Remembering Beckham
I've always thought of David Beckham as the over-hyped product of a culture that's not even the one I grew up in. Footballer up to a point, until he married a Spice Girl. We remember David Beckham more for his marriage than for what he was capable of on the pitch. At the limit, we remember it for how it fit: with the blonde streaks that he arranged while he was playing, with bleached hair, with the crest, shaved like a skinhead, shaved with an oblique stripe to the skin, with the samurai tail, even with pigtails, always beautiful. We remember David Beckham as a sign of the times, the first footballer to become a pop icon just as football became ... well, what it is fully now.
But David Beckham was not a simple product of his times, if anything, one of those who helped transform them. What then looked like just the son of a hairdresser and a kitchen fitter who grew up among the tabloids, who instead of playing football should have been part of a boy-band, was actually one of the few sportsmen to have had a ' influence beyond the limits of the sport he practiced. What was mistaken for superficiality, for frivolity, was instead a very precise vision. Beckham was looking in the right direction, we didn't. He also came at the right time, in the right place - the modern Premier League debuted in '92, he made his debut three years later - and was the first of a new line of football-brands for whom hair was no longer a distraction. but part of the job (to say, today Rome has its own “barber shop” inside Trigoria).
David Beckham, therefore, as the spiritual father of Cristiano Ronaldo, who inherited his number 7 Manchester United jersey and updated his role as an icon on the principles of financial capitalism (without the typically British "real" aura, that is, even because Ronaldo missed his Posh Spice to complete the pair). Of course, there was also the ingenuity of the turn of the century in David Beckham's ideal son-boyfriend-father smile, compared to the very new generations of footballers who act as a cross between the future President of the Republic of their country of origin. and a minor superhero in the Avengers cast - perhaps as worthy substitutes for the android Vision, who is defined on Wikipedia as "constantly struggling to assert and maintain his precarious humanity."
Beckham did it all seemingly effortless, retaining his human condition even after turning into a brand, as if he really was a secret member of the royal family. But unlike Ronaldo and all those who came after him, he ended up overshadowing his sporting talent. David Beckham was not the strongest footballer on the planet (even though he finished second in the 1999 Ballon d'Or ranking, behind Rivaldo), but the most handsome; Cristiano Ronaldo wants to be both. Fame transported Beckham to a level that was beyond the competition and sacrifices of top-level football; Ronaldo, on the other hand, is a walking monument to self-sacrifice as a value that sublimates and crushes competition (and therefore success) at the same time. Beckham was what the men of the last century did not yet know they wanted to become; Ronaldo is a fundamentally inimitable model that we can pursue endlessly. David Beckham is an entrepreneur; Cristiano Ronaldo is a platonic idea.
When we remember Beckham, his footballing talent is always overshadowed. Recall that he shot free kicks well, which is really the laziest form in which you can express the talent of a footballer. On the other hand, Sir Alex (Ferguson) also said that "from that moment", after his marriage to Victoria, that is, "his life has never been the same", that football was not everything for him. Ferguson - who convinced him to go to United for a dinner on his 14th birthday, who launched him into professional football, who hit him with a boot in the face during a fight at halftime, which fined him for taking care of his son by skipping training while Victoria was at London Fashion Week, that perhaps something personal against him and what he stood for had it - he also said he worked with only four phenomena, and Beckham he was not among those named (Cantona, Giggs, Scholes, Ronaldo).
George Best said of Beckham: «He doesn't use his left foot, he doesn't know how to hit his head, he doesn't know how to tackle and he doesn't score many goals. But apart from that he is a good player ». But it is possible that Beckham won what he won - before the age of 28 he already had six Premier League leagues in eight years as a starter at Manchester United, the '99 Champions League in which he kicked the two corners with which United overturned in time. expired the final with Bayern, an Intercontinental; then also a Liga, a Ligue 1, two MLS and various national pairs - and became the third English player with the most caps in the national team, just because he was good at set pieces? Just because it was beautiful?
Yet that was really how I remembered David Beckham. Before getting lost in a whirlwind of his collections of assists and goals, with all the jerseys he wore, and having transformed my "favorites" into gifs to watch in loop as if I were the last man left on the planet and still have some electricity and internet to consume before accepting my fate. Why did I realize at that point that ours - only mine? - Beckham's way of remembering doesn't do justice to his right foot. To one of the right feet, that is, the most precise and sensitive that has ever hit a football. An amazing foot, gifted with imagination, powerful, delicate, graceful and violent at the same time. Perhaps the best way to remember David Beckham, the one who truly does justice to his footballing talent, is as a fashion icon and best cross player ever in the post-YouTube era.
