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miklós fehér
máriojardel
sporting XXI
Miklós Fehér (27/04/01)
Football as a game obviously took a back seat Sunday as the very sad incident in Guimarães opened news bulletins and later grabbed front pages. And rightly so, of course - the death of a person must obviously come
above league results and positions in the pecking order of the human experience. But perhaps football is not merely a game. Perhaps it is one of the media, and perhaps one of the most important media, through which
humanity can express itself and be brought, albeit often screaming and kicking, together.
The response of the Portuguese to the televised death of a foreigner, and not a particularly loved foreigner, but playing for the country's greatest team, has been phenomenal. There have been similar scenes in recent
years only for the death of Amália Rodrigues, the country's Diva of Fado, the country's 'soul' music. The sense of grief, or at least stunned disbelief, was almost palpable wherever you went Monday.
The incident itself and its aftermath are dealt with elsewhere here. But football created the potential for this level of widespread grief and devotion. However much some may consider football to be a triviality, no
one can deny its power to move masses. And move masses it has once again, ever since the untimely death of a young man. On a football pitch. In the North of Portugal. On a wet Sunday in January.
Mário Jardel (12/09/03)
Mário Jardel came to Portugal from Brazilian side Grêmio as a 'goal machine' and left as one ... twice. His first spell at FC Porto, during which he was top scorer in the league four times from
1996-2000, gave an incredible average of 33 goals a season.
He left for Turkey (Galatasaray) and returned. His second Portuguese period, briefer but no less striking, was with Sporting. In his first season, 2001/2002, he scored a massive 42 goals, which won him
a Golden Boot. In his second he got 11. And thereby hangs a tale.
His overall statistics
really cannot lie about the man's talent: he has been a phenomenal scorer of goals, and while in his golden season at Sporting a lot of them were from the spot, a lot of them were not, and a lot of them were scored from impossible angles, or from impossibly subtle flicks of the head or foot, or from seemingly simple slips away from marking. Whatever, everyone in Portugal, regardless of club affiliation, was of one opinion ... Jardel was a natural and
feared goalscorer.
The main problem for Jardel was that this was all taking place in Portugal, which, notwithstanding the Figos, Quaresmas and Ronaldos of this world (or perhaps reflected in the fact that these stars have had to
leave the country to get ahead), is widely seen as a backwater of European football. This meant that his goalscoring feats were constantly being undervalued, by the market and also by the selector of the
Brazilian national team, most recently Scolari, who stubbornly refused to even consider him.
So, despite the adulation that he had at Sporting after a season (2001/2002) during which it was blindingly obvious that he was the key factor of the team's league success, he wanted more. And that's when he
fell out of love with Portugal, and eventually, Portugal fell out of love with him.
Sporting were re-grouping following a second title in three years (after a hiatus of 18). Under Romanian coach Bölöni, they were perhaps a little naïve in thinking that the same formula would do a second time
around, i.e. get it to Jardel and he'll sort it out. Whatever, just before the season started, Jardel blew a fuse.
Ostensibly, the reason was a falling out with Karen, his theretofore-devoted wife and, let it be said, Lady MacBeth figure. The first part of Jardel's season was taken up with the separation and subsequent
divorce from the statuesque Karen, including various trips to Brazil to deal with the respective paperwork, and returns, invariably unfit, to Portugal.
However, on more than one occasion, Jardel made it clear that he did not want to play in Portugal, despite the fact that Sporting's administration and fans had bent over backwards to accommodate the
increasingly unpredictable Brazilian.
All of which gave rise to the idea in some quarters that the divorce from Karen might just have been a drastic, devious ruse
(claiming psychological incapacity) to get out of the contract with Sporting and into a more lucrative one with a club of more international standing. Now that SuperMário
is back with Karen with apparently no damage done, this theory has gained even more credence.
But if Jardel's season was getting off to a bad start, Sporting's was faring even worse, dependent as it was on the gangling striker's contribution to the team's basic game plan. It was clear, however, that they had
no Plan B, and despite Jardel's eventual but obviously reluctant return, and in the event impressive 11 goals, their season suffered a slow, painful, relentless petering out.
