Freddy Adu, the American football prodigy, trained at Old Trafford last week. Thanks to a million-dollar deal with Nike signed when he was just 14, and coach Ray Hudson’s crazed endorsement of his ability — ”A blind man on a galloping horse can see his talent. He’s a little Fabergé egg” — the Ghana-born DC United forward has been famous for so long it’s a shock to find he’s still only 17. I had imagined that by now he must be in his mid-thirties, at least.
The prospect of young Freddy joining a Premiership club has not met with great approval in the United States. The LA Galaxy coach Alexei Lalas, for example, took time out from serenading David Beckham on his grunge-rock guitar to say: ”If [Freddy Adu] goes to the wrong team, he will be swallowed up both on and off the pitch.”
Dave Kaspar, DC United’s technical director, was even more worried, asking: ”Does Freddy want to have to go to Watford on a rainy Wednesday where he’ll have 6ft 4in goons on his back all night?”
Personally, I have no idea, and I’m sure Adu doesn’t either. After all, the lad is a teenager. He is at a delicate stage of his emotional and psychological development.
At this moment, he surely has no idea whether he wants a 6ft 4in goon on his back all night or not. But if he wants to explore that side of himself, then for goodness’ sake leave him to it.
Be that as it may or may not, the view from here is that Adu should stay where he is. I like it best that way. US football gets little or no coverage on British television and as a result Adu is just about the only well-known footballer most of us have never seen play. He is a sweet mystery, a glorious promise we can nurture while watching Steve McClaren as he swigs repetitively from his water bottle, then pretends he isn’t belching.
There’s something else, too. Adu’s mixture of fame and lack of screen exposure makes him a throwback to a bygone age, an era when Pele was pronounced in the manner of Phoebe from Friends expressing shock and incredulity — Peh-lay — and foreign footballers were paraded before most British fans just once a year: in the Christmas football annuals, in a section tucked away far to the rear of the honest British fare of ”Have Boots Will Travel” strikers and defensive stalwarts declaring ”Consistency is the key”. It was headlined, simply: ”Stars of the Continental Game”.
Luckily for whoever compiled these pieces, the Continental Game apparently existed in a state of stasis and its stars, like those in the heavens above, appeared year after year after year. Presumably, at some point men like Sandro Mazzola (probably the only international player ever to share his name with a branded cooking oil; well, apart from Germany’s Walter Trex, obviously) and Uwe Seeler had to make way for younger men, but thankfully I was not around to see it. I imagine that when the age-old order of Eusebio, Fachetti and Haller was finally overturned, nature herself rebelled and the earth was thrown into great tumult, which may explain how Graham Taylor got the England job.
Paul van Himst (Anderlecht and Belgium), for example, featured in practically every football annual that appeared in Britain between 1960 and 1982. Van Himst was a forward with immaculate, side-parted hair and generally looked like he might have driven one of the Minis in The Italian Job while wearing string-backed gloves. To this day, I could easily pick him out of any photo line-up, but I have no idea how he played the game because — thanks to the lack of TV coverage — I never once saw him play.
The descriptions of the players in the old annuals gave little help. They were written in a bizarre language that bore no relationship to football as I, or probably anyone else bar possibly the contributor himself, had ever thought of it. ”Alberto Flange (Racing Concombre, France, and Chile)” the text would read, beneath a photo of a balding man with a moustache like a hairy caterpillar and a primal glint in his eye. ”A cunning central wing-nut whose perpendicular thrusts and whirling strategic lunges can dizzy even the most resolute half-back phalanx.
Known in his native land as El Banjo, this languid and metaphysical Andean boulevardier is at his most perspicacious when plucking the chords in no man’s land, from whence a sudden anonymous eructation can rapidly turn an opposition counter-riposte into a dangerous precedent.
Twice winner of the prestigious Chorizo Gordo, the 32-year-old from the land of the rustling alpaca is considered by many experts to be the most redoubtable exponent of oblique probing the game of soccer has ever known.”
Times have moved on, I know, but if they can find anyone to pen something similar about Freddy Adu and then ship him back to the States, it would make this doughty old pivot extremely happy. — Â