Show Messi out wide... and scream HELP!
GRAEME LE SAUX IS ON THE MALLORCA BOARD AND HAS OVERSEEN BACK-TO-BACK PROMOTIONS. NOW HE HAS A PLAN TO STOP BARCA TONIGHT
MALLORCA have no fit left-backs for tonight’s game against Barcelona. There is one specialist at the club, but he retired 15 years ago and these days he’s one of the directors, advising the American consortium that owns the club.
‘I’ve put my name forward but they still haven’t replied,’ Graeme Le Saux says laughing at the prospect of having to mark Lionel Messi this evening.
On the basis of where the club was when he joined in 2017 and where they are now, the 51-year-old appears to be thriving in his new role.
When the former Chelsea, Blackburn, Southampton and England defender first joined the Mallorca board three seasons ago the club was struggling in the unglamorous third tier.
‘There was one team we played against and the ball was cleared and ended up in the community swimming pool,’ he says, illustrating life outside the top two Spanish divisions.
After two straight promotions the club are back in the top flight and have already beaten Real Madrid at home this season.
While a football pundit on NBC, Le Saux got to know Robert Sarver, the owner of basketball team Phoenix Suns, who went on to buy Mallorca. It was when the club was relegated to the third tier that Le Saux was hired by Steve Nash, NBA great and an associate of Sarver.
‘I happened to be in California with my wife and our two children when he called me and said: “We really want you to get involved and help us build a culture of success at the club”,’ he says.
Sarver, Nash and former tennis player Andy Kohlberg, who is club president, all knew of Le Saux’s fondness for Mallorca, the island he’s been visiting regularly for almost 20 years.
The challenge of growing something in spite of limited finances appealed. ‘When you are a small club you know that every €100,000 is significant. We can’t just throw money at things,’ he says.
‘I saw in Spanish paper Marca that Real Madrid had spent €400million on Under-21 players in ten years. It’s a staggering amount to spend on one category. You look at that and then you look at our budget and there are clearly different ways of doing things.
‘Our gold standards are teams that have blazed that trail before us, like Eibar in Spain or Sheffield United, who have achieved a lot in a very short period.’ Would mid-90s Blackburn also work as a role model for Mallorca? ‘More now than ever I appreciate the level I got to, and the people I was around at Blackburn,’ he says. ‘We were an inexperienced group that reached the Premier League and we were fourth, second and first in three seasons. And it wasn’t purely based on money. It was about the attitude we showed on a daily basis. ‘Kenny (Dalglish) wouldn’t let people get away with anything he considered sloppy, not even a throw-in in training. If it was awkward to control, he would disproportionately lose the plot. That was the standard he set.’ He laughs at the memory and immediately comes up with an off-pitch parallel at Mallorca. ‘I noticed the canteen staff did all the clearing away. The players would come in, eat, get up and go. I said: “This isn’t a restaurant. We need a couple of trolleys, plates here, knives and forks there”. These are little things that mean a huge amount. It’s about respect and taking responsibility. ‘Maybe the players are going: “Who does he think he is?” but those things are important in terms of creating a mindset.’ Having won promotion, the battle now is staying up. Mallorca are third from bottom with 11 games left but are a point from safety, and that win over Real is a reminder of what they can do. ‘I can’t imagine any of them thought they’d ever be playing against Real, let alone beat them,’ Le Saux says of the players, many of whom have been at the club during the last two promotions. Playing Barcelona earlier in the season at the Nou Camp was a little more grounding as Messi scored a hat-trick in a 5-2 win. So how would he have stopped Messi, back in the day?
‘I would do everything to stop him using his left foot,’ he says. ‘If I’m playing left-back and he’s playing on the right, and he comes in-field, I would over-exaggerate and try to force him to the side of the pitch… while screaming for help!
‘You can’t let Messi get up to speed because when he is dribbling with the ball at pace, you are falling over backwards because he’s got so much agility. You have to try to slow him and then get help from midfield.
‘But he’s unplayable, so even if you do all that right, it’s probably still 70-30 in his favour.’
Did he ever play with anyone close to Messi’s level? ‘Gianfranco Zola had some of those qualities,’ he says. ‘He was bought by Napoli to replace Diego Maradona, so you know you’re in the right ballpark saying him!’
Zola, not unlike Messi physically, played alongside Le Saux at Chelsea until he was 36. Does that mean we have three more years of Messi, who turns 33 this month?
Fortunately, he’s not had a big injury which makes a huge difference to the tail end of a player’s career. And his role is adapting and changing. There aren’t many teams that will carry a player gradually as he is less active out of possession than he was.’
Back in Mallorca’s world, not knowing what division they will be in next season adds to the financial uncertainty created by the pandemic. ‘It’s difficult trying to future-proof your squad for what might happen against a very tight budget,’ says Le Saux.
He will be key in that process, having just played a part in hiring a new director of football, Pablo Ortells, a job some believed he might have taken himself.
‘I’m not fluent in Spanish, so that’s a disadvantage,’ he says. ‘I lean on my wife — she’s Argentinian — to help me but I’m not sure that would work around the negotiating table: “I’m just going to get my wife!” Maybe it would, she’s a brilliant negotiator!
‘My role is to be a conduit from the board and ownership to the football side. I always said when I was playing that there was so much tension, such a big chasm, between the business of football and the playing side.
‘Ken Bates would always separate those two things and players were not seen as capable of getting involved. It’s a case of finding people that can operate in a boardroom but also put on a pair of boots and operate on the pitch.’
The mention of putting on boots brings us back to the defensive injury crisis. But Le Saux is looking at the bigger picture. ‘If we can create a good La Liga team that everyone is proud of and that represents the island, then that will be a great achievement.’