hahahah...as usual, a thought provoking article from john Nicholson footballl365
http://www.football365.com/john_nicholson/...6269756,00.html``I'm a big Joe Cole fan. There are not many of us left, it's true.
I know what you're thinking - Joe is yesterday's man; a show pony who promised much and delivered little; a crock who will never regain his form; the possessor of one of the funniest, wooden-legged step-overs in professional football and a Desperate Dan jaw. This might all be true. In fact it is all true. But that doesn't stop me being a fan.
I bloody love creative, inventive footballers who try outrageous things on a football pitch. I love dribblers and tricksters. Cole is one of those. Or at least he was back in the day.
And as a fan of that player I'd urge him to sign for Liverpool as quickly as possible. Forget playing for money, medals, Champions League football, forget title challenges.
Just. Play. Football.
Because when Cole does just play football he is fantastic to watch. But he just hasn't played enough football in a position that he can excel in; not for years now. His career has, if not exactly gone down the toilet, certainly lingered in the bathroom while the system has been flushed time and again.
Cole was destined to be a once-in-a-generation player 10 or 12 years ago - not even his best mate could say he's got anywhere near to living up to that early promise.
His only other option is Spurs but if he goes there he wo''t play each week and he'll end up like Robbie Keane, in a kind of void, pitching for a game against the likes of Luka Modric, who has proved a better, more valuable player more recently.
Redknapp would buy Cole but he doesn't need Cole at all, whereas Liverpool really badly need him. Better to go somewhere you're needed, I say.
At Liverpool he has a chance to become a hero that he could just never be at another London club and more importantly be a fulcrum around which the new Liverpool side will operate.
He will play every week and probably play centrally as an advanced attacking midfielder. The chances of him being stuck out on the left wing are quite small. Hodgson likes to play players in their preferred position - hardly a radical idea but an important one nonetheless.
Liverpool are desperate for some creativity and at just five million quids worth of wages, Cole seems a tremendous value option to provide that. The fans love but have been starved of some genuine flair and creativity in recent years. They want some attractive football to entertain them. We all do. And to that end, Joe Cole playing weekly and in the right position will improve all our football lives.
England has produced so few players who on their day are so good you'd pay to see them alone. Cole should have been one of those players. I recall seeing him play in the mid 90s against a Boro reserve side and it was as though he had liquid mercury for feet. His skill level was on a different plateau. He scored seven out of eight in a youth international but this seems to have been beaten out of him every season since. Partly this was due to the self-indulgence of youth, trying tricks and flicks in dangerous areas of the pitch, often losing possession, and as we all know in English football, that's a very big sin.
Quickly, he became that most English of things; a luxury player, in other words, not a box-to-box grafter-good-engine-on-him-sweat-machine. You can make mistakes if you're one of those and no-one in English football minds because you've 'put a shift in' and have 'tremendous work-rate' and in English football these two things trump any amount of bad passing and being caught in possession. However, if you try a bit of outrageous skill and mess it up you will be mercilessly criticised and you will end up tagged as some kind of liability.
Why do we do this to our most skilful footballers? You have to accept that they will try things that don't come off and others will have to clean up after him but when it's 0-0 and you're playing a side with ten behind the ball, that's when you need your magician to unlock the football chastity belt.
This was Cole's lot. So he had to change his game, to knock the very thing that was unique about his game, out of his game. Under Mourinho this worked quite well - his two best seasons were the title-winning ones - but it was like seeing the best guitarist in the band being forced to play the bongos. He played the bongos very well but good grief, look what we were missing.
Seeing him berated by Jose for being that flash, clever player saddened the heart but it's to his credit that he knuckled down and became part of the Mourinho machine.
Hodgson has a track record of reviving players whose careers have nose-dived. It would be a supreme irony if Cole was Hodgson's Danny Murphy at Liverpool, especially as Murphy is just four years older and in my mind, should have had a full career on Merseyside.
Had Cole gone abroad to Spain or Italy when he left West Ham I'm sure his career would have blossomed. In an environment where you have more time on the ball and where the concept of luxury players doesn't exist, who knows what he could have achieved. But sadly, English footballers seem distinctly uncurious about going overseas except on holiday.
I wrote a year ago that last season was a big one for Cole and that he should have moved away from Stamford Bridge to better fulfil his potential. A year on and his hand has been forced after frankly, if they're true, stupid wage demands that smacked of greed.
There are few bigger stages in football than Anfield. A Joe Cole, on top of his form, playing twice a week all season would grace that stage like few others. It'd be a Joe Cole who would walk back into the England side too. He has little or no competition as a creative attacking midfielder.
The time has come for him to make the best football decision of his career to date because frankly, I feel he's made all the wrong choices in the past. He could have left West Ham in 1997 aged just 16 for Manchester United for ten million. Imagine how he'd have flourished in that golden United era. Yes, moving to Chelsea brought him wealth and medals but in seven years, how many really great games has he played for them? I'd argue little more than a handful and most of them in the two title-winning teams - but that's over five years ago now. Since then a mixture of injury, lack of form and lack of managerial belief has stalled his career. Hodgson would put belief back into him and I maintain would make him the player he always should have been.
Choosing Spurs and the bosom of Redknapp would be massively retrograde step; more easy-going, un-testing, part-time football. Go to Liverpool and he could be the driving force behind the revival of one of England's biggest clubs. That's something to get excited about. So what's it to be JC?
Forget about the money, you're rich enough, it's time to write your football legend. But are you up for it?''
This post has been edited by nando: Jul 20 2010, 08:50 AM 
Jul 14 2010, 02:44 PM, updated 16y ago
_of_roy_hodgson_37.jpg)
Quote
)
>>> 
0.1459sec
0.39
6 queries
GZIP Disabled