The World Needs More Makélélé

I don’t have a lot of time today, but I feel a need to post this just to get that Dhorasoo photo off the top of the page. (Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Interesting career retrospective of one of our resident old guys, Claude Makélélé, over on the FIFA.com site. How can you not love a footballing article that begins:

As Pierre Corneille put it: “In souls nobly born, valour does not depend upon age.”

I’ll bet this writer has boxes and boxes of poetry stashed in the back of his closet. Not that this is a bad thing. The world needs more poets.

(I personally find that limericks stretch me to the limit. So I respect poets. And now that I have somehow managed to link “limerick” and “Makélélé” in my brain, I’m feeling a need to write a limerick dedicated to our Claude. Stay tuned. This is one of many services we’ll offer in the run-up to Euros.)

But I digress. Makélélé. (If you’re English, you take away the accent marks and kind of rhyme it with “Ukelele.”) The article has a lot of good quotes, but this is my favorite:

“Precision is the most important thing for the position I play in,” explains the man himself. “You have to be physical, quick and have good technique. If you lose the ball, it can have irreversible consequences. You have to be very precise in your positioning. There are no more No10s - the defensive midfielder has to know how to do everything.”

Pretty much sums up the man behind the Makélélé role, doesn’t it? Based on our Claude’s recent performances (seriously, the man pretty much defines the word “consistent”), I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more of him this summer.

Not bad for an old guy.