da realbet： It was a strange sensation watching Tottenham’s Champions League victory at AC Milan the other night – a genuine throwback. Not because I was watching two of my former clubs but because the match really did, despite the many nationalities on show, have a genuine sense of a typical English team facing a typical Italian one. These days familiarity breeds contempt, even at World Cups, where nothing is a surprise and opponents often know each other through club matches.
da bet7k： Back in the day, though, there used to be a lot of mystique about playing foreign sides and great contrasts in the way they played. The way Brazilians would kill the ball in the air rather than trap it, having been brought up playing on beaches or pot-holed roads, was a wonder to me. And then there were the infamous dark arts of Italian football – as recalled in such graphic detail by AC Milan on Tuesday.
Just after I was transferred from Chelsea to Milan in 1961, but before I had joined my new club, England played Italy in Rome (the sort of fixture we call a ‘friendly’, but was nothing of the sort back then). We won 3-2, having been 2-1 down with five minutes remaining. Gerry Hitchens, another Englishman who played in Italy, scored twice, then I got the winner.
This was considered a very famous victory at the time and so our captain, Johnny Haynes, decided to lead us on a lap of honour. Not a sensible policy, given the locals had just started lighting bonfires on the terraces of the Olympic Stadium and were busily ripping out seats to hurl at us! I suddenly thought ‘what the hell have I done agreeing to play here?’
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Playing away in Italy has never been anything other than hostile. It is the most beautiful nation on Earth, full of the loveliest people, but when it comes to football, they are cynical and ugly. And the longer the Italians are losing a game, the nastier they get. They ruled the world once or twice in their history, of course, and I think they saw football as a reprise of the Christians v Lions … with us strikers very much on the side of Jesus.
I can particularly remember Omar Sivori, an Argentinian-born striker who was a naturalised Italian and a big mate of John Charles at Juventus. He had a party trick which consisted of sticking two fingers into your eyes to temporarily blind you. When I played for Milan, the dark arts were known by every defender – the kick on the ankles, the knee in the back, the over-the-top tackle. You never received the ball without first getting some physical contact from your marker.
Even though I only played in Serie A for a few months, I always felt I went to Milan a boy and came back a man thanks to all the physical treatment I withstood from their defenders. And I think Spurs really came of age as a Champions League team the other night, too. I liked the way Peter Crouch kept literally grinning and bearing it, every time he was fouled or roughed up by Gennaro Gattuso or one of his pals. Tottenham still have 90 minutes of cynical football to overcome and even with that one-goal lead going into the home leg, they’ll need that same calm, level-headed attitude if they are to make the quarter-finals.
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I was asked a few times last week whether Wayne Rooney’s Manchester derby goal was the best I’ve ever seen. Well, as a man who used to make his living scoring goals, my response has been: ‘I couldn’t care less. What is this, Dancing On Ice? Have they started giving marks for artistic impression?’. I was accused of many things during my career but nobody ever told me I’d scored a bad goal.
Your best goal is always your next goal. I can remember an FA Cup tie at Walsall when Spurs got battered and I scored a late winner, which was such a scruffy old shot on a mudheap of a pitch that it only just went over the line and didn’t come close to hitting the back of the net. It was almost embarrassing. But you know what? We got one for that goal and Rooney got one for his! He was having a miserable day until then but went and scored an absolute stunner.
Which makes you wonder why Carlo Ancelotti subbed Fernando Torres after about an hour of his first two Chelsea matches. I had plenty of terrible 89-minute performances, only to score a winner – a manager simply has to keep his best goalscorer on at all times. What sort of message does it send to the player himself, to his team-mates and to the bloke who just forked out £50million?
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