If Louis van Gaal turns out to be mistaken and David de Gea does accept Real Madrid’s invitation to ease out Iker Casillas, the goalkeeper they called San Iker in happier times at the Bernabéu, presumably the outstanding performer of Manchester United’s season will know in advance that it might be a more complicated business than many people realise.
It isn’t easy anywhere, let alone somewhere with Madrid’s record of politics and infighting, when a new kid on the block is ushered in to replace someone who has become an institution at their club in the way Casillas has for the 10-time European Cup holders.
When Larry Lloyd joined Liverpool from Bristol Rovers in 1969 it was because Bill Shankly wanted someone who could eventually take over from Ron Yeats, the club’s distinguished centre-half and captain, and the new signing arrived at Anfield to find Yeats’s wife waiting for him. “Let me tell you something, young man,” she told Lloyd. “You have no chance, you are simply not in his class.”
As for the goalkeepers’ union, that tight little community who apparently always look after their own, David James could barely look at Brad Friedel when the American was recruited by Liverpool in 1997 to challenge for his place. “All I could think was: ‘Who the effing hell are you?’ and: ‘Where’s your work permit?’ I was asking all these questions about whether he’d played enough games for America because I wanted them to send him home.”
When Friedel made his debut, James was desperate for it to go horribly wrong – “every time the ball went near him I was thinking: ‘Go on, drop it.’” – and if that sounds remarkably self‑centred it is far from the only story of this kind in the goalkeeping fraternity. At PSV Eindhoven, Ronald Waterreus used to switch on the television at all sorts of unspeakable hours to make sure his room-mate and fellow shot-stopper Georg Koch did not get a decent night’s sleep before matches.
Casillas might be a lot more welcoming to a fellow Madridista. Then again, he might not. He took it as a personal affront the last time he was removed from the team and, whether it is true or not that he was the instigator of all those corrosive dressing-room leaks, the memory still lingers of José Mourinho’s first day back at Chelsea and his change in body language when I asked him about the consequences and rancour of favouring Diego López. Mourinho gave the impression that if he saw Casillas drowning in the Manzanares, 20 feet out, he would make sure to throw him a 15-foot rope.
It certainly wouldn’t be straightforward for De Gea, who should also be aware that he could wear Madrid’s colours with distinction over the next decade and still find himself jeered if he dares to misjudge a cross later in his career. Casillas can tell him all about that after some of the treatment he has encountered over the past few months, whereas Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale might also testify about the way the Bernabéu crowd can be high on disdain and low on gratitude. “It is not a sane mentality,” Rinus Michels once said of Barcelona. Yet no club is more impulsive, more impatient and more prone to the pañolada, the mutinous waving of white hankies, than their great rivals.
That’s the downside. The alternative argument is that Madrid is still the place in football where most of the sport’s dreamers believe they can turn into dream-makers. It is obvious why the club’s president, Florentino Pérez, is attracted to De Gea (nothing will convince me De Gea wouldn’t have saved the shot from Álvaro Morata that got the hankies fluttering again and eliminated Madrid from the Champions League) and the unfortunate truth for United is that it would still be a shock if Van Gaal is correct and De Gea chooses to bat away Madrid’s advances.
Plainly, the alternative would be a considerable setback for Van Gaal given the consistently upward trajectory of De Gea’s career since those early days in Manchester when he could be a danger to his own team and Eric Steele, then United’s goalkeeping coach, talked of him being a poor trainer, “lazy” when it came to learning English, and eating “too many tacos”. De Gea’s raw potential was always obvious but there is no point trying to airbrush out of history how vulnerable he was back then. Steele remembers that first six months as “horrendous”.
His improvement since then has been phenomenal and the question for United now has to be whether there are contingency plans to make sure the process of replacing him would be as seamless as possible. Petr Cech has been mentioned as a possible replacement and it was intriguing to discover United’s chief executive, Ed Woodward, met Mourinho at a hotel in London on Friday (though the relevant people assure me it was purely a case of bumping into one another). Tottenham Hotspur have a long history of taking United’s money that means their supporters should feel slightly uneasy about the potential availability of Hugo Lloris. Yet, equally, let’s not disregard that there is also Victor Valdés, one of the mainstays of Pep Guardiola’s great Barcelona sides, in reserve at Old Trafford. Valdés might not be a long-term solution at the age of 33 but he has won the Ricardo Zamora trophy as the best goalkeeper in La Liga more times than anyone else and the answer might be staring United in the face if his year recovering from a knee injury has not dulled his reflexes.
There are certainly enough options to make a reasonable argument that United’s more glaring issue this summer will not theoretically be replacing De Gea but planning for the other end of the pitch and how to compensate for the fact that all three of their main strikers are, to varying degrees, on the wane.
