www.football365.com/news/long-term-view-moyes-and-the-man-united-momentThis is my moment, said Martine McCutcheon. Which, if it teaches us anything at all, teaches us that repeating song lyrics without the music is always a foolish thing to do. But more importantly, in this context, given that she later clarified this was her perfect moment, Martine recognised the overall importance of moments, and their ability to govern your life. Which gives her a spiritual ally, if not probably a willing one, in David Moyes.
As its manifestation bears more than a passing semblance to Gill from the Simpsons (the one who was always begging people to buy a fridge or a used car so that he might have a chance at making his month’s quota and thus not be forcibly evicted), it’s hard not to find a little comedy in how David Moyes has been acting in front of the cameras this season. Rank, oh-so-jokey sexism notwithstanding. But he’s broken, truly, and so there’s something sad about it too. Broken in the most literal sense – he is an entity now incapable of performing previous functions.
Who knows what kind of strange chances at redemption life can offer, but if one doesn’t appear to offer itself soon, David Moyes will never again come close to even the early Everton days, let alone be a top manager. Because, swept up in the fervour of his moment, he flew too close to the sun, and now any happy-go-lucky sense of potency has melted, leaving only those grimly hollowed eyes behind.
Put yourself in his shoes for a moment. How lucky would he have felt – but equally how suitably rewarded for all the hard work it doubtless took to take Preston North End relegation strugglers in what was then Divison Two to a Division One Play-off final only a few years later – that his reward for losing to Bolton was promotion, this time alone, to the Premier League only a few months later? I’m a bit special, he must have thought, and justifiably.
Now, his work at Everton is being re-cast and wilfully underappreciated; they were pointless, when he joined, one of those teams who bumped around 15th and had not a single player you enjoyed watching. With Moyes: cast-iron leaders of the best of the rest, an FA Cup final, LMA Manager of the Year in 2005. These achievements aren’t nothing in a competitive league with budgets that far outweighed his own. Would there have been whispers in his mind, when he looked in the mirror, of other grim, disciplinarian Scots in the Premier League who he might eventually emulate?
Except of course, as was reliably proved, David Moyes is not Alex Ferguson, nor even Kenny Dalglish. That picture snapped on his first day at Old Trafford, sat gawkily and doing the first traces of the Gill grin in the swivel chair, screamed painfully of someone who knew they didn’t fit the big time; there are no equivalent photos of Carlo Ancelotti or Jose Mourinho, but there are of Brendan Rodgers. It’s not the evident impostor’s discomfort; it was Fergie’s old desk, everyone would look like an impostor. But the guys who actually belonged there just wouldn’t let the photo be taken, would recognise it was a no-win situation. Moyes was too swept up in the unlikeliness of his moment to say no.
He had already proved he couldn’t hack the big time. At Everton, the only time he spent what constituted ‘big money’ that also constituted ‘a success’ – Fellaini – was the exception which proved the rule. The others – Diniyar Bilyaletdinov, Yakubu, Andy Johnson, Andy van der Meyde – all speak of a manager straying from his comfort zone, and making jittery clutches at players who were all various shades of misstep. In his comfort zone – unearthing quality at bargain prices – I think he was wicked. Arteta, Cahill, Jagielka, Leighton Baines, Joleon Lescott – all were good if not great servants of Everton. But, to hack the big time, you have to have a sure hand when the prices start to rise, and not just gulp and sign Fellaini again.
Doubtless he would have taken a self-deluding amount of comfort in the fact that Fergie picked him. Does it really surprise you that the one thing Fergie could not do was select a manager to follow him who could instantly distract from his legacy? Jurgen Klopp, for instance. It’s painful to think of the hope Moyes would have piled upon hope that what he knew about himself – that he was a stubborn, unspectacular but capable manager – was actually disguised greatness that belonged on the biggest stage of all. Would he be happier, now, if he’d turned Fergie down? Is it better to find out that you can’t? Consider it from two perspectives – given the requirements of paying off that insane contract United put him under, he has financial security for life; and seems haunted, like a deserted monastery with an occasionally cheesy grin. That’s the price of discovery.
Know where Asamoah Gyan plays, these days? Course you don’t. *checks Wiki*. He’s on loan at Al Ahli Dubai, from his Chinese parent club. But you will of course remember the moment when, for a minute or too, he was the most famous player in the living football world. Africa, forever a well-loved sideshow in World Cups, was now here and centre stage, and at its spearhead was Ghana, and at their spearhead was Asamoah Gyan, and Luis Suarez had done his volleyball act and now it was time for the continent that had provided a glut of elite players to European football to stride confidently into the World Cup semi-final, if you can just…no, you can’t.
How utterly barbaric is it, to know that waiting out of your sight, at the end of all those dreams you had as a kid to be the one to step up to take the last-minute penalty to thrust your country into the limelight of the future, was that ridiculous Jabulani beachball smacking off the crossbar? That was what your career was building towards.
Where it degenerated afterwards was inevitable. If the game is about glory, at its untouchable root, about heart and feeling, then Gyan’s chance for fulfilment had been stamped on like a puppy, via his own wrongheaded smash of the ball in Soccer City. There won’t be another last-minute penalty to make the semis of the first World Cup in your native continent.
You get one moment, in life, and it’s on you. So where does your mind turn, after that avenue is closed? To more barren things. The kind of things that presumably are offered in large quantities in Abu Dhabi and China and Dubai, to soothe and distract from your broken heart, that presumably scars over with age. But a ball hitting a crossbar will surely never glance off Gyan’s eyeballs innocuously from now until the lights go out. Never forget – you love football as much for the victims it leaves behind as the victors it sends off into the sunset.
Toby Sprigings
