We have reached the time of the year to look back and reflect on the things you have said, and be humble.
A review of 2023 reveals some of the themes that preoccupied this column during the year: the decline and fall of Stephen Kenny, Manchester City’s Treble (and alleged scandals) and the ups and downs of “Rorschach striker” Darwin Nuñez.
In March I wrote about the new hope represented by Evan Ferguson’s emergence into the Ireland team. “Unlike [Robbie] Keane, he is the kind of strong central player you can shape a whole team around. It’s not just that he can score, that he is physically strong and can stand up to defenders, that he is a strong runner who is willing to offer options. It’s the passing, the control, the combination play – everything clean, simple, fast, efficient.”
“Strong” Ferguson has continued his impressive form for Brighton. After 17 Premier League matches, he is hitting the target with 70 per cent of his shots, a phenomenal performance far above any other Premier League striker (for comparison, Harry Kane is hitting the target with 50 per cent of his shots this season, Erling Haaland 48 per cent, Kylian Mbappé 42 per cent, Mohamed Salah 40 per cent, Darwin Nuñez 38 per cent).
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But for Ireland in 2023, he never quite got rolling. He was carrying a slight injury in the first game against France, then missed the France and Netherlands games in September with another injury.
I had greeted Stephen Kenny’s efforts to imprint a new playing style on the Ireland team with enthusiasm in 2020-22. By the time Ireland’s qualifiers began in March, I was starting to express doubts, having been impressed by the way Lionel Scaloni led Argentina to victory in Qatar, coming up with a new game plan for every match. “Scaloni showed himself to be a shape-shifter in the tradition of Carlo Ancelotti, [who has said]: ‘We don’t have a clear identity because we don’t want one ... We are a team that knows how to do many things, not just one.’”
Was that sort of adaptability more likely to be the way forward for Ireland, rather than Kenny’s idealistic insistence on a “progressive” style? “Maybe, now that once-radical ideas about possession and pressing have ... become familiar, we have entered a period of retrenchment, when the successful teams are not so much the ones who are committed to a single idea, as the ones with the flexibility to switch between them as the game demands.”
Kenny actually did adapt his playing style, switching to more defensive tactics against France, but the defeats just kept coming. In September I rationalised the failure of the Kenny project with a foray into “predictive demographics”, arguing that the age make-up of Ireland’s new squad augured well for the future. Obviously “football is not a simple matter of ‘22 players run around for 90 minutes and at the end whoever has the most players in the 24-30 age bracket wins’,” but with many players due to enter that bracket in the coming years, Kenny “can be confident that history will judge him more kindly than many of those who came before him”.
In January, after Manchester City lost successive games to Southampton and Manchester United, I wondered whether they might be suffering some of the same problems that had affected then-disintegrating Liverpool after a draining 21-22 season. “The notion that they are currently capable of putting together another of their famous 15-match winning runs feels like it might belong back in 2022, with a lot of other ancient history.” City would go on to win 25 and lose two of the 32 matches remaining, breaking the back of Arsenal’s challenge with a run of 12 league wins in a row.
By April I had completed the U-turn: “Now that Guardiola has found a system which gives him the control he prioritises while also allowing Erling Haaland to wreak his havoc up front, City look Europe’s outstanding team by far. Watching them destroy Bayern last week, you saw that the Treble is not just realistic – it’s likely.”
They did win the Treble, an achievement which I received sourly: “Imagine a reboot of Moby Dick in which Captain Ahab strikes a mysterious Faustian bargain that enables him to live into the age of industrial whaling. He fits the Pequod with a diesel engine, tracks down Moby Dick using sonar and kills him with an explosive harpoon.”
The big problem with City is, of course, the slow-burning alleged financial scandal for which the shorthand is “115″. When that number of charges were announced in February, Pep Guardiola responded: “like Julius Caesar said, in this world, there are not enemies or friends, there are just interests.” The quote was actually by Lord Palmerston, the former British PM and ethnic-cleansing landlord of Mullaghmore.
Referring to an actual Caesar quote, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”, I declared that “we know now Guardiola is no Julius Caesar. For Caesar suspicion was intolerable, but Pep can live with it ... In the meantime, City play on ... [Against Villa], the fans booed the Premier League anthem, then ran through their updated song repertoire: ‘F**k the Premier League’, ‘Sheikh Mansour my Lord, Sheikh Mansour’, and ‘We’ll cheat when we want’.”
The pirate-ship mood at City reflected a wider sense of a game increasingly mired in corruption, also encompassing “the Negreira scandal in Barcelona, more cooking of the books at Juventus, and the Qatar World Cup. If fans seem increasingly inclined to see crooked influences at work everywhere they look, maybe they’ve just been paying attention.”
In May, former Crystal Palace owner and current TalkSport host Simon Jordan complained about the politicisation of football by interest groups seeking to advertise their agendas through the game. I accused him of missing the point: “Jordan is not alone in feeling exhausted by a sense of increasing political polarisation, but that hasn’t been caused by football and it’s hard to see how football can remain separate from it ... [the real problem of politics in football] is not about the encroachment of gesture politics ... [it’s] that outcomes on the field are being decided by political decisions that take place far above the game” – often in the Gulf, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s teams in the ascendant. “Keep politics out of football? At this point, they’re practically the same thing.”
With the overall atmosphere of the game increasingly dark and foreboding, I felt grateful to “human volcano” Darwin Nuñez, “the £80 million centre-forward who can shoot and head and run like the wind but can’t pass and can’t play centre-forward”, for providing so much light relief. In August I derided his performance at Chelsea in the Premier League opener, arguing his technical inconsistency prevents Liverpool from keeping the pressure on opponents. Darwin would be “a good player for a bad team”, but not a good player for a good team.
He promptly delivered one of the most spectacular Premier League performances ever by a Liverpool striker, coming off the bench to score two magnificent goals at Newcastle. Many readers got in touch to express their disagreement with my Darwin-scepticism, though the flood of correspondence has dried up in recent weeks, like Darwin’s goals. With so much discussion of the game now revolving around corruption and power politics, there is a joyful innocence to arguing over whether a player is any good or not. May Darwin continue to captivate in 2024.
