Hard choices for Mory Toure this Wednesday at his home in Abidjan. Which son
to follow closest? The one in action against Milan in the last 16 of the
Champions League, or the son who puts on his long-sleeved Barcelona shirt
for a February night in Glasgow? Some weekends, his attention needs
stretching further. Mory Toure, 61, has three sons in professional football
– Ibrahim, a striker, has had spells in Ukraine and at Nice in France – and
although his quartier in the principal city of Ivory Coast may seem as
remote as imaginable from London, Catalonia or the Cote d’Azur, television
brings their feats into his dimly lit living room.
Sometimes, Mory Toure feels the sort of frisson that sets him thinking back to
the beginning. Last month, watching the Ivory Coast team at the African Cup
of Nations, he saw Kolo Habib set off on one of his safaris, carry the ball
with long, purposeful strides into unusual territory for a central defender.
Kolo’s run would end at the opposition goal-line. There he centred, left to
right, for another Ivorian to score – his brother Yaya. “That was a very
precious moment,” smiles their father, “but I was also very unhappy later in
that match.” Kolo would be carried off on a stretcher with an injury.
Happily, the senior of perhaps the most talented family at work in elite
football has recovered, ready to line up for Arsenal and gee them up against
Milan. Yaya Gnegneri Toure will at the same time anchor the Barça midfield
against Celtic. When fit, this pair are givens in the first teams of two of
the finest squads in the world. Name a Dream XI of players taking part in
the last 16 of the Champions League and both Toures would be strong
candidates. Kolo, 26, is in his fifth season with Arsenal, the senior player
in a young side. Barça fans have voted Yaya, 24, the most effective
footballer to have joined the club in the past 12 months, ahead of Thierry
Henry, and among those who have known the Toure brothers longest, the
puzzling aspect of their journey is simply that Kolo had conquered the elite
so much earlier than his sibling.
“Yaya was always the most gifted of those two brothers,” recalls Amani Yao,
who worked with both at the ASEC Mimosas academy in Abidjan. “Kolo did not
have the best technical level when he first came here, but he was a great
trier, with an ambition you could see in his eyes. Yaya made football look
easy, had a vision of the field even as a teenager that you expect from a
coach, and always played with his head up.” Of course, none of it was easy
at all. Mory Toure, employed in the Ivorian military, had a large family and
they would spend much of their life distant from their own community.
Kolo and Yaya had been born in the middle of the country, around Bouake, but
by the time they were embarking on careers in football, they had settled in
Abidjan. By their teens, civil war would make travelling north perilous.
Their father worried about providing for them all. “You know I read recently
a story about Pele, that when he was a very small boy, somebody told his
parents, ‘Your son will one day be a king’,” recalls Mory Toure.
“And I remembered what happened when Kolo and Yaya were about four and two
years old, playing football together in the sand in our home town. I was
complaining that I have so many children to support. How could I feed them
all? It was their maternal grandmother who turned around and said to me,
‘Those boys, they are going to save you’. They have. I’m very grateful to
them, and very proud.”
WE ARE in the home Kolo provided for his father, brothers, sisters, nieces and
nephews in the quartier of Yopougon, not far from where the Toures lived as
children. It is among the bigger houses on an untarred street. On days when
the Ivorian team, the Elephants, play, Mory Toure takes care about going
out. “Their fame, their celebrity has utterly transformed my life,” explains
the head of the household. “I have a lot of respect from people in the
community, who offer congratulations, especially when Les Elephants have had
a good result. But there is also the problem that is common sometimes in
Africa, that people think that when you have children like Kolo and Yaya,
you are wealthy. They come a lot, knock on the door, want to see you asking
for help. And you know sometimes when the national team has a bad
performance, some people threaten the players’ families.”
In the main room hang pictures of Kolo in his Arsenal kit, and another that
needs updating, Yaya wearing the jersey of Olympiakos, a previous employer.
Some lines from the Koran are framed on another wall, and on one of the
sofas sits Ibrahim, back at home while he recovers from an injury that has
interrupted his career. Ibrahim has Kolo’s face and, he tells, benefits from
Yaya’s studious managerial advice on negotiating contracts. Yaya was always
sharp like that.
