Martin Jol called a special squad meeting on Tuesday. With Tottenham playing
five games in 13 days, their manager said it was not a time for players
calling off with ailments or little injuries. Darren Anderton would have
hated it: no sick notes. “I told the boys that I need them to be tough,”
says Jol.
He is reclining in a chair, great big feet up on a desk, left hand reaching
compulsively for the tactics board on his office wall. “Players will be
tired and I’m going to have to change them around,” he says, moving counters
before stopping when he clamps meaty fingers round a particular one.
“Not Daws,” he adds, grinning. “I never need to worry about him.” Jol calls
Michael Dawson his “bionic man”. Injuries have dethroned Ledley King but
Jol’s other first-choice centre-half has missed just one of his side’s 45
matches this season, bringing to each performance a level of physical and
mental commitment as constant as the cheerfulness that infuses him off the
field.
“I just love it,” says Dawson. “Of course you get tired but I never want to
miss games.” FTC: future Tottenham captain, suggests Jol. On Thursday in
Braga, Tottenham did not kick-off until 9.35pm, making today’s FA Cup tie
with Chelsea, which gets under way at lunch-time, even more a test of
energies and mettle.
Dawson’s poser is an opponent who is hulking yet delicate, swift but subtle,
the scorer of 29 goals this term, replete of confidence and form. Against
Chelsea’s superman, Dawson had better be bionic. How does he muzzle Didier
Drogba? Were Dawson less modest, he could turn the question around. In
Tottenham’s surprise 2-1 victory in November Drobga could not stop him: it
was the Ivorian who Dawson out-leapt when heading his team’s equaliser, his
only goal for Spurs.
“Goals are something I could add to my game, but first and foremost if you’re
defending you have to keep the centre-forward quiet and the ball out of the
net. If you’ve done that you’ve done your job,” he says. In three encounters
with Dawson, Drobga has yet to score.
“Drogba is a fantastic player,” the 23-year-old says, smiling. “He’s got
everything. He’s a very strong guy, he can head it, he gets goals and his
overall game is very good. Everyone always asks who the toughest striker is
to play against, but sometimes it's partnerships that make it difficult.
Drogba has Andriy Shevchenko playing alongside him, but maybe Wayne Rooney
and Henrik Larsson were the toughest I’ve faced.”
Dawson made an extraordinary 23 interceptions and won 14 headers while
subduing Drogba during the 2-1 game and, of similar shape and build to
Manchester United’s Nemanja Vidic, he shares with the Serbian a liking for
close combat with strikers. That quality seems to make him suitable for
facing big forwards — Jol raves about how well his man plays Peter Crouch.
“There’s no hiding on that pitch. You’ve got to stand up for yourself and do
your job,” says Dawson.
“It’s completely different playing against big and little strikers. When
Jermain Defoe gets it to his feet he’s so sharp and is hard to defend
against in training, one on one. Drogba is bigger and probably not as light
on his feet, but he can still go past people.”
Jol calls Dawson “an old-fashioned English centre-half — except better than
that”. He likes Dawson’s relish for the tackle and aerial challenge but also
admires his poise in possession.
“In training,” says Jol laughing, “I’m always shouting, ‘Daws, did you used to
play up front?’ ” It turns out that Dawson did. His elder brothers Andrew
and Kevin were at Nottingham Forest as defenders but he joined the club as a
striker before being asked to play centre-half in a youth match against
Leeds.
He certainly thinks like a centre-half now. “You have to put your body where
it hurts sometimes and come out top .When your body’s been battered and
bruised, and you’ve won the game, it takes all the pain away,” he says. “A
clean sheet is fantastic, it’s a great feeling and so’s a last-ditch tackle
when you know it’s a scoring chance. Maybe the scorers get the limelight but
I get a lot of pleasure out of that.”
You sense that goal-getting would be almost too ostentatious a pursuit for
this lad. “Yeah? Cheers!” laughs Dawson when it is suggest he is a typical
Yorkshireman, except cheerful.
“Wensleydale, that’s where I’m from,” he says proudly, “a little place called
Leyburn in the country. I’d say that I’ve got Yorkshire attitudes. You work
hard and you get your rewards — and it’s certainly paying off.” Stuart, his
father, was a striker in Manchester United’s youth ranks but broke his leg
playing rugby and was released, going on to become a mechanic. “He works
hard,” says Dawson. “He works for his weekends, when he can watch me and my
brothers play. He never talks about his own career. He’d never say, ‘I
should have made it’.
“Maybe we’ve learnt from that, for if me or my brothers hear someone say they
could have been a player we ignore it. Because you have to put in a lot of
hard work, it doesn’t come easy.” Not for Dawson the gilded cocoon of a
Premiership academy, the flash pad, diamond jewellery and season pass to the
nightclub VIP areas which some young footballers take possession of before
they don a first team shirt. From the age of 14, “on a Friday night I knew
my routine: straight home from school, a quick bath, my dad would make me
some quick tea then drop me at the train station. Three hours later I’d be
in Nottingham and stay until Sunday”.
He lodged in the same digs as his brothers, a vast house behind the City
Ground which is still used by Forest and was home to 25 apprentices in
Dawson’s day. He lived there full-time from the age of 16. “Dinner was at
5.30pm, you had to be in your room by 9pm,” he says.
“There were strict curfews and in the morning you had to be at the ground at
8.30am. None of us had PlayStations or anything like that, though there was
a computer. Sometimes it was hard when you were homesick, but the laughs
that you had with the lads were fantastic.
“We were too scared of Paul Hart [Forest’s then manager] to break any rules.
He made you disciplined and that’s just the way, for young players, it needs
to be.”
Dawson owes a lot, he says, to Hart, a “traditional English centre-half” in
his own playing days. “He was a good coach and a hard man,” he says. “I had
a lot of tellings off, not for misbe-haviour but things I’d do on the pitch.
It was tough love and if he said anything you could never take it to heart,
you just had to get on and work at things.”
Hart gave him a Forest debut at 18. It was a bittersweet day because his
parents had come down to Nottingham and his chance came at the expense of
Kevin, his older brother, who had already played for Forest but was that day
left on the bench. Kevin now plays for Worksop Town while Andrew, the eldest
brother, is at Hull, and Dawson is often seen at Championship and Conference
grounds watching his siblings. “There’s never been any jealousy between us,
we just want each other to do well. That’s how close we are as a family,” he
says.
There is no hiding which Dawson is the prodigy, though. After just 15 games
for Forest he was called up to train with the England squad before a
friendly against Sweden, in November 2002. Last summer he was a late
addition to Sven-Göran Eriksson’s World Cup standby players after an injury
to Luke Young. “I was supposed to be going to America with my girlfriend on
the Tuesday and got the call on the Sunday so I cancelled the holiday, but
it was a fantastic feeling meeting up with the squad,” he says. Ahead of him
in England’s pecking order are John Terry, whom he admired at close quarters
during Terry’s loan spell at Forest as a youngster, and Rio Ferdinand, his
boyhood hero — along with Pierre van Hooijdonk.
Having been in the first squad named by Steve McClaren back in the autumn, he
is eager for further England opportunities “but when everyone asks me that
question I just say I concentrate on playing for Tottenham and everything
else takes care of itself”. Now to take care of Drogba: an exotic task for a
traditional English centre-half.
Didier Drogba: the ideal striker
Didier Drogba's two goals in the Carling Cup final illustrate his special
qualities. He employed pace and guile to beat the Arsenal offside trap for
the first, but it was his strength and agility that saw him outjump Philippe
Senderos to head home Chelsea's second
