Colin Sheridan: Timo Werner is the fisherman on the bank, smiling at the one that got away
Chelsea's Timo Werner
Recently, my son and I have started fishing. We stand on the edge of the canals that run through Galway and we cast and we wait.
Nothing too extraordinary about it, other than a six-year-old telling his father to be quiet, as we might scare the fish away.
As I had hoped, there is a certain poetry to the cadence and the candour of the act; the simplicity and the silence is as cathartic as you’d expect, and although we are not fishing the Big Blackfoot river in Montana, in a world of perpetual noise, the river gives a little peace. Any excuse to stand staring at water. I know what I see. I wonder what he sees?
Not dinner, that’s for sure. This has been discussed many times at committee level, and the boy is not for turning. It appears he has been influenced by his great mentor and friend, another child in his class, who practices the philosophy of “catch and release”.
This was news to me. It immediately rendered all my dad jokes about catching supper obsolete. To be clear, we have not caught anything yet, so there has been nothing to release. We have gone close a few times, and the rabid excitement that has met those brushes with glory suggest to me whichever unlucky fish we finally snag may actually perish from shock when he comes out of the water anyway.
So, we stand there in the near silence, at waters edge, watching little fish jump and plop. You’d swear they are winking at us as they leap and land. And we wait, and while we wait we whisper about what we will do when we actually hook one.
And all this talk of catching and releasing has made me think, is that what it’s like to live in the mind of Chelsea anti-striker Timo Werner?
Full disclosure; There is no evidence to suggest Timo Werner’s father was a fisherman.
Less to suggest he was poor, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest the German is an ardent believer in the ‘catch and release’ philosophy, especially when it comes to scoring goals. Just like the waterways of Galway, the Premier League is awash with goals. They leap out of the water, always just at the edge of your peripheral vision, testing and teasing, yelling “over here!”, yet by the time you’ve reeled in and re-cast, they have fluttered away, like a Timo goal chance.
Timo, like my son, seems unbothered, as if the catching is actually the least consequential part of the poetic process.
Werner, who cost Chelsea around €53m last summer, has scored 12 goals this season; six in Premier League, four in the Champions League, and a couple in the cups. All in 50 games. Twelve goals in 50 games. Not a complete bust, but for a team that scores a lot of goals, not value for money either.
For context, David McGoldrick scored seven goals for Sheffield United, a team who were relegated.
There is something decidedly abstract about Werner’s ineptitude in front of goal. He’s not a bad/good striker in the classical sense. Shane Long was a bad/good striker for a while. Difficult to play against in his Southampton heyday, he’d trouble good defenders but somehow always contrive to miss the most scorable of chances. Every now and then, like a warm day in Spring, he’d look brilliant, but, for the most part, the scoring was a struggle. By the end, he looked desperate.
Robbie Keane was a particularly bad/good striker at both Inter Milan and Liverpool. He even had spells at Spurs that made him look Werner-esque in his profligacy. Crucially, Keane had a confidence that seemed to only amplify with age. He also played for a team intent on cultivating a cult status as hipster nearly men rather than actually winning anything. This lessened the pain of his misses.
Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino meanwhile, is a striker only in name. He has long since clarified that scoring is the thing that interests him least. He is the Yusuf Islam, or the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, of Premier League football. The trappings of being a striker interest him none. Unlike Werner, he doesn’t even try to score — though he occasionally does.
Then there are players you thought were bad/good, who were actually good/good, but because they disappointed you the only time you bothered to watch them, they unfairly failed the eye test. One such striker was Gonzalo Higuaín. El Pipita often cast a lonely shadow on the biggest of stages — particularly in successive World Cups with Argentina. A cursory glance at his scoring record at Madrid, Napoli, and Juventus disproves my suspicions that
Higuaín was bad/good. He was good/good. Very good. He clocked numbers Werner would delight at.
Yet, Werner plays seemingly unperturbed by his stat line. Living perpetually on the edge of offside, he runs and zig zags and weaves and dribbles and shoots and more often than not — he misses. Like a disaster artist, he stands at the water’s edge with his rod, peering into the water, and no one knows what he’s seeing. He’s catching and releasing. For now. Pundits claim he’s not up to the English game. Fans may admire his bouncebackability, but the mob is fickle. Chelsea is not an artist’s retreat. It’s a hit factory. Werner is a bad Euros away from being sold to Schalke 04, which is a genuine shame. A brilliant player to watch, you feel that when it clicks for him, it’ll be like catching mackerel at the end of summer.
Werner has redefined the role of the bad/good striker, and in doing so has challenged us to consider what is actually important. Sure, goals matter, but as a kid, the thrill of smashing one off the crossbar was always far more visceral than bungling one in off your hip from a yard out. I’m sure Timo agrees. His oligarch owners? Not so much. What do they know?
Who remembers whether Hemmingway’s old man caught the marlin anyway?
