How much talent does the difficult player need?

Exceptionally gifted but unreliable players are often given lots of rope by management, but far too many seem to believe themselves to be deserving of that leeway

Ed Smith

May 20, 2014

 

	It's no surprise that Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and not be dropped for it © Getty Images  Enlarge

It's been a mixed week for sportsmen out of love with the authorities. Michael Carberry, overlooked after the Ashes tour, publicly stated his frustrations about a lack of communication from the selectors. Many assumed that Carberry, aged 33, had signed his own death warrant and would never play for England again. But the selectors have made a shrewd decision in recalling him. He is a decent, understated man; the England management now looks magnanimous in overlooking a few surprising quotes in a newspaper.

No such luck for Samir Nasri, the wonderfully gifted but moody French footballer. He has been left out of France's World Cup squad. France's coach, Didier Deschamps, explained his decision with bracing honesty: "He's a regular starter at Manchester City. That's not the case today with the France team. And he also said he's not happy when he's a substitute. I can tell you that you can feel it in the squad." Deschamps went further, anticipating his critics by conceding that Nasri was more talented than some players he had selected: "It's not necessarily the 23 best French players, but it's the best squad in my eyes to go as far as possible in this competition."

Talent v unity: an old story.

Rugby union, though, has also brought two mavericks back into the fold. Gavin Henson, Wales' troubled but mercurial playmaker, looks set to return to the red jersey. And England's Danny Cipriani, another flair player who has never found a happy home wearing national colours, has been thrown a lifeline. A last chance that both Henson and Cipriani cannot afford to miss? I bet they have heard that before. And then been handed just one final, last chance. That's often the way with rare talent: different rules apply.

As always, these debates have generally descended into an argument about abstract principles. Pundits have rushed to say that French football has a problem with finding a home for left-field characters. Other have bridled at Deschamps' logic: who should be happy being put on the bench anyway? It is the job of managers, we are often told, to finesse and handle talented but unconventional personalities. Indeed, with a moment's reflection, anyone can produce a list of world-beating players who didn't conform to a coach's template for a model professional - from Diego Maradona to Andrew Flintoff.

Such a list, sadly, proves absolutely nothing. Because it is just as easy to find examples of teams that began a winning streak by leaving out a talented but unreliable star player. The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 left out both David Ginola and Eric Cantona, just as the current side have now omitted Nasri.

In the popular imagination, the argument about dropping and recalling star players revolves around the juicy, gossipy questions: how difficult are they, how does their awkwardness manifest itself, has anyone tried to talk them round? This is naturally intriguing stuff. But the other half of the question - the crucial half - is too often ignored. Quite simply, how much better are they than the next guy?

	When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance

If you are a lot better, it is amazing how forgiving sports teams can be. Luis Suarez was banned for eight games for racially abusing Patrice Evra. He then served another ten-match ban for biting a Chelsea player. Obviously Liverpool sacked him instantly on the grounds that he was bringing the club into disrepute and becoming a distraction from the task of winning football matches? No, they didn't do anything of the kind. They calculated that Suarez was the best chance, their only chance, of mounting a challenge for trophies. If Suarez had been Liverpool's sixth- or seventh-best player, rather than their star man, he would have been kicked out years ago.

In other words, the best protection from being dropped for being "difficult" is to be brilliant. Even as a young man, England midfielder Paul Gascoigne was a heavy drinker and an unreliable man. But he was a sensational footballer. Coaches put up with him because they calculated it was in their own and the team's rational self-interest. By the latter stages of his career, Gascoigne was still a heavy drinker and an unreliable man, but he was now only occasionally an excellent footballer. Glenn Hoddle felt Gascoigne was too unfit to play at the 1998 World Cup. The glass was half-empty.

When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance. That is why Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and (nearly) always stay in the team. Any rational man who asked himself the question: "Are Australia a better team with Warne in it?" came to the unavoidable conclusion: "Yes, definitely."

Here's the central point. At this exalted level of elite sport, a great number of players have an epic degree of self-belief. Being convinced of their own greatness is an aspect of their magic. They back themselves to shape the match, to determine its destiny - especially the big matches. Instead of seeing themselves as just one of a number of exceptionally talented players, in their own minds they are men apart, special cases.

They aren't always right, though. So the question becomes: how good, how difficult? They are two aspects of the same equation, a calculation that is being made every day by coaches all over the world - on the school pitch, in the reserves squad, all the way to the World Cup final.

