SORRY THIS WADDLE IS TWADDLE!
CHRIS DUNLAVY reviews Chris Waddles’ damning assessment and make his own evaluation of David Beckham
CAN I list 1,000 Premier League players better than David Beckham? Jesus man, I probably couldn’t list 1,000 Premier League players of any variety.
So how Chris Waddle can reasonably claim that the former England skipper wouldn’t rank in the best 1,000 players of the last 40 years is beyond me. The man must have a memory as long as his mullet.
“I would say he has been a good player, but I wouldn’t put him down as a great,” said Waddle. “You can go down a list of players from the Premier League or the 70s or 80s, whatever you want to do. And I’ll be honest – Beckham probably wouldn’t be in the first 1,000.”
Predictably, this led to a tumult of outrage. “If someone finds the plot, can they please forward it to Chris Waddle as he appears to have lost it” tweeted one angry punter, adding the hashtag ‘plonker’ for emphasis.
“Chris Waddle is trying to prove he’s not in the top 1,000 football pundits,” said another. And so on.
Now that the bile has bubbled back to a simmer, we are left with two questions: Why did Waddle make such a claim? And was he right?
As is standard practice, let’s tackle the last question first. Is Beckham better than a thousand top-flight players since 1970?
Without a team of researchers, complex algorithms and plenty of arguments, it is obviously impossible to say. Football is objective, and 40 years is a long time.
Yet there is, without question, plenty of merit in the argument that Beckham was “not a great”.
Aside from when he stepped up to take a free-kick, Beckham would never have you on the edge of your seat.
Even then, he was no Pierre Van Hooijdonk or Juninho Pernambucano, the era’s undisputed set-piece kings. He missed a hell of a lot.
He didn’t have the elegant grace or imagination of Zidane, he couldn’t torture a full-back like Cristiano Ronaldo. Nor did Beckham – bar that one wonderful night against Greece – have the totemic, galvanising presence of Stephen Gerrard, Brian Robson or Roy Keane. Goals? Sure, he’d chip in. But he was no Frank Lampard, whose tally of 166 Premier League goals may never be surpassed by another midfielder.
If you were choosing an all-time Premier League XI, he wouldn’t be on the pitch. He might not even be on the bench.
Indeed, hidden in the shadows beneath the Waddle’s neon outburst was a fairly adroit assessment of the Beckham’s career.
“I think there have been a lot more talented players in the world,” added Waddle, who won 62 caps for England. “He never had a trick, wasn’t particularly quick, but he was very good at set-pieces and deliveries, he made chances and made goals and was fantastic for clubs. He made the most of what he has got.”
Even Beckham would not dispute that.Yet this is a man who was twice runner-up in the FIFA World Player of the Year award.Who won a European Cup, multiple titles in four different countries and more England caps than any outfield player in history.
Medals aren’t everything. John O’Shea got a ton of them at Manchester United but he wasn’t better than Georgi Kinkladze. But set against such achievements, are there really 1,000 players better than Beckham? I’ve got to say no.
Yes, Beckham was average at a lot of things. But he was magnificent at others. In an era when English players are derided for technical failings, the 38-year-old had continental class.
Can you remember him taking a poor first touch? Or panicking in possession? Or misplacing a simple ball? You can’t, because he didn’t.
It sounds simple, the kind of stuff they teach at juniors. But these were the elementary mistakes that so often made England look clumsy and brainless at major tournaments.
When a ball plummets from the sky towards Wayne Rooney, you wince. Will it stick? Or will it turn into a 50 pence piece and careen 10 yards up the pitch?
When someone smashed a hopeful howitzer at Beckham, you sat back, safe in the knowledge that he would always turn s**t into gold.
Nor would Beckham, for all his passing mastery, ever hit the Hollywood ball just for the hell of it. Where others would instinctively look for the big man, Beckham would look for the right man.
“You look at his passing and he makes it
look so easy,” said former England boss Graham Taylor. “When he passes the ball, it always seems to go where he wants it to go. That sounds simple, but believe me, it is not.”
People disparage his lifestyle, moaning that he chased celebrity and wealth. But the fancy pants and the Spice Girl wife never stopped him grafting his nuts off for every team in every game.
He always answered the call for England, always applauded the fans at the end. He did the charity work, loved helping kids. Some would say that doesn’t make him a better player, but I’d disagree. It showed he cared, and that he tried.
In a similar vein, some have suggested he only got a game to sell shirts. Maybe this was partly true at Real or PSG. But Alex Ferguson would have no truck with marketing men choosing his team. Beckham played for Manchester United on merit, and kept out plenty of world-class players in the process.
So what motivated Waddle’s whinge? In the rush to rubbish the former Newcastle, Spurs and Marseille winger, many have compared him unfavourably with old Goldenballs. This, though, is both irrelevant and wrong.
Waddle was one of the most gifted English players of his or indeed any generation, able to beat a man with sleight of foot or a shimmy of the shoulders. Just ask legendary Italian left-back Paolo Maldini, who put the former sausage maker behind Maradona as the toughest player he ever faced.
“I found it very difficult to play against Chris Waddle,” he said in 2000. “He had a good career, but it could have been much better. He was physically strong, with good feet and great imagination. It was always hard to work out what he was going to do.”
Waddle is perfectly placed to criticise Beckham. Like Becks, he was a tremendous technician who lacked searing pace. He won titles abroad (Marseille voted him their second greatest player
of the century), played in a European Cup final and, of course, made the World Cup semi-finals with England. He has earned the right to an opinion.
But you know what? I don’t think he meant it. I think Waddle just got in a tangle with his maths.
You see, 1,000 players doesn’t sound like a lot over 40 years. But when you
I don’t think he meant it. I think Waddle just got in a tangle with his maths
break it down, it really is.
For argument’s sake, let’s say someone who plays for a side in the top four is a ‘good’ player. Of those, maybe ten will be ‘great’. That’s 40 great players per season. Now, 40 multiplied by 40 gives you 1,600 great players. But this number is nonsense because almost all of those 40 players will play in multiple seasons.
As a conservative estimate (given that, say, Ryan Giggs has been playing for 23 years), let’s halve that 1,600 to give us 800 ‘great players’ in the last 40 years. Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Did Chris Waddle really mean that David Beckham wouldn’t have been in the top ten players of any top-four side since 1970? Of course not. He just picked a number out of the sky. So let’s cut the guy some slack. After all, he only savaged Beckham by accident.