Emmanuel Adebayor turned 24 on Tuesday. It was a bittersweet birthday. The
evening was joyous: Adebayor opened his door to find Kolo Toure, Emmanuel
Eboue and other friends waiting with the whoops and streamers for a surprise
party his girlfriend arranged. “We had a meal and went to a bar in town,”
says Adebayor. “It’s nice when your teammates are there and you can feel the
love they have in you.” But thoughts were never far from earlier in the day.
The Arsenal squad had visited Eduardo in hospital and the question in their
minds was, and remains, the same as since the awful moment Martin Taylor
broke their colleague’s leg. “Why him?” asks Adebayor. “Why not me? Eduardo
is a nice guy. Some of us like talking a lot but he’s a very cool guy,
easy-going, quiet, you know what I mean? That’s why you think, ‘Why did it
happen to him?’ He’d never do anything wrong on a pitch.”
Adebayor was feet away when Taylor made his tackle. “Eduardo was trying to
pass me the ball. When he fell down I hadn’t really seen what happened and
put the ball down to take the free kick quickly. Eduardo was not even
shouting, because some pain is so great you can’t even take it, you’re in
shock. Then he showed me his ankle and when I saw it, I ran away.
“It’s been more than difficult for everyone at Arsenal to deal with. In the
game, it affected the team, for sure. You’re trying to keep playing and you
know he is suffering somewhere in a hospital, crying, shouting . . . I don’t
know about others but, for me, it was very hard to continue. A ball, 50-50,
you think, ‘Okay, I’ll go for it’, but just for a second it comes into your
head, ‘What if it happens to me?’”
Though poignant, the visit to Eduardo was cathartic. “He had good confidence
and looked very strong,” Adebayor says. “Enough time has passed now for us
to get over it.”
Eduardo’s forgiving of Taylor helped everyone move on. “And it was right,
because the most important thing is for him now to be focused on his ankle
and getting back to playing in four, five, six months.”
If something lingers it should be a lesson for English football. Adebayor
agrees with Arsène Wenger that the Taylor tackle was an accident, but one
waiting to happen. “That’s what I don’t understand in this country,” says
Adebayor. “You see a lot of papers, journalists, people saying ‘to beat
Arsenal you have to be more rough in your game’ and that’s very bad. That’s
no example for children reading or watching.” Arsenal players “will be more
careful in 50-50s now”.
What can the outside world change? “I think it’s about other teams. If you
have to kick someone to win, that’s not football, it’s cheating. If you have
to tackle hard that’s okay, but tackle in a good way. Don’t kick just
because your opponent plays for Arsenal. We don’t want to have a war on the
football pitch. We want to play. The boss has always told us we have to send
a message out, we want people to watch us and say, ‘Yes, this is a team
playing football’. Manchester United do it too, Liverpool sometimes, but
there are not enough teams with this mentality.”
TAKE A BOY and a ball on a string and a poor border district in Africa. The
boy dwells in a traditional house comprising one large room where he, his
parents and five siblings all live and sleep. Understandably, there is
yelling from his mother when he ties the ball from the ceiling and claims
part of these crowded quarters for a jumping game. He ignores her and begins
leaping, attempting to touch the ball with his head.
It takes him a week to succeed but when he does he suspends the ball a little
higher and starts again. Try, try, try, rise a bit further each time.
Adebayor’s childhood routine is a metaphor for his career. “My father always
told me, to be a big person you must respect yourself. Two years ago he
passed away but what he said is in my heart. I don’t want to waste time. If
I have a chance to win the league, I want to give everything to win it. If I
have a chance to win the Champions League, the same. Because those are the
things one day I’ll tell my children about and be able to say, ‘If you go
the right way, you can achieve’. I don’t know what they’ll be, footballers,
doctors, ministers, but whatever - if they go the right way they can get
somewhere.”
Adebayor does not know exactly how high he can soar. “All I know is I can jump
higher than every single player at Arsenal,” he says. Jimmy Bullard said
“the big man has jumped as high as the crossbar” for his two headed goals
against Fulham. Can he slam-dunk a basketball? “Yeah. No problem. Easy,” he
snorts, as if I have just asked whether he can tie his shoelaces.
Adebayor’s aerial mastery is one reason he is becoming a striker who, like
Thierry Henry, is unplayable on his day. His times in Arsenal’s sprint tests
are comparable to Henry’s. His once reedy 6ft 4in fame is now muscular, so
much so he is 27lb heavier than the 11st 8lb he was when he arrived in
England in January 2006.
His ball skills were always there but using these to team effect, and
marshalling his physical gifts tellingly, appeared to puzzle him. Now
Adebayor is as good as Didier Drogba at covering the ground and bumping the
bodies a lone striker must and, crucially, is looking a better scorer than
Drogba. The 22 goals he has already in 2007-8 include 19 in the league.
Twenty is Drogba’s best season’s total. I tell Adebayor his story seems all
about improving himself and disproving others. “Of course,” he smiles. “Some
of my friends, when I told them my target was 20 goals said ‘yes’ but you
could see in their faces they didn’t think I could do it. And for me it was
very difficult when at the start of the season I could see people putting on
the Arsenal website who’s going to finish top scorer and I was not involved.
You could see Robin van Persie, Eduardo, Nicklas Bendtner - no one voted for
me.
