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Cesc Fábregas

Read of the Day: The Left Hand Takes Charge

Vicente Del Bosque — a nice guy, went the party line in Spain, but a caretaker with a soft, “left handed” approach to the easiest job in the world, nothing more than rolling out the balls and telling the Barça 7 to play like Barça. Wrong – especially about his squad list, his lineups and substitutions, his use of Busquets and Torres (integral to Villa’s success) and Fabregas, holding him until the end, which liberated Iniesta to dominate in extra time. “Nice guys do not always come last…Vicente del Bosque is a good man. He is also a good manager.” (Sid Lowe/Sports Illustrated)

(Image credit: Univesidad Europea de Madrid/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Poaching and Fàbregas

The Premier League invented the art of the youth poach — its teams use their superior TV revenue to pluck the best young players out of Europe’s academies like chickenhawks. Now, as UEFA is trying to bump up the minimum age for international transfers, the case of Cesc Fàbregas reminds us of this predatory system — and why Arsenal tears about Barcelona’s reclaiming of Fàbregas come from crocodile eyes. (Sam Wallace/The Independent)

Eric Cantona and the Anxiety of Influence

Thierry Henry? Ronaldinho? Nonsense: the most influential footballer of the last decade is clearly the irrepressibly just, justly violent Eric Cantona. From Man Utd’s regnancy to the “talismanic player uniquely reflecting an entire club’s values” that is Fabregas to our indulgence of Terry and Lampard in hopes of recreating the “remarkable spiritual connection between one footballer and thousands in a crowd” — Cantona foreran and articulated “all the good of English football,” while also making one “aware of the consistent shortcomings of every player, and every other human being you will ever meet.” (Alex Netherton/Who Ate All the Pies)

A Son of the System

They tried to hide Cesc Fábregas, did his hometown youth side, so Barca’s scouts wouldn’t see him — because they knew. For all Thierry Henry’s pain at playing Arsenal, Fábregas tonight goes to war (pending injury) against més que un club — it’s the team that sent a taxi 55km each way every day to pick him up for training at age 10, and the kids named Piqué and Messi that beat him at table tennis and Playstation and mocked his bad taste in music. And that he defended with his fists mid-pitch. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)