He could have gone flat after France, but Old Trafford’s master crosser has gone from strength to strength, writes Paul Wilson
David Beckham drives a Ferrari Maranello, a Porsche Turbo and a Jaguar XK8, and says there is no limit to how much he will pay if he really likes a pair of trousers.
Gary Neville, who has been seen behind the wheel of a Ford Focus, and Denis Irwin, who admitted to watching Emmerdale instead of Arsenal’s defeat at Leeds on Tuesday, think he’s great.
The two Manchester United defenders are just the sort of solid, bordering on square, citizens who might be expected to dismiss Beckham as a Flash Harry or Big Time Charlie. Even George Best, in many ways the pioneer of Beckham’s goldfish bowl lifestyle, had his detractors within Old Trafford before his unreliability began to let his team-mates down.
The trouble with Best, it was said, was that he wasn’t always as focused on his football as he might have been, partly because the game came so easily to him that he didn’t need to be. No one, with the notable exception of Glenn Hoddle, who was almost certainly wrong, is likely to say the same thing about Beckham.
Like Best, Beckham has immense natural ability, but he works at it long and hard at the training ground, listening, learning and practising those free kicks. The Beckham who Alex Ferguson and the other Manchester United players see at work every day is not a pop star, a pin-up or a playboy, but simply a model professional and an incredibly consistent player.
If Beckham was ever going to follow Best in going off the rails it would have been this season, with all the nonsense he had to endure following his dismissal for England against Argentina and the virulent abuse he still suffers on away grounds. Just to play on through all that has been an achievement; to emerge as a leading candidate for player of the season was quite magnificent.
However, it says everything about Beckham that no one at United was particularly surprised. Judging Beckham on what he does with his money and his spare time is to miss the point about this player, which is that his spare time never impinges on his football.
“I have known him since he was a schoolboy, and I’ve played with him in all the United youth teams, and I can honestly say I haven’t noticed any great changes in him,” Gary Neville said. “He has fantastic ability and great self-belief, but he always did have. He is just the same as he always was.”
Neville was with Beckham that fatefu1 night in St Etienne, as was Paul Scholes, another graduate of the same United youth team. “I would like to think that it helped him to have us around, but I don’t think there was any chance of him caving in,” he said. “He’s too strong.
“There was talk of him leaving the club, or going abroad, but I never thought he would do that. The abuse he has had to put up with has been terrible, what he had to go through last summer was nothing short of scandalous in my opinion, but I knew it wouldn’t crack him. He has had too good a schooling at this club for that to happen.”
Irwin, outranked in seniority only by Ferguson, having been at United longer even than Peter Schmeichel, has seen Beckham’s rise and does not expect him to fall. “I don’t know how he does it but he copes,” Irwin said.
“He has lived in a goldfish bowl, I feel sorry for him really, but the thing is he seems to thrive on it. I couldn’t handle even a tiny bit of that sort of attention, but that’s the great thing about having Becks around. It stops the rest of us having to do it. At least everyone wanting to talk to him means I can easily get on with my life.”
However, as Neville points out, what makes life easy for Beckham is his ability on the pitch. Had he been sent off two or three times this season, missed the odd game through going on a bender or even played poorly a few times, his legion of critics would have been given the ammunition they craved and the odd eyebrow might even have been raised within Old Trafford.
Instead Beckham’s performances have been beyond criticism. Only the faintness of the praise – it was surely a travesty that Beckham did not pick up either of the main player of the season awards – hints that he has not fully escaped the stigma of St Etienne or, perhaps worse, the plain resentment the English reserve for successful individuals not clever enough to be apologetic about their wealth.
As around half of England discovered a year ago, it is not particularly difficult to take a dislike to Beckham, but the player himself has just admitted the taunts made him stronger and, in a more literal manner than is true of most footballers, he enjoys a sense of release on the pitch. “He is untouchable out there; that’s where he has shown what he is made of,” Neville said.
“It all comes down to football in the end. If you are playing well, that answers everybody. And Becks has certainly been playing well.”