England ace Kyle Walker has SENSATIONALLY asked Manchester City for a divorce – and pals fear the sharp decline of his recovery pace could be to blame.
According to insiders, jilted Pep Guardiola was HEARTBROKEN on hearing about Walker’s decision to walk out on their seven-year partnership, having publicly defended the 0.06-non-penalty-expected-goal-contributions-per-90-minutes right-back on numerous occasions this season. One source exclusively told the Guardian: “It’ll be an amicable split given everything they’ve been through together. But there’s a mutual recognition that a club of City’s standing can’t go on carrying a player averaging 7.7 possession losses per game and a career-low 5.8 final-third passes per 90.”
Walker, 34, dropped his BOMBSHELL news last week to City’s head honcho Txiki Begiristain, 60, amid persistent rumours over a budding romance with Italian stallions AC Milan, 125, whose new coach Sérgio Conceição, 50, could see Walker, 34, as a better fit for his dynamic, transition-based defensive build-up style than either Emerson Royal, 25, or Davide Calabria, 28.
“Obviously Pep’s trying to re-establish their stability in possession, get some pausa back into their attacking phase, and for that you need a rest defence worthy of the name,” the pal said. “Kyle’s not naive – he’s seen what people have been saying about him online, that his recovery pace has been impacted by multiple groin injuries, that City have an 18 per cent win rate this season when he starts – and with neither Calabria or Royal really nailing down a first-team slot at San Siro, a fresh start could be best for everyone.”
That bit of the column took about three hours to write. I’m not even sure it’s funny. Certainly I can confirm from acute research exposure that celebrity gossip journalism may well be the weirdest form of the English language ever invented: a brain-melting argot of multiple compound nouns, facts as adjectives, adjectives as exclamations, exclamations as facts. Commas less as punctuation and more as a kind of lifestyle choice. An entire spurious tissue of quasi-truth spun out of the unattributed, unchallenged testimony of “close pals”, albeit the kind of close pals happy to spill your most intimate personal secrets to a tabloid journalist.
This, for the most part, is how the life of Kyle Walker has been recorded. Based on media footprint alone, Walker might well be one of the most chronicled English footballers of the last decade, and largely for issues unrelated to anything he did in a defensive transition. Search the internet for this player of 93 England caps and pretty much every medal at club level and you will be deluged with various keyword-rich morsels of celebrity gossip swimming in pound signs, house prices and gigantic photos ripped from Instagram.
This is quite weird, right? A whole industry of salacious Kyle Walker content that relies for its news value on the fact he’s a star footballer, while never really mentioning football at all. Nor is this purely the domain of the gossip pages. Social media has long been fertile ground for Walker-banter, usually based around the fact that he has several children (LOL) with more than one partner (LOL! LOL!).
I do not propose to judge or analyse Walker’s life choices in any great detail. Partly out of an earnest belief that Walker’s personal life is his own business, particularly when the welfare and sensitivities of young children are involved. Mostly, however, it’s because I couldn’t give the tiniest sh*t. I don’t care how many children Henri Camara has. I don’t care if Nabil Bentaleb breached social distancing rules during Covid. I don’t care if James McAtee’s ex has finally “broken her silence”. Why should I? Why should you?
But the player: this part I care about, if only because this is a career that basically shouldn’t have happened. From the moment Walker broke through at the start of the last decade there was always a thrilling point of difference to him. Not just the speed, which was visceral to the point of violence. Not just the engine, which never ever seemed to run out. Not just the lashing long-range shots. But the pure, wide-eyed sense of emergency in his step, the skip and gallop of a terrified child, the way he ran as though if he ever stopped running the world would explode, and that would be the end of everything.
[ Kyle Walker reveals ‘vile, racist and threatening’ abuse after Juventus lossOpens in new window ]
Walker was always running from something. At the start it was the Lansdowne estate in Sheffield, where substance abuse was rife and horror woven into the tapestry of life, where Walker once saw a woman burned alive in her flat. Then it was the pall of self-doubt, the constant nagging sensation that he would never quite be good enough.
I interviewed Walker back when he was still at Spurs and was stunned when he described himself at one point as “an average player”. At this point he was already an England international, a young player of the year, one of the most exciting full-back prospects in world football. But of course he was still running, and in a way he was right. Over the next decade Walker added levels and tones to his game that we never knew he had: overlapping winger, auxiliary midfielder, centre-half in a back three.
Yet six Premier League titles and a Champions League later, there’s still something missing when we talk about Walker. Perhaps it’s the laser focus on his physical gifts, as if you could survive as a full-back in a Guardiola team for over seven years on brute pace alone. Perhaps it’s the influence of all those tabloid exposés and Twitter jokes, subtly encouraging us to see Walker as a unit of meat, all impulse and no refinement, all body and no brains.
Perhaps, if you’re a tabloid editor, Walker is what you want people to think all footballers are like. Certainly this might explain the grotesque intrusion into his personal life, human drama mined for snackable content, a prurient obsession that lavishly undersells his feats as an athlete and has probably contributed to his departure.
As he prepares to step away from the club that turned him into a champion, it’s hard not to feel he deserved better.
– Guardian
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