GRAND TOURE
BIG HOPES I’LL MAKE PELE DREAM COME TRUE Drugs ban still haunts my family
IF a return to football seems ages away, spare a thought for the frayed patience of Pele.
In 1977 the Brazilian superstar predicted an African team would win the World Cup. He reckoned it would be before 2000. Instead the wait will now be at least 45 years until Qatar 2022.
But former Celtic coach Kolo Toure thinks he knows why it has not happened yet – no African nation have had the right manager.
Now he is working hard to be the trailblazer who finally makes Pele right.
The former Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool
BY MATTHEW DUNN defender is currently learning his trade as assistant to Brendan Rodgers at Leicester having made the journey from Celtic Park to the Midlands when the Northern Irishman upped sticks last season. Despite playing under legendary bosses Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola, Toure is taking nothing for granted and is studying for his UEFA Pro Licence at St George’s Park. He said: “If you want to bring the best to the players you have to learn the best philosophy of football playing. “You have to learn the best way to coach players. “Some of my friends who have been playing maybe haven’t thought of that.
“But I want to do it because I think Africa needs that, Africa needs people who can inspire them.
“There always has to be one person to start – and then the rest will follow.”
As a player Toure was one of the early African imports to the Premier League when he signed for Arsenal in 2002.
“If you do things right they will always think, ‘Kolo Toure comes from the Ivory Coast and he’s doing well’, and they will go and find new talent there.
“After me so many players from the Ivory Coast came here to express their talent. I was very proud of that.”
Up till now though African teams at the World Cup finals have been managed generally by foreigners.
Aside from the countries on the Mediterranean coast, who do tend to appoint coaches internally, only five of the 27 other African teams to compete in the finals had a coach from the continent.
Toure said: “For all the knowledge of the coach coming in you have to know the African player.
“People are more relaxed and timing is not so very, very important. You have to go there and make sure every detail is dealt with.
“If you don’t nail things back there you will miss something at the end.
“It may be you need to maybe put an extra discipline on them.
“Of course you want them to express themselves but you have to make sure that you tell them things in the right moment and at the right time.”
If anybody has the charisma to carry it off it’s Toure who has won over fans wherever he has played.
And then there is that “Kolo, Kolo” song, sung wherever he played including Parkhead – even though he only made 20 playing appearances for the Hoops.
Toure said: “It touches my heart. When you come to another country and the people embrace you, give you praise and even sing your name?
“It is unbelievable – 15 years ago if somebody had told me, ‘Kolo – people will be singing your name everywhere in the UK,’ I would say, ‘Are you joking, or what?’ “This is a dream for me.” And managing the Ivory Coast to a World Cup Final is just his next one.
THE drugs blunder that saw Kolo Toure banned for six months still haunts his young family even now.
The former Celtic defender recently had to comfort his 15-year-old daughter after a boy at school mocked her before a race and said: “We’ll have to test you because your dad took drugs.”
Toure, now 38, failed a test in 2011 after taking water tablets given to him by his wife.
He said: “I was shocked to fail but the thing that hurt a lot more is my daughter recently came to me and said to me, ‘Dad, you took drugs?’
“I said to her, ‘No, no, darling, it’s NOT drugs. In the football world when people say drugs it can just mean something that is banned.
“‘It’s not cocaine or anything like that’.
“A boy at school made a comment to her. I told her not to worry about it but I felt like I had hurt her a little bit. That’s the bad side of it.”