Sky Sports' rolling news service has been running live coverage of Chelsea's training session ahead of tomorrow night's- ahem- "Champions" League Final in Moscow. Left-back Ashley Cole ("£55k a week please, any less is such an insult!") has taken a knock on the ankle. From the tone of the news reports you would think that George W. Bush had been assassinated. THIS IS HUGE NEWS.
I don't know why I'm surprised really. Tomorrow night's game will be, after all, the biggest, most important, most prestigious and (I think I can safely predict this) the most exciting game since Sky invented football in the early nineties.
In all seriousness, the neutral (some would suggest I'm talking about anyone outside of London and the Far East) will be hopeful that we don't get more of the same plodding, negative and unremittingly cagey football that these two teams invariably serve up when they face up to one another. For me, my only concern is that Paul Scholes- the most talented English footballer I have seen play- receives a winner's medal. What a contrast this man is with the chap whose ankle-knack dominates this evening's news.
Scholes is a wonderfully balanced and intelligent footballer, he has the ability to dictate the pace and direction of a game in a way that very few players have ever shown, he is a wonderful striker of the ball both in the crisp accuracy of his passing and in his potent shooting from all angles and ranges. And, what is more, he is also a very human footballer. He isn't a freak. He is short for a modern player and invariably finds himself up against taller, faster, stronger athletes where his ingenuity and intelligence enables him to overcome the initial disadvantage. And he is quite simply the worst tackler I have ever seen at the top level. It's so important that the people that you idolise have real human qualities, isn't it?
But the very greatest thing about Paul Scholes is his truly unaffected personality. In an age of celebrity obsession where bin-picking outside the home of any Premiership footballer can provide a living wage, Scholes remains himself. He plays for the most publicity-driven team in the most hyped league in the world and has done for the better part of fifteen years. He has been club-mates with some of the most well-known players anywhere in the world- Beckham, Cantona, Giggs, Ronaldo and Keane- and yet serious football scholars rate him as better than all of them. Not least his manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Scholes trains studiously, and then goes home to be with his family. He doesn't involve himself in personal product endorsements and, when his club requires him to do so his discomfort shines through every photograph. When his club aren't playing he watches his boyhood team Oldham Athletic with his son. He is probably more grounded, normal and humble than the most of the men on the terraces watching.
I often find myself sympathising with young footballers who find themselves millionaires in their teens and stalked obsessively by the media- not because of the intrusion necessarily, but because I know that I would have ended up in rehab, in prison or in a coffin. Scholes has had more than most, had it younger than most, has had it longer than most and copes with it better than them all. He is an absolutely wonderful man and I hope against hope that he gets the medal he cruelly missed out on eight years ago. I'll leave the last word to his former captain Roy Keane: "No self-promotion - an amazingly gifted player who remained an unaffected human being."
