Nowhere in the world does youth usurp adulthood quite so publicly as in the sporting arena.
On a bright, clear, frosty Saturday here, a 19-year-old Brazilian, known simply as Anderson, orchestrated an extraordinary 4-0 Manchester United victory over Arsenal in the FA Cup.
Anderson has been coming to the boil for quite some time. The folks in Porto Alegre have talked about him since he was five, and they began calling him "the new Ronaldinho" at 15.
United paid the price of a Goya masterpiece to get him, but, if his health is blessed and his heart and mind remain committed, he will more than earn the club that sum in the coming decade.
Yet sport teaches us to take nothing for granted.
As Anderson was striding across the English stage, his countryman Ronaldo lay in a hospital in Paris hoping and praying that yet another ruptured knee ligament has not brought a premature end to one of the most fulfilled careers in the game.
Ronaldo, the Milan player, the most prolific goal scorer of his era, had surgery in Paris where, eight years ago, almost identical repair work on the other knee enabled him to recover and then help Brazil win the 2002 World Cup. He then had comparative youth on his side; today he is 31. One hopes, for his sake and for the sake of soccer, that he comes back, but it is a challenge, he knows, that demands a young man's courage and will.
Should he desire an example, he need only look at Paolo Maldini, the captain of his club. Maldini on Sunday was to pass another milestone, the 1,000th match of his career. He is 39, he is hungry for one more Champions League winners' medal before the final whistle is blown, and he thanks his mother for everything.
So, on the grand platform of the multimillionaires' sporting life, we have Anderson, a teenager gifted enough to make the pinnacle; we have Ronaldo who has been there, done it, and needs surgical help to defy injury; and we have Maldini, the model of perseverance.
But the game is not only for the gods. On Saturday, not a 40-minute car ride from Manchester, two players were experiencing the day of their relatively unsung lives. Brian Howard and Luke Steele are not well known in English circles, much less the global platform that soccer commands. Yet Howard, by scoring the injury-time winner that gave Barnsley a 2-1 victory at Liverpool, and Steele making save after save against the renowned Liverpool strikers, savored one of the biggest shocks of FA Cup history.
Howard and Steele will not thank me for pointing this out, but, at 25 and 23, respectively, they are in sporting mid-life. Most men, the Maldini inspiration apart, get a decade at the top of their form.
Some, like Howard and Steele, get one great night on which to carve their name. Howard, the Barnsley club captain, summed it up succinctly.
"This is fairy tale stuff," he said. "I'm going to enjoy it for a long time, the rest of my life in fact. People were ready to die for the cause out there, they were chucking themselves at everything."
His goalkeeper, Steele, certainly threw everything in the way of Liverpool. Yet Steele is a journeyman goalkeeper who has known rejection early in his time, and could not a week ago have dared share the dream of Howard.
The goalkeeper had once, half a career ago, been apprenticed to Manchester United. More recently, he has played lower league soccer and, indeed, he was only an understudy at that. On Wednesday, however, he got the call from Barnsley, a team in goalkeeper crises because its No. 1 was injured and its reserve, having played elsewhere, cannot play in the competition.
Steele got the strangest phone call of his life. Would he be interested in playing for Barnsley as a stopgap, a short-term loan deal? he was asked. Oh, and was he up for a game at Anfield, one of the homes of world soccer?
"I'd never been to Barnsley before, and I still haven't played there," Steele mused on Saturday.
That is why the FA Cup is sometimes described as one man's magic, another's misfortune. The result will have dire consequences for Liverpool's coach, Rafael Benítez, unless he can turn around his team and his reputation in the next match.
All he has to do is produce a master plan to beat Inter Milan, the team running away with the Italian league championship. The game is at Anfield on Tuesday, it is in the Champions League, and in part it is the reason why Liverpool was so vulnerable to the lower league team Barnsley.
Benítez had gambled and lost in the FA Cup. He thought he could leave out his goalkeeper, Pepe Reina, his driving force, Steven Gerrard, his goal scorer, Fernando Torres, and take good care of Barnsley. He failed, and the American owners of Liverpool, having already undermined the coach by offering his job to Jürgen Klinsmann behind his back, will be getting edgy feet.
The Americans may or may not be considering another offer from Dubai to buy out their ownership. But the price might go down if Liverpool is eliminated twice in one week from cup competitions.
Yet Benitez, a Spaniard, is more European than he ever could be English. He is a cunning tactician in the Champions League, as his record of taking Valencia and then Liverpool to three finals of the most lucrative tournament on earth demonstrates.
Somehow, the straight forward nature of England's competition, the sheer aggression allied to fighting spirit, seems complicated for Benitez while plotting a route to beat the best on earth comes within his radar.
What he lacks is a squad of proven reserves. What Saturday showed is that Manchester United has such depth, and it showed from the first minute.
That was when Anderson, full name Anderson Luis de Abreu Oliveira, brushed aside Cesc Fabregas, the Arsenal play-maker. It was a breathtaking moment: Anderson had the ball, Fabregas attempted to challenge him, and was brushed off like a fly.
So strong is Anderson, so gifted, and so adventurous that he was able to caress the ball with a deft flick of his foot while sturdily deflecting Fabregas's tackle. And Fabregas, remember, is the 20-year-old who is wanted by Barcelona, wanted by Real Madrid, wanted by just about any club in the big league of global buyers.
Such is their attention that Arsenal intends to renegotiate his contract. It reportedly pays the boy from Barcelona £50,000, or $100,000, per week, guaranteed until 2014. The new deal, expected to be inked this summer, would extend that to 2016, and increase the weekly salary to £80,000.
In the forum where a few big clubs are making tens of millions every week, Fabregas is more often than not quite fabulous in performance. But on Saturday, he was brush-stroked off the pitch by Anderson, and by the 21-year-old Portuguese winger Nani and the 22-year-old English bull, Wayne Rooney.
The scary thing for watching opponents is that Anderson and Nani are newcomers to a squad that may not need their skills when they play the Champions League in Lyon on Wednesday. Arsenal, however, will need everything it has against AC Milan the same night.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/17/sports/SOCCER.php
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