Diego Maradona did not particularly like David Beckham. Or at least he once said: «He has a good long kick, but he's not a great player. He is not in the category of best players ever. There are hundreds of Beckhams playing soccer around the world ». Maradona is right - can he be wrong? - because basically kicking the ball well is a prerequisite for every talented footballer, at every latitude and at every level: the beauty of a Beckham free-kick is the same as all good free-kicks. Specifically, however, the balls that come out of Beckham's foot have a different quality from all the others. Take the half-time punishment against Greece, at Old Trafford, with which Beckham led England to the 2002 World Cup (partially repaying the English public for the pain of the expulsion against Argentina in '98, which contributed to the elimination). The ball spins so much that in the first few meters it gives the impression of passing over the barrier and going to the far post and the goalkeeper, Nikopolidis, takes a side step over there. Then the ball suddenly bends to the opposite side and appears to change speed.
Roberto Carlos said that in the days of Real he and Beckham both got close to the ball before deciding which of the two would take a free kick: "But I wanted to watch Beckham kick it, because it's beautiful how he hits the ball." But beauty risks distracting us from what really matters. In a video tutorial of those in which a gifted person pretends that their talent is learnable, Beckham explains to a group of boys that he likes to cross around, with the inside of his foot, why he "confuses the goalkeeper", who thinks is coming at him and instead then curves and walks away from him. So David Beckham's ability was not only to kick the ball well, but to kick it so well in order to deceive or at least surprise the defenders and the opposing goalkeeper. In the free-kick against Greece, the illusion is everything, because the ball goes to the goalkeeper's post, because Nikopolidis had placed the barrier on his left post even though the strike point was slightly to his right, and if he had guessed the trajectory probably would also have come to intercept it.
The surprise effect is actually a fundamental component of David Beckham's style. At least as much as the elegance of his movements, the left arm that was raised almost to emphasize the opposite movement of the right leg, stretched backwards to take the momentum like a club for a golfer's driver; the left support foot, which with the twist of the left leg bent and ended up resting on the ground with the outside instead of with the sole. When the ball came out of Beckham's foot only he knew where it would land, because only he really knew the potential of his kick.
An example would be the goal scored at Wimbledon, from behind the midfield (apparently he had already tried in that game and Ferguson had promised he would take it away if he tried again), but there is a better one. If in the video of the assist for Ronaldo against Zaragoza, easily available on the internet, you pause when it hits the ball, even knowing that the ball will end up in the center of the area in Ronaldo, in fact, you will hardly be able to prefigure the trajectory of the cross. which passes exactly over the head of the opposing defender and then lands on the foot of the teammate. Ronaldo himself seems surprised and starts slightly late, then forcing himself to hit the ball in a slip.
Many of Beckham's crosses were actually not crosses at all, rather very precise or very tense throws, delivered with an invisible drone on the feet of his teammates directly in the most sensitive areas of the field. His vision of the game is the true quality that made him a threat from anywhere on the pitch and that allowed him to serve the attackers consistently even without being able to rely on dribbling to create the necessary space (strange that George Best forgot just this Beckham's list of shortcomings). Even practically standing still, as in the case of Ronaldo’s assist against Zaragoza. Compared to all the potential Beckhams around the world that Maradona was talking about, the real Beckham has put the ball exactly on the head of Dwight Yorke, van Nistelrooy or Ronaldo too many times to not understand that there is something unusual, special, that only he had. Something that is barely visible in the quality of his crosses.
Cross is a disused tool, statistically not efficient enough. In the Premier League, for example, you cross less and less: according to Alfredo Giacobbe in the last four years the crosses have decreased overall by 4%. In a 2013 study (Jan Vecer, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management) entitled "Crossing has a strong negative effect on the ability to score", it was even argued that stopping crossing and looking for another solution could increase the possibility to score goals, also because in the Premier League they needed 92 crosses to score a goal (and it varied a lot from team to team, United needed 44 crosses while Southampton needed 143).
Today the idea is generally accepted that it is a random solution and that when a team crosses too much (like Ventura's Italy who in the return match with Sweden made 51 crosses without breaking the 0-0, losing the play-off for the World Cup) there is something wrong. The cross is a difficult tool to analyze, according to Alfredo Giacobbe we should «distinguish high and low crosses, crosses in the center and crosses behind. See the percentages of "success" with respect to the starting areas and the fall areas, even if this parameter of "success" should be defined ». Because it is not enough for the cross to be hit by a teammate for it to become a good cross: if the teammate barely touches the ball with his head, he hits it backwards or so weakly that he actually passes it to the goalkeeper, perhaps it is not quite right to speak of useful cross. In the same way, on a beautiful cross, made in the right time, which arrives with the right angle and strength, a center forward can completely miss the impact for reasons independent of the cross, for simple inexperience or because hindered by the marker or goalkeeper. . Ultimately, the cross depends on too many variables. David Beckham's power was to nullify the influence of all but one variable: the quality of his cross.
