I ran into this (sorry, quit long) story and, no matter Yayá and his agent childish behaviour, it makes one think ...
Jack Rodwell’s stasis says more about football than Yaya Touré row does
We can learn more from the Englishman’s inertia at Manchester City than from his team-mate’s fit of cake-related pique
By Barney Ronay
The Guardian, Friday 23 May 2014 14.05 BST
So, let’s all laugh at Yaya then. Although perhaps, all things considered, not that hard and not that long. At this stage in the week the birthday cake episode has already been thoroughly chewed over. Here, at last, is an issue everyone can agree on. The broad consensus seems to be that by complaining, via his agent, about the lack of formal birthday good wishes from Manchester City’s hierarchy – specifically the wounding absence of commemorative sponge – Touré has first of all been caught playing a very obvious pre-contract game of bluff; and second has provided another leaf in the groaning folio of evidence that modern footballers are little more than brattish uber-barbarians, empty-headed popinjays, doofus gods of the final perverted knockings of human history and all the rest of it.
There are two things worth adding to this. First, it is perhaps not as weird as it looks. Extreme people doing things at an extreme level are, believe it or not, often a little extreme. And let’s face it, elite modern football is a deeply unnatural environment, a multi-billion‑pound industry peopled entirely by men dressed in shorts, a glazed and airless place of minor concerns endlessly magnified, and an industry that would simply cease to function if everybody blinked a couple of times, took a breath and decided to be completely sensible about everything. Elite, big-money teams in particular are fascinatingly strange, a conspiracy of cosmopolitan self-interest that still remains somehow coherent, these disparate bands of sporting brothers ferried via chinchilla fur-lined helicopter gunship from hotel to airport to luxury compound, barked and yelped and brayed at twice weekly but still able to leap and fight and run through pain for one another, presenting in the process an oddly stirring example of the indomitable human spirit, even while filtered through the triple-glazed tinted glass of billionaire idiot ball. At the end of which: Yaya wants a cake. Give him a bloody cake.
The second thing worth saying is that anyone seeking Yet More Evidence of All That is Wrong With the Modern World would be better served looking at another proposed City midfield departure to emerge this week. Jack Rodwell’s two years at the Etihad have been one of the more frustrating big‑money English transfers of recent years. Rodwell has started 10 matches since leaving Everton. In the Premier and Champions Leagues he has scored two goals, made 10 tackles and provided no assists. For this he has been paid £5.5m. There was for a while a hope Rodwell might emerge as a kind of Yaya-to-be. Instead he has remained a squad-balancing punt and token Englishman, the footballing equivalent of a set of Aztec nose flutes purchased by Prince Charles during a walkabout at a tourist bazaar and destined to be stashed at the back of the royal vaults in between the Tongan fertility gourds and a jeroboam of something awful from Lithuania.
Ah, Rodwell. It is easy to forget how good he has looked on the few occasions he has looked good. Emerging ready-made from a decade in the Everton academy like some impossibly handsome teenage space cadet from the 25th century, he seemed from the start the kind of player who has always spoken to something innately excitable in the English footballing imagination, the seductive idea that football can still be reduced to a series of triumphant, nostril-quivering sprints, an irresistible physicality that cuts across all the difficult stuff about tactics and technical skills and reduces football once again to its ancestral state of beautifully pure physical explosion. This has always been part of Touré’s appeal in England – the tendency when discussing his performances in that advanced midfield runaway caravan role to lower the voice, to become a little husky and brave and tearful at the distant echoes of some long vanished ideal of bladder-smuggling village wrestle ball.
Rodwell showed glimpses in the midfield run-hulk role. He scored a sublime first Premier League goal for Everton against Manchester United, careering away from Johnny Evans like a startled yak bullocking out of the tree line. He was by many accounts the best player on the pitch in a Uefa Under-21 Championship match against Germany in 2009. He got the move to City. And then: nothing.
It has become commonplace to blame this kind of thing on rich clubs stockpiling talent: the paradox that quota rules designed to promote English players end up turning them into kept men, royal prisoners confined to sit looking sad and hopeful on the bench, occasionally running on to the pitch grinning and punching the air when other, slightly better footballers win a trophy.
But there is something else in the system beyond simply a “lack of faith” that means a 21-year-old Balkan or African or South American will progress where so many homegrowns stall. At which point: enter Touré once more. At the same age that Rodwell went to City, Touré was offered a contract by Arsenal but ended up turning it down. By the time he got to Barcelona, a little older than Rodwell is now, Touré had played in Belgium, Ukraine, Greece and France. He has continually developed, playing for Barça as a centre-back at times, then regeared at City into new attacking Touré, looming forward across the halfway line like an iron giant emerging from the sea. He talks about football as a science. He keeps a notebook with him to scribble down his ideas. He is – let us be clear on this – not what is wrong with modern football at all, but exactly what is right, a good man in a strange place, and an example of how talent, heart and intelligence will still prevail.
Meanwhile, Rodwell seems to represent better than most the enormous obstacle being brought up in the Premier League can be to fulfilling your potential as a footballer. What is striking about his move to City is its sheer pointlessness. Nobody learned anything. Nobody benefited. Nobody went anywhere. Plenty of German players in that game in 2009 – Jérôme Boateng, Sami Khedira, Mesut Özil, Mats Hummels – have gone on to explore the outer limits of their talent. Once again, an English player growing up as a domestic product of a thoroughly global league has seemed imprisoned, congealed, swallowed up by the system, rather than nurtured, inspired or sent out into the world bold and restless and ravenous to succeed. Rodwell will get another chance. If he could take with him a little spritz of that fearless Touré spirit, he might just take it.