“He was very intelligent, by his first year at grammar school he was always
first or second in his class,” recalls Mory. “but he felt football was his
vocation.” Kolo had the tougher battle persuading his father sport should be
his life. “He was in the first year of grammar school, about 12, he was
determined. He said, ‘Papa, I’m going to be a footballer’. I wanted him to
concentrate on his studies at school, to leave his football to one side. He
was playing for a team in the quartier and one day they played in a
tournament which was watched by Jean-Marc Guillou [a former France player
who ran the youth set-up] at ASEC Abidjan. He took Kolo in at the academy
and he convinced me to let him play.” The first brother had taken his first
step; two more would follow.
“Football has become this family’s drug,” smiles Mory Toure. It would also be
their blessing. Kolo would bring rice home when he received his bonuses at
the ASEC academy and maintained what his father calls “his solidarity with
his brothers and sisters, who were always together, and that helped us as
parents.”
If Yaya had been lucky to have a brother as pathfinder, Kolo had the good
fortune to find himself among an exceptional set of peers. Half a dozen of
the Ivory Coast squad at the African Cup of Nations had been Kolo Toure’s
teammates at ASEC Mimosas; they all now play at strong European clubs. That
group would be Africa’s equivalent of Fergie’s fledgings, with a similar
concentration of talent as Manchester United’s class of the mid1990s, though
this being Africa, these fledglings all flew north swiftly.
Behind them were a group barely less talented, led by Yaya, and including
Arsenal’s Emmanuel Eboue and the Chelsea striker Salomon Kalou. The secret
was out: the best of Yaya’s generation would be exported to Europe faster
than Kolo’s. Indeed, Arsenal might have had a pair of Toures – they took
Yaya on trial from the Belgian club Beveren. It did not lead to a contract,
so Yaya Toure made his reputation at places like Metalurg Donetsk,
Olympiakos and Monaco and began to show why Kolo used to tell people his
little brother was like Patrick Vieira.
“He’s always been a great player,” says Kolo of Yaya, “and he’s with a great
club and I think he’s enjoying the atmosphere of that. He’s really matured
and has his own family.” So mature he no longer seeks the advice of his
brother? “Sometimes I still try,” smiles Kolo, an insatiable smiler. “And as
a team we work well together, which can be really important for our national
side.”
Among the first things Yaya did on arriving at Barcelona last summer was to
call Kolo. He appreciates his brother “feeling proud and happy for me”. The
second thing he did was make a point that he wanted to be known, on
team-sheets and so on, as Toure Yaya, rather than vice-versa, his family
name first and proudest. He explained to Catalans that Vieira had been his
idol and he admired the football of Claude Makelele. Come his Nou Camp
league debut, he did something Makelele never does. He scored, a thunderbolt
from distance. Barcelonistas had been won over.
The younger Toure has since become as automatic a first-team choice at Barça
as Kolo is at Arsenal. In a squad of many rotations, a fit Yaya never starts
on the bench. The more delicate of his colleagues – the midfield runners and
creators, Xavi and Andres Iniesta, call him their “big brother”. In a team
short on inches, his 6ft 2in makes the sort of amends Barça coach Frank
Rijkaard had been seeking for years. Yaya exudes less of his brother’s
competitive fire, though the steel of his tackles lacks nothing by
comparison.
So what happens the day when Kolo takes one of his safaris upfield and Yaya
stretches out a long leg to challenge? Or when Yaya tees up one of his long
drives and Kolo comes to stop him, not as kids playing in the sand, fellow
internationals practising, but under floodlights, beamed to the world, in a
Champions League quarter-final, a semi, or better. “I just hope it’s in the
final, in Moscow,” says Mory Toure. Who to win? “I will support the team of
the eldest. Because Kolo brought Yaya into the game. So I will pray for Kolo
first, then Yaya.”
TV match
Arsenal v AC Milan
Wednesday, Sky Sports 2, 7.30pm, K.O. 7.45pm