Those of us who imagined Van Gaal’s appointment might re-invigorate Robin van Persie now have to accept he will probably never be the player who bewitched Old Trafford in his first season at the club. Radamel Falcao ought to be grateful he has been spared the league’s wooden-spoon awards because of Mario Balotelli’s risible efforts at Liverpool and let’s not forget that Wayne Rooney is approaching the point of his professional life when age slowly becomes the footballer’s hardest opponent. He is 30 in October and his body shape has always made United suspect he might have to re-invent himself as a midfielder once he is on the way down.
It was David Moyes who identified the lack of dynamism in United’s attack and set about exploring whether Edinson Cavani might be the answer. Falcao was supposed to bring his own stardust but United have not scored any more freely this season than under Moyes, currently two short of last year’s total of 64, and the presence of so many high-reputation strikers seems to have disguised a revealing truth since Sir Alex Ferguson ushered himself into retirement with a 5-5 draw at West Brom two years ago. Manchester City have amassed 183 league goals since then. Liverpool have 152, Arsenal 135 and Chelsea, the boring so-and-sos, 141. United have managed 126.
Memphis Depay might help to make up the shortfall but there is still some way to go bearing in mind that in Ferguson’s last eight years the team averaged 80 league goals per season. It is now around the low-60s and, unfortunately for Falcao, the chances of United completing the £43.2m deal to sign him from Monaco beyond the current loan arrangement are somewhere between non-existent and miniscule.
Falcao’s decline has been so difficult on the eye that he is now attracting the one thing no footballer ever wants – pity – and there are people at Old Trafford who have started talking about his inadequacies in a way that reminds me of how Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character, used to excuse Annie Hall’s erratic parking. “That’s OK,” Alvy said. “We can walk to the kerb from here.”
De Gea is a different matter entirely and it would be intriguing to know exactly why Van Gaal believes the Spaniard will opt to remain in Manchester when the lesson of history is that Madrid generally get what they want. He is not, however, as irreplaceable as some people appear to believe. For United, the greater issue might actually be returning to the days when it would have felt implausible that their best player was their goalkeeper.
The conspiracy of poppycock
Better late than never, José Mourinho has finally accepted it was disingenuous to allege there was a campaign among the Premier League’s higher authorities to nobble Chelsea’s title challenge through the kind of refereeing mistakes that invariably happen to every club over the course of the season.
“Maybe ‘campaign’ is not a nice word,” Mourinho said. “Maybe I would take that word out from my explanation and my comments, but that [bad decisions] is the reality. We had very bad decisions over a big period of time. But I also made bad decisions, no problem.”
By Mourinho’s standards, that is straying dangerously close to a climbdown but what a pity he had to wait until now before accepting he was wrong. It was five months ago when he first made that complaint and the timing of his latest comments, just as Chelsea are preparing to be reunited with the championship trophy, merely firms up the suspicion that it was always a deliberate ploy to put pressure on referees and “get an advantage”, to use the description of Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City.
It’s an old trick and Mourinho won’t be the last to use it but he has gone further than anyone else when it comes to pushing it to the next level. It rubs a bit thin, therefore, that he should withdraw the allegation now everything is done, and we can only cling to the faint hope he tries to behave with a little more decorum next season (fat chance, I know).
At other times, Mourinho has lumped in the media and in particular Sky’s television pundits as further evidence that there is a concerted conspiracy against his club. It was poppycock and he knew it all along.
Dead man walking
Sam Allardyce has been a good manager and sometimes a very good manager even if not quite as good as he appears to believe. He has certainly done more good than bad for West Ham United but it has been obvious for a long time that the club have lost faith in him and merely been waiting for his contract to run down so they could ease him off the premises, free of compensation. West Ham have duly gone from a side that took 31 points from their first 17 matches to one that has been in relegation form since Christmas with 16 points from the following 20 games. That is almost certain to finish with the guillotine coming down on Allardyce’s reign on Monday but, in fairness to him, is it any wonder his players have lost their focus when they have known for months, like everyone else, that he was a dead man walking?
Memories of Mackay
Alex Montgomery, one of the great Fleet Street veterans, told a lovely story during the Football Writers’ Association dinner about a trick Dave Mackay used to play on nights out when he would ask for someone to toss a coin in his direction.
Mackay would trap it on his shoe to begin with. He would then flip it up on to his forehead and slide it down over one eye. Finally, he would drop it into his top pocket.
Mackay was known more for his strength and force of personality rather than juggling skills but it was a reminder he deserves to be remembered for more than just that photograph he disliked so much of him and Billy Bremner.