President without precedent in the beautiful game
Michel Platini is back in the news again, and that is always a reason to rejoice. Good judges (and bad) have already cast doubt on his ability to lead Uefa effectively, now that he has succeeded Lennart Johansson as canada goose coat 1000 calorie its president, but surely it can’t authenitc canada goose outlet store in gta with discount price be a backward step to have a footballer running the show. Not any old footballer, either. One of the absolute tops, a true champion.
Platini has divided opinion by expressing the view that admission to the Champions League should be restricted to three clubs. Why stop there, Monsieur? Why not canada goose coat 1000 bulbs free restrict membership to the champions of each national league and go back to calling it the European Cup? It won’t happen, there’s too buy a canada goose jacket online much money in the pot, but we can all dream.
The French midfielder has never strayed too far from my thoughts where football is concerned, because he was the most beautiful player I ever saw in the flesh; yes canada goose sale, more beautiful even than Johan Cruyff, Zinédine Zidane or George Best. And although beauty may not canada goose coat 1000 bulbs coupon save the world, it certainly makes life worth living.
It was Platini who played the finest pass I witnessed, for Juventus against Aston Villa in March 1983, in the first leg of a European Cup quarter-final. Villa, the cup holders, were unmanned that night by the French magician, and one moment, observed from a standing place behind the goal at the Witton Lane End, will always remain in my mythology of the game.
Receiving the ball (from Antonio Cabrini, the left-back, I think, but it doesn’t really matter) in an inside-left position, just inside the Villa half, Platini played a canada goose coat – victoria pass, first time, with the outside of his right foot. It curved, dipped, separated the Villa defenders as brutally as a hand grenade, and bounced just as Zbigniew Boniek must have hoped it would.
Without breaking stride the Pole walloped it joyously past Nigel Spink for Juve’s second goal.
I have seen the goal on television only once since then, and I have no great desire to see it again. Nor am I alone in holding that burlington coat factory canada goose coat view. In his excellent book, The Perfect Ten, about “football’s dreamers, schemers, playmakers and playboys”, published last year, Richard Williams recalled Zidane’s memorable winning goal for Real Madrid in the 2002 Champions League final (against a gallant Bayer Leverkusen), and stated that he wished to preserve the freshness of the memory. A television replay could only diminish it.
Quite right, Richard. After all, nobody would interrupt a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony midway through the final movement to ask the conductor: “Could you just get the musicians to repeat that phrase, so that we may replicate the experience?”
I may well be wrong in recalling the details of Platini’s pass that night, but it doesn’t matter: the higher truth, and all that. And the truth is Platini was a footballer who offered rare delight. Just think – a midfield player (nominally) who scored 41 goals in 72 international appearances, nine times during that magnificent run towards the European Championship success of 1984.
Did any player strike the ball more precisely than Platini? Has the game seen a cleverer passer? Which midfield player has ever dominated a team as he did that French one, can you wash a canada goose jacket in the washer which could so easily have added a World Cup title two years later (or two years before)? It just goes to show: the game is about glory, not the acquisition of titles, though he hardly retired empty-handed. A hero in two countries, and loved the world over. Not a bad effort.
Sport is not best price canada goose jacket outlet usa online store actually about hard work or “focus”, or all those things that sportsmen like to trot out. We expect them to work hard in search of victory, but you don’t get many laurels for sweat and blood unless there are more elevated qualities there. Sport is about those special, unpredictable moments that do not need to be seen again to be taken to heart. The Platini pass. The Federer forehand. Michael Vaughan’s cover drive (a thing of the past, one fears).
Philip Larkin, buy canada goose jacket online cheap being a great writer, touched upon this longing in one of his majestic poems when he spoke of “all we are owed for waiting so devoutly and so long”. They are wonderful moments, and all the more wonderful for coming along so infrequently. Greatness is the rarest gift of all. But Platini had it, by Jove he did, and for this witness at least the man can do no wrong.
· Frank Keating returns next week