It is by no means his natural role, but through hard work and discipline he has grown into it, while retaining a measure of characteristic improvisation.Hence Mourinho’s plaudits after the narrow victory last Wednesday at Manchester City (with Cole’s winning goal): “He is untouchable… Having deliberately criticised his maverick midfielder despite a fine winning goal against Liverpool, he inflicted further public humiliation by pulling him off after 45 minutes at West Bromwich and not selecting him for another two months. “No one knew what his best position was, not even him,” the manager claimed last week.Cole has, in fact, insisted in the past that playing just behind two strikers brings out the best in him, but that did not fit Mourinho’s methods, so he was forced to fight for one of two places on the flanks with Damien Duff and Arjen Robben. In the conformist world of modern professional football they have been regarded as slightly freakish, individualistic figures, who therefore cannot be trusted when the chips are down and whose credentials are regularly mocked.
Yet Joe Cole and Peter Crouch have finished the year on top of their game, looking back on a superb month and as far ahead as they dare to what could be a thrilling 2006 for club and country. Better still, instead of merely mirroring the current high standing of Chelsea and Liverpool respectively, the players’ form has contributed heavily towards it.
A year ago, not even the arch-tactician Jose Mourinho knew quite what to make of Cole. Jon Smith has little doubt what the advent of the transfer window has done to football. “We were riding the crest of a wave,” says the chief executive of First Artist Corporation. “And someone took away the ocean.”
Not that Smith expects too much sympathy.
He is, after all, a football agent, and knows that his trade’s reputation does not usually figure high on the list of the average fan’s concerns.. He is an engaging figure, his manner as uncomplicated as his approach to football, but as Roy Keane recently discovered, brute honesty is not necessarily the best policy at Manchester United. It may have drawn laughs when, at his first press conference after signing for Spartak Moscow, he replied to a question about how much Russian he knew by saying the only word he had learned in his first few days in the country was “probki” (traffic jams), but his candour about his move to United threatens to be rather more problematic.. “What do you think this is, son, a fucking democracy? You’re the fucking captain.”And so he was. Packer embodied the irresistible force of money, power and ambition. Considering the type of people in charge then, cricket was probably lucky he was on its side.. Nobody who has seen Nemanja Vidic play would doubt his willingness to put his foot in, but he seems also to be developing an unfortunate habit of putting his foot in it.
The first words Packer ever spoke to him were: “What are you, a fucking cowboy? Well, who do you want in this team of yours?” Chappell pointed out that he was no longer captain of Australia. His second lieutenant in the whole secretive enterprise was the former Australia captain Ian Chappell, lured out of retirement by the Packer dollar. At their first meeting, called with no notice, Chappell arrived wearing jeans and a country-and-western singer’s shirt. Packer’s Channel Nine were first denied the right to bid, and a year later offered hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and were still rebuffed.
That is when he realised cricket was going nowhere; he was famously to say later on that it was the easiest sport in the world to take over because nobody was willing to pay the players what they were worth.Packer never was in it as a phil-anthropic gesture He was a tough-as-nails businessman who wanted his own way. The politest thing that can be said about the people running the game when Packer came along was that they were nincompoops.It has never been adequately explained why the Australian Board turned down his offer for rights. “The whole association was an unbelievable experience,” Greig recalled. “To be in that world was something, I used to go in every single night and there would be prime ministers and world bank officials and moguls.”Greig’s biggest point was always that he was doing it for the money because cricketers were ill-served by the masters. The criticism was that I was recruiting players while still the incumbent captain, but we were sworn to secrecy.”Packer never forgot Greig and always looked after him thereafter.
