A fond farewell to Becks
So farewell then Fergie. And farewell Rafa. Farewell to Roberto too. And also to Scholesy. And not forgetting Becks, of course.
In Ireland we have The Gathering. In English football, it seems to be the year of The Dispersal.
And, at this rapid rate of departures, you wouldn’t rule out the possibility that, if things don’t go Arsenal’s way tomorrow, it might be farewell Arsene too.
I say “not forgetting Becks” precisely because this week it’s all too easy to overlook the mark Beckham made as a footballer, when so many of the valedictory pieces which have followed the announcement of his retirement have opted to focus on the extracurricular activities for which he became even more famous: the marriage, the haircuts, the clothes-horsiness, the glossy ads for everything from underpants to underarm deodorants and all those ambassadorial roles which combined to create the hydra-headed monster known as ‘Brand Beckham’.
The tsunami of publicity which his every twitch was capable of generating was hard to take, for sure, and probably accounts in good measure for the relish with which many were inclined to belittle his achievements on the pitch, the cutting down to size of the celebrity footballer being seen as a necessary counter-weight to all that hype.
Thus, the wide recycling of George Best’s dry indictment: “He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right.”
And while I would never be in a hurry to agree with the insufferable Piers Morgan about anything, he had a point when he tweeted that, far from being the world’s best footballer, Beckham wasn’t even the best United player to retire this week – that would be Paul Scholes.
And despite the fact Beckham tops the list of England’s most capped outfield player with 115 appearances, only in statistical terms would any serious student of the game think he deserves reverential mention in the same breath as Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton, the two greats of the game he relegated to second and third place respectively in the personal international honours roll. (Leaving out the small matter of World Cup winners’ medals, of course).
But, all that said, Beckham was still a player of considerable and very distinctive talent, a footballer who didn’t clock up league titles in four countries simply because the lottery of life was uncommonly kind to him. Admittedly, the final medal of his glittering collection — the French title with Paris St Germain — comes his way long after he’d ceased to play at anywhere near his peak but, at the grand old footballing age of 38, he could still ping a ball to good effect and, thanks to keeping himself in fine physical trim, his final days as a pro could in no way be described as a cringe-inducing embarrassment.
At his best though, when contributing to six league titles and the Champions League at Old Trafford, he was virtually unplayable as perhaps the single best crosser of the ball the game has seen. And he had to be that because, as George Best alluded to, he could never have run the Belfast Boy — or even, for that matter, his own team-mate Ryan Giggs — close as a dribbler. Fortunately for Beckham, he didn’t have to beat the full-back to get his crosses in: instead he had the rare gift of being able to accurately compute the distance to his target and the loft required before bending the ball around his opponent with such precision and pace that a succession of United strikers needed only to be in the right place at the right time to capitalise on what became, for a time, the most reliable delivery system in English football.
Not bad for a one-footed player and, contrary to another of Best’s assertions, Beckham was no slouch in finding the back of the net either, especially from those virtuoso set-pieces which added so much to his legend, both for club and country. Nor was it a skill which evolved by happenstance. Alex Ferguson may eventually have come to loathe the ‘Beckham brand’ more than most, but when it came to the player’s attributes as a pure footballer, the most demanding manager in the game left no-one in any doubt about how highly he rated the player. In 2000, Ferguson said this: “David Beckham is Britain’s finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practices with a relentless application the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn’t contemplate.”
Add to all that, the abiding impression of a thoroughly decent and friendly bloke who seems to genuinely dote on his family, and there’s a lot to admire about a man who, while never as great a footballer as his more starry-eyed cheerleaders maintain, was still a whole lot better than his joyless detractors are prepared to admit. So farewell again Becks, but please be so kind as to leave the door open behind you. I have a feeling we’re not done saying all our goodbyes just yet.
