exit, cast as the villain of Rooney’s sending-off for winking at the Portugal bench. True, his haranguing of the referee after Rooney’s entanglement with Ricardo Carvalho was ungallant considering their relationship at club level, but Horacio Elizondo, the referee, said that he was going to show a red card for the foul anyway, making Ronaldo’s antics irrelevant.
As for the wink, it is unlikely to have referred directly to the incident. Ronaldo knows Rooney better than any of us. No doubt, before the game, he told his team-mates about his short fuse. Get at him, snap at his heels and he will lose it eventually, he may have said. And they did. And he did. So Ronaldo winked at his team-mates. “Told you so” was the message.
Of course, when the match ended in a Portugal victory, there was a need for a scapegoat and Ronaldo pandered nicely to our wrong-headed prejudices about cheating foreigners. By the time Portugal played their semi-final against France, the witch-hunt in England had reached such ridiculous levels that a correspondent from one national newspaper was told that he could not give Ronaldo the top rating as man of the match, even though he was the best player on the field.
Will our country have grown up in time for the end of the season? If he continues playing as he is and is overlooked when the accolades are handed out, we will have our answer.
Then there is Drogba, the thinking man’s Mark Falco, in status more than ability. In the 1980s, Falco was Tottenham Hotspur’s main striker, which was a source of amazement to many, not least the directors. The club spent a small fortune trying to replace him, but each time Falco fought his way back into the team. Between the 1983-84 and 1985-86 seasons he scored 54 goals and started both legs of a victorious Uefa Cup final against Anderlecht.
Drogba is in a different class to Falco, but is in a similar predicament in that every time there is a transfer window or Chelsea enter the market, it is suggested that he is the player whose days are numbered. Andriy Shevchenko’s arrival was said to have sealed his fate.
Instead, while Shevchenko has been struggling, with one goal in his past seven matches, Drogba has flourished, with four in the same period. He has been the pick of the Chelsea forwards, probably the pick in the Premiership, and clearly José Mourinho loves him.
When Gianluca Vialli interviewed Mourinho for his recent book, The Italian Job, the Chelsea manager spoke at length, almost in awed tones, about Drogba’s athleticism, unselfishness and worth to the team. Until recently, though, Mourinho has been head of a select fan club.
DROGBA remains an acquired taste. He was among the catalysts for this newspaper’s campaign against diving last season, with actions so repugnant that even Chelsea fans moved against him. Drogba admitted diving and then retracted the statement during an interview with Match of the Day last March, but those who had witnessed his display in an earlier match against West Bromwich Albion had no need of confession.
Drogba’s default position when brushed by an opponent was to collapse in a heap. As well as being distasteful, it was self-defeating because, upright, he was growing into one of the most dangerous goalscorers in the league. What has recently set Drogba apart from persistent offenders such as Arjen Robben, the Chelsea winger, and El-Hadji Diouf, of Bolton Wanderers, is that he has understood the need to amend his behaviour.
Changing the game when coming on as a 56th-minute substitute against Blackburn Rovers last month, he scored a stunning goal that would not have been possible a year ago, simply because he would have fallen when André Ooijer, the hapless defender, attempted to foul him. Instead, Drogba stayed on his feet and struck a fierce shot past Brad Friedel.
The public pressure had worked. Maybe we should try something similar to stop Michael Brown, of Fulham, going over the top in tackles, which he has done twice this season, before the little thug breaks an opponent’s leg. Yet are we ready to forgive Drogba? Are we ready to admit that he has modified his game and that, for all his posturing, he did care what people thought (particularly his team’s supporters, who deserve credit for their stance)?
RONALDO has also undergone a conversion of late, delivering a series of match-winning performances as the perfect riposte to his tormentors. Maybe as Drogba realised that he had the beating of most players standing up, and very few lying down, so Ronaldo came to appreciate that there were better ways to fool defenders than pretending to be tripped, and that the smartest answers were in his feet.
Ronaldo did not need to cheat to earn Manchester United a point away to Reading, or to inspire four league victories this season. In a time of precious few showmen, he is a player whom lovers of the game should seek out. Not to scream obscenities at or taunt as if he were to blame for the limitations of English football under Sven-Göran Eriksson, for Ronaldo, like Drogba, is what the sport is about. Excitement, yes, but something more meaningful, too: the opportunity to inspire and, in some cases, redeem.
English football’s unmentionables are proving themselves this season’s big men. The question is, are we man enough to acknowledge that?