“So I said in an interview, ‘Believe in me and I will score 20’ because if you
say something you have to do it. I prepared mentally very hard, and on
holiday in Togo I practised with two or three old friends, crosses, headers,
volleys. I know what I’ve been through to get here, in Africa, and Metz and
Monaco, and Arsenal at first, and I know when people doubt me it makes me
stronger. If I’d scored 10 goals everyone would say ‘that’s normal. Adebayor
always gets 10-15 goals’ and I just wanted them to say, ‘Oh. is it him
scoring again? Is it him with 20 goals, with 30’? I’ve scored 22 and
I know I can do much better.”
Alan Smith, the former Arsenal striker, is a judicious, not excitable pundit,
but he suggests Adebayor can become one of the greatest centre-forwards in
English history. Wenger, mocked initially for spending £7m on the striker,
says: “Of all the many young players I’ve brought here, his story is the
most pleasing.” There was a time when Adebayor, never mind hitting a barn
door, couldn’t even hit the ball. Francis De Taddeo, the Metz coach who took
him from the Togolese capital, Lome, at 15, recalls his inability to shoot.
“Yeah,” grins Adebayor. “I could nutmeg every player in front of me, dribble
past four or five people, and couldn’t score. He said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I
said, ‘What you ask me to do is something I don’t know’. In Africa it’s
who’s going to dribble most, who’s going to do the most nutmegs. It’s like
Brazil. It’s not about scoring goals. We do play with goalposts, but once
every three months. Dribbling games - two v two, three v three - we play
every single morning.
“Francis made me shoot and shoot. At first the ball went 10 metres over the
bar, or for a throw-in. Even when I arrived in Monaco, after the first
training session Shabani Nonda and Fernando Morientes were practising
volleys and I had a go. The first time the ball landed on the next training
pitch. Everyone was laughing and for me it was a big embarrassment.
Shabani said, ‘You’ve never done this, have you?’ No. He said, ‘You have to do
this every morning to be a big striker’. These things stayed in my mind and
when I came to Arsenal I had the chance to learn from Dennis Bergkamp and
Thierry. I still practise after every session.
“Thierry taught me about the mental side of scoring, to be calm, make your
decision, put the ball where you want it to go. I can learn more but one
thing making me feel better is I feel I can now score every type of goal,
left, right, header, volley, distance. Before, I could only score if the
ball was almost in the net. Thierry frightened defenders and I’m working
towards that. At the moment I can see in their faces I make them a bit
worried.”
CONFIDENCE courses through Adebayor but a nice confidence, one expressed by a
strong handshake and a saucer-eyed, ready laugh. He talks for Togo, and
superfast, and even his jeans, with their swirling silver stencils, are
exuberant. There is a temper that can rise within him and Bendtner was left
holding his nose after they skirmished during Arsenal’s Carling Cup exit at
Tottenham, but Adebayor demonstrated the maturity Wenger and De Taddeo say
he has found by issuing an immediate, sincere TV apology. “I wanted to
apologise not just to Nicklas, but the people watching who are influenced by
our behaviour,” he says. “I have a passionate nature and sometimes the
passion takes you the wrong way but I love the game. Four years ago I didn’t
care if I won or lost. Now I’m playing professional football, they pay me
lots of money and I have to do what they want - scoring lots of goals and
helping Arsenal win games and trophies. I’m fighting for that every single
day.”
Adebayor will be back in Togo this summer. His neighbourhood, Kodjoviakope, is
on the western fringe of Lome, in the crime-ridden border area with Ghana. A
previous interview had him slanted as saying he almost grew up to be a
gangster, which annoyed him for the negative portrait of his country and
family it gave.
“What I said is like a message. Where I lived, at the border, everything
passed through, bombs, diamonds, arms, and you can see everything, people
fighting with knives. What I was trying to say was my parents protected me
and stopped me going the wrong way.
“I love my country. I’d fight for it until death and whatever happens it’s my
roots first. It’s true Africa’s a poor continent but in some places, like
Monaco or Paris, you can see people who are very rich but not happy and I
never understand that. In Africa some people don’t even have something to
eat, but you see them talking, laughing and dancing, being happy. At home I
organise tournaments for kids and always end up joining in because it’s so
enjoyable. They say you need a bodyguard, I don’t care about bodyguards.
It’s where I grew up and if they wanted to kill me there they’d have done it
by now. I love the people and just want to be with them.”
He departs with another floodlight-strength smile. No wonder Wenger takes such
pride in this footballing and human success story.
Capello’s verdict
It will be very important for Arsenal not to concede in the first half-hour.
Milan are used to playing games like this, while the younger players at
Arsenal are not. It’s not a bad position for Arsenal to be in, though,
because I think they will have the chance to score at the San Siro. They
have to play their normal game with confi dence. To win this competition you
need young and energetic players as Arsenal have
How Adebayor filled Henry’s boots
When Emmanuel Adebayor arrived in England there were doubts whether he was
good enough for the Premier League. Now respected Arsenal watchers are
asking whether the giant Togolese could go down with Thierry Henry, inset,
as one of the best forwards the club has ever had
- Higher The 6ft 3in Adebayor has the leap of a basketball player.
Fulham’s Jimmy Bullard claimed Adebayor could jump high enough to be head
and shoulders above the crossbar, making him impossible to defend against.
Some 26% of Adebayor’s Arsenal goals have been headers, while Henry headed
just 3% of his goals. In his first three seasons Adebayor has already scored
more headed goals than Henry did in his whole Premier League career
- Faster Deceptively quick, sprint tests earlier in the season showed
Adebayor is very nearly as quick over 40m as Henry and even quicker over
100m than Theo Walcott
- Better The template for lone strikers is Didier Drogba but Adebayor
is a better passer and almost as good at holding up the ball. His 88%
passing success rate is well above the Premier League average for strikers
