Underrated and under-acclaimed, Yaya deserves the send-off of legends
PEP GUARDIOLA has promised to give Yaya Toure the send-off he deserves on Wednesday night.
Good. As fundamental as he was to Manchester City’s emergence as a footballing superpower, Toure also played a significant role in Guardiola’s managerial career.
To be in the Stadio Olimpico last Wednesday was to be reminded, among many other things, of Barcelona’s 2009 triumph over Manchester United in the Champions League Final.
Toure was deployed as a centre-half by Guardiola (above) and was excellent in a 2-0 win that capped Pep’s breakthrough season.
Guardiola’s relationship with the player, though, has clearly been soured by Toure’s agent.
It is obvious that the City manager and Dimitri Seluk do not get on. Seluk speaks his mind and it has never gone down well at City, or with the wider audience.
Of the various things he has been pilloried for, Seluk’s ‘race’ comments in 2014 were particularly derided.
He said Toure would win more individual awards if he was white. In City’s title-winning season of 2013-14, Toure scored 20 Premier League goals.
The top individual awards that season – the Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year and the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year – went to Luis Suarez.
Hard to argue with that. In the PFA voting, second place went to Eden Hazard. In the FWA voting, second place went to Steven Gerrard.
Toure was head and shoulders above any other midfielder that season but failed to win even a Player of the Month award.
Unlike Connor Wickham of Sunderland.
Yet that should be little surprise. Toure has never won a Player of the Month award in England. Gerrard won six. Four times Toure was African Footballer of the Year. His continent has saluted him, if others have not.
Did that come down to a form of racism, as his agent implied?
It is a claim hard to corroborate.
George Weah remains the only African to be named World Player of the Year, but it is impossible to argue with any of the recipients, hard to knock the domination of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi for the past 10 years.
But since Weah was given the Ballon d’Or in 1995, no African player has featured in the top three. Not Yaya in his pomp. Not Didier Drogba in his pomp.
Maybe no African player has been good enough to feature in the top three for the past 22 years.
There will surely be one in the 2018 Ballon d’Or.
What is for sure is that African players, black African players, have been stereotyped.
They are not the only ones, but their stereotyping has been the most obvious. Only on Friday, Tony Henry – West Ham’s former director of player recruitment – was charged for saying African players “have a bad attitude” and “cause mayhem” when they are not in the team. On a routine basis, wittingly or not, emphasis is placed on African players’ physical power, strength, speed, athleticism or muscularity. A wonderfully skilful player, Toure makes a mockery of the misconceptions and the casual pigeonholing. He will leave City with a convincing case to be acclaimed as the best player in the football club’s history. He will leave, for whatever reason, as one of the English game’s most underrated, under acclaimed performers. The promised send-off cannot be grateful enough.