£80m an expensive motivational tool

From the Times Gabriele Marcotti

Sometimes change can work in the most unexpected ways. Real Madrid acquired ten players last summer at a cost of about £80 million. It was an attempt to overhaul a team who, under Fabio Capello, won La Liga but supposedly came up short in the entertainment department.

Four months on, Real sit top of La Liga. Is it evidence that spending money guarantees success? Not quite because, amazingly, of Real’s ten newcomers, only one - Wesley Sneijder, the Holland playmaker – has started as many as half the club’s matches this season.

The others’ impact has ranged from the fleeting to the impalpable. Pepe, the £20 million Portugal defender, missed ten weeks with injury. Christoph Metzelder, the Germany centre back, has made six starts, while Royston Drenthe, the much-hyped Dutchman, has made four. The quartet of players who used to ply their trade in England – Arjen Robben, Gabriel Heinze, Júlio Baptista and Jerzy Dudek – have started seven games between them. And the pair of strikers, Javier Saviola (plucked on a Bosman free transfer from Barcelona) and Roberto Soldado (back from his loan spell at Osasuna, where he scored 11 goals in 21 appearances last season) have accumulated only three starts between them.

What is curious here is how Real have thrived without the contribution of those players who were supposed to strengthen the team, but rather relied on the veterans, in some cases the same veterans who were apparently past it. Take Guti, for example. Eleven months ago Ramón Calderón, the club president, was caught on tape lambasting Guti and his unfulfilled potential, saying that he has been “a promising player” for his entire career. This season the 31-year-old, originally pencilled in as a reserve, has been a fixture in midfield, playing some of the best football of his career.

Raúl, the club captain and a veritable superstar early in his career, seemed to hit the skids after his 26th birthday, failing to reach double figures in league goals in each of the past three seasons. This season he has amassed eight league goals already.

Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos, as always, have been the driving forces defensively and Robinho and Fabio Cannavaro, after disappointing campaigns last season, are back to their best as well. As for Ruud van Nistelrooy, it is the same story: put the ball anywhere near him and he will stick it in the net. His goal against Athletic Bilbao on Saturday evening took his season’s tally to seven in 12 matches and his overall Real record to 32 in 49 appearances.

Contradiction right at heart of the enigma that is Kieren Fallon

By the Times Chief Sports Writer Simon Barnes

Jockeys are a difficult bunch. It’s a mixture of short man’s chippiness and the demands of the job, a series of brusque, even brutal, wham-bam relationships with an endless series of partners. Thus we have the depression of Fred Archer, the pathological meanness of Lester Piggott, Willie Carson’s outbreaks of spitefulness, and even Frankie Dettori has a dark side.

But Kieren Fallon is different. I have had long chats with him on two or three occasions and each time I walked away thinking: “What a nice guy. If only they were all like that.” Fallon’s CV speaks of someone you would cross the M25 to avoid, but the man himself is quite different.

All the same, there was the time when he pulled a rival jockey off his horse — brilliant, in a way, because a racing saddle and an oated-up thoroughbred do not make a stable platform for judo. Whatever else Fallon may be, he is not so much a magnet for trouble as a black hole. Incomprehensible forces of gravitation tug every possible aspect of strife and destruction towards him. And so, even as his corruption trial collapses, we hear that he has failed a drugs test for cocaine, a matter still in the arena of the unproven as we await the findings for the B sample.

And yet the man I met was a champion jockey filled with humility, lost in admiration for Dettori’s style, expressing a touching eagerness to improve. You can see his hidden nature in the way he rides, in the impulsive, nanosecond seizing of a gap. But for the rest — well, he has some of the most well-mannered demons you could possibly wish to be introduced to. One of the strangest men I’ve ever met.

As reports in different newspapers claim that José Mourinho has (a) signed up as England’s next head coach and (b) performed an about-turn and joined Barcelona, the fact to bear in mind is that neither scenario would come as the least surprise. Mourinho obeys neither laws nor conventions. He pleases himself and if he gets the England job, he will do it for himself alone.

I take my hat (and shirt) off to Giggs

I remember attending a football match in which opposition supporters sang of their hatred for Ryan Giggs. Not for the first or the last time, I was bemused by a football crowd. How can anyone hate Ryan Giggs? He’s another of those athletes who lift the heart.

He has just scored his 100th league goal for Manchester United, so it’s a nice moment to applaud him as he lifts his bat, and to muse on the idiosyncratic gallop – at full pace, he is recognisable from half a mile away – and that expression, seen far too often, alas, of profound and innocent bewilderment because the ball that he has struck has failed to find the goal.