A woman from Zurich once wrote to George Bernard Shaw: ”You have the greatest brain in the world and I have the most beautiful body, so we ought to produce the most perfect child.” Whenever anyone in football talks of fusing the British and continental style of play, I always recall Shaw’s reply: ”Yes, but what if the child inherits my body and your brains?”
Fortunately the sporting equivalent of Shaw’s unfortunate baby — a team that passes with the finesse of Titus Bramble and tackles as ferociously as Francesco Totti — has yet to make an appearance. Well, not on the field anyway. Off it there are now signs that the stork may be about to deliver a hapless mongrel: a manager who fuses the scientific coaching techniques of Europe with the eldritch football phrasebook of Olde England.
The warning lights flashed last weekend when Arsene Wenger praised Wayne Rooney with the words: ”He’s clever and a natural, built like a Gascoigne with his low centre of gravity.”
A low centre of gravity has long been the Holy Grail of English football managers, but it was strange to find Wenger attempting unsuccessfully to swerve past it like a German tennis player round a tax demand. After all, the Arsenal manager is intelligent, wise and presides over a team that contains David Seaman, a man who, taking into account his ribcage and hairstyle, has a centre of gravity that’s about as low as that of a moose on stilts wearing a concrete bonnet.
According to ancient runes a low centre of gravity allows players to turn faster and also makes them difficult to knock off the ball. In Paul Gascoigne’s case this natural advantage was achieved by being a bit on the chunky side (I’m assuming that when Wenger said Gascoigne he meant Paul. He could, of course, have been referring to Bamber Gascoigne, whose low centre of gravity was the result of being tall and thermometer-thin and wearing extremely heavy brogues with lots of metal Blakeys nailed on to his soles).
But there is clearly more to it than that. Otherwise premiership teams would be packed with average-sized lads with equatorially proportioned waistlines, which is clearly not the case. Well, not since Barnsley dropped out of the top flight, anyway.
For while chunkiness is one way of ensuring the sort of weight-to-height ratio that, according to mythology, produces a Wayne Rooney, it is the distribution of the kilos that is all important. To put it in layman’s terms: the bottom half of the player’s body must be considerably heavier than the top half. (This is known to soccer technocrats as the Weeble syndrome, in honour of the popular round- bottomed 1970s toys which, as older readers will recall, were celebrated with the words ”You can make them wobble but they won’t fall down”.)
There are three basic methods of achieving a low centre of gravity: mighty thighs and a huge bottom (a technique invented by Kenny Sansom and perfected by Roberto Carlos) short, thick legs and a long, skinny body (Brian Kidd in his pomp) or massive feet (if only Ian Thorpe had been Brazilian). Players lacking these characteristics can attempt to compensate by filling their boots with lead or wet fish, but it is generally at the expense of basic speed.
That Wenger has got caught up in this sort of thing may at first seem a surprise, especially since most younger English managers are now abandoning such earthy native clichés in favour of brighter, shinier ones from the United States.
This year reality checks have pelted down at such a rate — striking Bradford, Aberdeen, Leicester, Middlesbrough and even Wembley stadium among others — it is a wonder anyone in the game has time to explore his fantasies. The fear factor, meanwhile, is so prevalent this season it calls to mind John F Kennedy’s words: ”There is no factor to fear but the fear factor itself.”
On closer inspection, though, it is plain that the chances of foreign coaches beginning to speak like this are higher than those of reading the headline ”Health Insurance Premiums On England Fast Bowlers Rise” on the money pages (the words ”English pace attack” must have the same effect on insurance executives that the smell of mint does on lambs).
After all, as the former Arsenal player Paul Merson once observed: ”If you go to the barber’s often enough at some point you are going to get your hair cut.”
The Arsenal boss has been in England for quite a time now, so perhaps it is no surprise that some of its weird football lore has begun to seep under that silver cowlick.
Across London, meanwhile, Claudio Ranieri is working hard to catch up with Wenger. While the Gunners coach was talking about centres of gravity, his Chelsea counterpart was expressing the view that his team needed ”to base themselves on English football culture”. Clearly he is not merely thinking of drinking, hi-jinx and the occasional nightclub incident but of something even deeper than that. Ranieri is a single-minded individual who will undoubtedly lead by example. Expect to hear him utter the words ”in the trenches” at least once before Christmas. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002