Zinedine Zidane is a fountain of delight, yes, but football is not ballet. If Madrid’s favourite Frenchman is the world’s finest player it is because he deploys his genius not in splendid isolation but in the face of intense, relentless, often brutal pressure. The sort of pressure dispensed by that monster of a defender, Paolo Montero of Italian champions Juventus, who dispensed with Real Madrid 3-1 on Wednesday to progess to the Uefa Champions League final.
Zidane and Montero are football’s polar opposites. Beauty and the beast. If they were food, Zidane would be the coq au vin, Montero the boiled potatoes. Yet each merits his place in a balanced football diet. Top-level professional football is, as Montero likes to reflect, a game for men. We would not relish Zidane’s talent the way we do if every week he played against boys.
So let us pay homage, for once, to the hard men of football. Our habit as lovers of the beautiful game is to praise the Zidanes and bury the Monteros. But now let us break with the customary script for a moment and acknowledge the role of the destroyer, the cynic ruthlessly dedicated to the task of ruining the fantasistas’ fun: the type of player of which the 31-year-old Uruguayan is the game’s epitome.
Montero is the son of another celebrated defender, Castillo, who played for the phenomenally dirty Uruguay defeated by Pele’s Brazil in the semi-finals of the 1970 World Cup. The 10 years Montero has spent playing in Serie A have served to deepen his genetic predisposition to conceive of football as war. A war in which all is fair because football, as Montero sees it, ”is made for cunning people”.
”It was always like that and it will always be like that,” Montero says. ”And I can’t understand why people are surprised when I say it. When I get on a football pitch my only desire is to win. I’m not thinking about being a role model for my sons or for the fans watching me. I don’t think it is true to say that you are disloyal to football if you feign an injury or tug a shirt or do something else to win the game, as winning games is the purpose of football.”
Honest and not hypocritical, Montero believes that in the sacred cause of victory it is perfectly reasonable for the enemy to break the rules, too. ”Cheating the referee is not a sin if it helps your team winning,” he explains. ”I don’t criticise those who tend to dive, because football is for smart people. And I am a defender, who comes up against cheating strikers every week.”
Montero is himself a legend. Not only the most feared, and grudgingly respected, defender in Italian football, he holds the Serie A record for red cards. He has been dismissed 19 times in 10 seasons, and for almost every possible offence from deliberate handling to punching an opponent in the face. Which reveals that he falls a little short of the cunning ideal to which he aspires. ”Yes, I have let myself down at times,” he has confessed. ”This is the only true regret of my footballing career. It’s all born from my desire to be a winner.”
Montero and his formidable defensive partner, Lilian Thuram, playing either in central defence or at full-back, will be the players tasked with preventing AC Milan from scoring against the ”Old Lady” of Tunin in the final on May 28. —