Sporting had made the mistake of putting all their eggs in the Jardel basket, as FC Porto had done previously and had equally rued the day. FC Porto have come out of their post-Jardel hangover
with flying colours. Sporting have still to find the way.
Which all goes to sum up the advantages and (the corollary) the dangers of having a player like Jardel in your team, both on and off the pitch. Sam Allardyce
has said that Bolton are specialists in dealing with difficult personalities. With SuperMário, and the highly exigent Karen, they may well have to be.
(Article published in When Saturday Comes, September 2003)
Sporting XXI (10/08/03)
Sporting have a new home. It's called Alvalade XXI and Manchester United came to help inaugurate it Wednesday. It seats 50,000 and is lined up to take a semi-final of next year's EURO 2004
. Of course, there's a lot of time to go until that eagerly awaited tournament, but if the early days of this stadium are anything to go by, then we will have to firmly cross our fingers for the organisation of the
whole thing ...
Let's start with that 50,000. Well, on paper it's 52,000, but in fact it's below 50,000; the presence of the two giant screens, in opposite corners actually blocks the view of many seats. The Sporting
administration has come up with the brilliant idea of allocating these to blind people, but as the blind are very often accompanied by people with sight who give them running commentaries ... and the screens can
hardly be seen from some angles, e.g. way up in the press section. In fact from there, it's impossible to see the top half of the opposite stand, such is the low-slung sweep of the roof of the stadium, already
unkindly likened to a roller coaster track. This has an unsettling, claustrophobic effect which must be the same for the people high up in the opposite stand.
The press section
on the night was a bad joke. The stadium was more than sold out, and the public were allowed to enter the press section and stake their claim to a seat there, leaving many journalists desperately scrounging a perch where they could. For those journalists who could find their rightful place, the space in which they were asked to work was ludicrously narrow, and the tables inclined at such an angle that laptops simple slid off into the journos' ... er ... laps. If they wanted to powder their noses, as it were ... nearest toilet, fourth floor (from the seventh, with a single lift that defied all logic in terms of progamming). To their credit, Sporting's administration has acknowledged these deficiencies and has promised to put them right ... which they will have to do before the UEFA big guns get their teeth into them.
The stadium itself was variously praised for its "magnificence"
by Portuguese footballing folk, celebrities and Alex Ferguson, but it is in fact a rather ugly edifice. The neat green and white hoops etched by the seats of the old Alvalade have disappeared; there's some green there, but only in patches, and yellow, for some reason, seems to be in equal evidence. Also, the majority of the seats make up a rainbowy mosaic effect, rather disconcerting in that it is difficult to make out the presence of human beings there (possibly Sporting thinking ahead to their future 10,000-average crowds). The outside of the stadium is like the bathroom of somebody with particularly bad design
sense, all patches of yellow, white and green tiles, intended undoubtedly to be an advertisement for suppliers Revigrês, but that will be mentioned for all the wrong reasons.
Other things to be put right during the coming season are the deficient signposting in and around the ground, the deficient support of 'support' staff (who did not seem to have been properly briefed on organisational
strategies for the Manchester game) and the appalling playing surface, which was cut up like a ploughed field within minutes of the kick-off.
This will all seem like a very negative view of Sporting's new home (and we haven't even mentioned the obviously obscenely expensive but woefully ramshackle pre-match 'entertainment', a cheesy laser show on giant
curtains that were only half up, then left bandage-like tatters when they came down, and the weird painting in real time of the Sporting symbol on a large bedsheet by hundreds of young people dressed like the sperm
in Woody Allen's 'All You Wanted to Know About Sex' ... an 'entertainment' not quite salvaged by the magnificent Dulce Pontes, dressed incongruously in a mixture of Elizabethan and geisha styles, singing the
Sporting anthem), but there are some positive aspects about the stadium, and there were some postive aspects about the inauguration night.
There is now a roof on the thing. This does obscure some of the opposite stands, but it holds in the sound beautifully, and will be a million light years better than the old Alvalade in this respect. It will also
keep us all dry in the winter. And finally, Sporting
played like a dream against Manchester United. If they can duplicate performances like that on a regular basis, then maybe all the rough edges of the Stadium and its organisation will take a back seat (but not too high up, because ...).
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