A player, too, must make his own calculation. Would pretending to be someone else - a more compliant, easy-going man - centrally detract from my performances? Must I play on my own terms, behaving as I like? But this question must coexist with another, less comfortable one: am I good enough to get away with it?

Not many. Fewer, certainly, than the number who think they can.

Can a sportsman's life explain his career?

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Can a sportsman's life entirely or satisfactorily explain his sporting achievements? © Associated Press

Do great sportsmen have interesting lives? Does that matter? In searching their autobiographies, do we learn very much about what makes them so good on the pitch, or are the important truths already out there on the field, clear for all to see?

I recently bought a bunch of sporting biographies and autobiographies. They were all okay, but I began to question the methodology. One player claimed his childhood poverty made him a great player, another thought his parents' relative affluence gave him a crucial head start. One player thanked his loving family, another felt his fractured home life provided the hunger to succeed. One player argued his incessant practising as a child made the difference, another believed he had been helped by not practising too narrowly and by retaining a sense of play.

Of course, each narrative might be true: what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. But surveying all the books together, a rival explanation seemed more true to me: none of these back-stories, none of these paths to greatness, had any real relevance. The harder each book tried to use biography to "explain" the career under review, the less it succeeded.

When I was working for the Times, I once shared a lift with a journalist who had just returned from interviewing a major film star. She was complaining about how unforgivably boring she was. The presumption, of course, was that famous people had a responsibility to have interesting lives. Being an excellent actor was not enough; they had to entertain the media as well - the life had to be the equal of the work. But why? Shouldn't we just be thankful for the great performances?

I've written here before that I am sceptical about the expectation that sportsmen ought constantly to explain to the media how and why they play sport, that they must decode their competitiveness and creativity. That column was written from the perspective of an ex-pro: players should be given some space to live and breathe.

I write now wearing a historian's hat. I have lost confidence in the idea - widely held - that the way to understand what makes sportsmen excel can be found in a catalogue of biographical details. The presumption of modern sports coverage is that we learn about a great athlete by using a zoom lens to follow him off the pitch, down the tunnel that leads to the locker room, then track his car journey home, all the way back to his home town and family life - on and on, until we know the "real man" and understand "what makes him tick", as though his life is a just a jigsaw puzzle with a given number of pieces.

	As an ex-sportsman, who has lived inside the dressing room, I know how normally unexceptional people can do remarkable things out on the pitch

There is a rival view. To reach the top in sport, with all the exceptional discipline and sacrifices that are called for, sportsmen often have to accept a sublimation of their civilian lives. Pursuing and achieving greatness on the pitch comes at a cost. The force that feeds their life must be channelled relentlessly towards the pursuit of victory, the honing of a craft and the nurturing of competitiveness. Often there is not much juice left in reserve.

In this respect, sportsmen have much in common with artists. The poet Edward Thomas, killed in the First World War, captured this brilliantly: "Most lives of poets stand to their work as a block of unhewn marble stands to the statue finished and unveiled… We read their lives after their poetry and we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive."

Thomas' point is that the relationship between "life" experience and artistic output is complex: some mysterious alchemy turns the former into the latter. That is where the magic lies. I am beginning to suspect the same applies to great sportsmen. Of course, they must have a life that feeds their sport. But the life does not entirely or satisfactorily explain their sport. In fact, looking to autobiography to explain how sportsmen play obscures the truth more often than it illuminates it.

There are always exceptions, players whose lives are central to every move they make on the pitch. You cannot tell the story of Muhammad Ali the boxer without devoting space to Muhammad Ali the man. It is impossible to explore his bravery and resilience in the ring without acknowledging there is another story, even greater, about race and civil rights, Vietnam and American identity. His great life is as interesting as his great sporting deeds.

But how many Alis are there? Very few. Far more often, the sport emerges from an apparently routine and mundane life. As an ex-sportsman, who has lived inside the dressing room, I know how normally unexceptional people can do remarkable things out on the pitch. They are two different people, the man and the player.

This is one of the reasons I still watch great sport with a sense of wonder. When I see a sportsman at the limit of his defiance, bravery and self-belief, I know there is very often a normal, flawed human being coexisting with the apparently invulnerable champion. Rafael Nadal, one of the world's toughest and most unblinking sportsmen, calls himself "the Clark Kent of tennis". (To be fair, though it runs against my opening paragraph, he made the comment in an autobiography.) Nadal might be Superman on the court, but he remains as shy and unconfident man in the rest of his life.

How? Because he is a great sportsman - unremarkable and exceptional, all at once.