In Beckham's case, it is the cross that finds the attacker and puts him in a position to kick for the net, or even lures him into the space where the ball is falling. A space whose existence the attacker discovered only after the passage had landed on him. Beckham anticipated the movement of his attacking teammates who only had to follow the ball, in the space created by the cross. Not only did his balls magically end up magnetized on the center forward's head between the heads of two defenders too many times to think it was a happy cross (according to Opta there are 148 assists between Premier, Liga, Ligue 1, Serie A and MLA, although obviously they are not all crosses nor all assists from the outside) but very often the information needed to score - this is how you have to hit this ball - was contained in the trajectory of the cross itself.
It is true that Beckham had great finishers at his disposal, who had more space at their disposal than they would have today at a high level (and who perhaps hit better heads than many forwards do today), but it is also true that to hit the balls Beckham's often did not even have to adjust the pace of their run, move even half a meter, and almost always hit balls that had curved enough to meet him as if they came from the baseline. They didn't have to turn it into goal by twisting its neck, causing the ball to lose speed, just hit it with a full forehead, without making it lose power.
Rooney said she loved playing with him because: "I knew I just needed to run and he would put it on my head or in space." Sometimes the idea behind it was so difficult to imagine that even his comrades were surprised. If anyone can put the ball at the far post, very few have exploited the territory outside the last defender like Beckham. The assist against Valladolid requires a diagonal ball that rips the pitch like a Fontana canvas, and until the ball lands on Zidane's left instep it is not clear whether the ball was for him or Ronaldo. But it's too accurate for Zidane to think it was actually for Ronaldo.
My absolute favorite is an assist against a team in blue which I cannot recognize due to the quality of the video. I don't even recognize Beckham's partner, who from the way he moves and the conclusion could be van Nistelrooy. He stands almost on the side line and hits very hard from the inside, giving such a strong effect to the ball that - this can only be seen by looking very carefully at the grainy image - when it touches the ground it further tightens the corner, curves even more towards the center forward. But the absolutely unique thing about this ball is that it passes with all the calm and grace in the world in front of a defender. Beckham not only calculated the rebound, he also calculated that the defender would not get there. A superiority of this type is worthy of the best one-on-all actions and the best ankle-breaking dribbles, reminiscent of the technical and athletic superiority of the best footballers. And perhaps the most modern aspect of Beckham is that even if he doesn't hold a candle to the numbers and successes of the great contemporary players he can compete with them on YouTube.
Okay, so how should we remember David Beckham? What place does it occupy in the Pantheon of the best footballers of the last 20-30 years?
Only by seeing him play together with Eric Cantona do we realize that we are talking about a player who is not exactly contemporary with Ronaldo and Messi. The football Beckham grew up in was totally different from the one he left relatively recently, while the football in which Messi and Ronaldo grew up was 'Beckham's' football. A feeling confirmed by the memory that Beckham left with the English national team and especially with United. Cristiano Ronaldo said at the time: "I would be proud if one day I enjoyed the same esteem as George Best and David Beckham" The football in which Messi and Ronaldo grew up was Beckham's football. Ronaldo the Brazilian, Roberto Carlos, Owen, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Henry, Kakà, those footballers with one foot in a past football era and one in today.
Ferguson said Beckham was obsessive in coaching free kicks and the story of how Cantona's discipline affected United's "class '92", forcing the very youngest boys (Neville, Scholes, Beckham) to stay on the pitch at the end of training to train him to hit the cross ball How lucky, huh? Beckham himself describes himself as more normal than he is: "I don't see myself very different from any other hard working family man." The memory he would like to leave is an altogether banal memory: "I just want people to remember me as a footballer who worked hard, one who, every time I set foot on the pitch, gave everything he had." We know that the distance that separates talented men from their gift is unbridgeable, we should stop asking them to explain to us what makes them special. Their remembrance is our responsibility. David Beckham should be remembered as the player - not the first, nor the only one - who showed a new generation of spectators and budding players that class also mattered in football. That football was not only a sport for tough men, who knew how to impose themselves by force in a context of strong men, but also for those who knew how to do it with elegance. He demonstrated, with the means at his disposal, that beauty is not only superficial, but also a value.
