Yaya Tour de ForceQUOTE
Yaya Toure’s Regretful Battle With Reductive Assessment
When he eventually leaves England, one sequence will define Yaya Toure’s time in this country. It will be five-to-ten seconds long and it will show him thundering through the middle of the pitch, his limbs pulsing, his opponents flailing.
Despite hardly being a once-a-game occurrence, that has come to be his dominant association. That is what Toure does, that is his function.
European football watchers have an issue assessing African players and, almost without exception, they are presented in physical terms. Before noting the technique or cerebral qualities of an African forward, for example, the general impulse will always be to comment on his size or athletic advantage.
That’s an observation which always sounds accusatory. Any time this topic is broached, the assumption is that “blind spot” really means “racial prejudice” and that, rather than being a discussion, the article is really just an attempt to shame.
That needn’t be the case.
Football is a very superficial game and, irrespective of where they come from, players are judged all the time on little more than a cosmetic basis. Equally, millions of fans watch sport in a very surface-deep way and are always likely to make assumptions based on body shapes and physical size.
David Silva is one of the most technically gifted players in the Premier League, but he is also one of the most cynical and commits far more fouls than most realise.
Why does that generally escape notice? Because Silva, with his impish Iberian features and schoolboy haircut, looks like a playmaker and he doesn’t seem imposing enough to be a credible menace.
So it works both ways. Where it becomes a darker force, perhaps, is when assumptions are made about player character on the basis of origin. There is a very real and very troubling tendency to apply certain behavioural tags to African players and to fill-in their personalities by using erroneous and frequently derisory stereotypes.
Yaya Toure is afflicted by both. When Manchester City’s collective form has dipped, his work-rate and commitment are typically the first debating points. Does he care enough? Has his head been turned by another club’s wealth? He earns a very generous wage at the Etihad Stadium and maybe money was the driving force behind his transfer from Barcelona, but Toure’s attitude is on trial far more often than any of his teammates, all of whom have very healthy bank balances.
It’s a very dark tendency and one which has been used against far, far too many African players in the past.
But the physical tagging, while irritating and reductive, probably belongs in a slightly different category. Toure does deserve to be appreciated in a more three-dimensional way, but that he’s not is a consequence of just how rare a player he is.
In the flesh, Yaya Toure is a mightily impressive athlete. His size and speed are a highly improbable combination and only those who have watched him from the stands can really attest to what a force of nature he can be. The Ivorian is a physical anomaly: someone that powerful should not be that dynamic.
But that gift is also a curse. Just as large athletes aren’t expected to be overly mobile, they’re also not typically associated with subtlety or finesse. Toure challenges that. His range is incredibly broad and it challenges a lot of the assumptions that are made about shape.
We don’t expect heavyweight boxers to make great tap-dancers.
Nor do we anticipate that a ballerina might have a jaw-cracking uppercut.
That’s the paradox. While he’s inextricably linked with power and his physical existence on the pitch is accentuated by his size, his actual footballing impact isn’t really defined by either characteristic. During the course of game he might brush aside an opponent or use his natural advantages in an aerial contest, but nobody would consider either to be prominent within a seminal Toure performance.
No, beyond those surging runs there’s hardly a trace of physicality to his play. It’s a mind-trick: it just seems like there is.
His passing is beautifully smooth, both in its rhythm and its execution. Not only is he perpetually aware of what exists around him, but his actual passing technique – his literal contact with the ball – looks effortless.
And that extends to his goal-scoring, too. Whenever a player develops a habit of shooting from long-range, he becomes – again – associated with power. How often, though, across his two-hundred-and-something Manchester City appearances, has Toure tensed his calf muscles and put his laces through the ball?
When he shoots for goal, he does so with precision and delicacy. He side-foots the ball; he places it; he manipulates angles to his own advantage. In and around the box, Toure is a craftsman and there is rarely even the slightest hint of violence to his work.
He’s capable of generating great velocity – those at The Hawthorns over the opening weekend of this season will attest – but that’s a product of technical purity rather than blunt force. In the Premier League’s twenty-three year history, no player – with the possible exception of Matthew Le Tissier – has made scoring from distance look quite as easy as Yaya Toure regularly does.
He doesn’t drive the ball and he doesn’t thrash at it. He is an architect rather than just a simple demolition man and he scores goals with a method that very few of his contemporaries can match. His swirling, dipping equaliser at Wembley against Sunderland, for example, was a work of art. A shot placed to perfection, certainly, but how many current players process the game quickly enough to have even been aware of that opportunity? To see Vito Mannone a fraction off his line, to identify the square foot of uncovered net and then, as the exclamation point, to execute perfectly.
It was a classic Toure moment which neatly surmised his place in the footballing consciousness. At first glance it seemed to rely on thumping power, but the more you watch it the more apparent the hidden detail becomes and the more appreciation you have for its delicate mechanics.
That is Toure. His value as a player has been simplified by a sinister subtext, but he is also a layered performer who will forever be misinterpreted by an audience which will always be drawn to the superficial and the obvious.
Nov 16 2014, 01:24 AM
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