Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WILF?
Swansea star set to seal £30m move to Man City
FROM a bootless young parent in the Ivory Coast to a £30million target for one of European football’s biggest clubs, via the Czech Republic, Holland and Wales. Wilfried Bony’s career path is one less travelled, but then this is a man who does nothing in a conventional manner.
That extends to his dress sense, nightclub conversations and sneezes, which his former Swansea colleague Michel Vorm recalled as being so loud they briefly halted work in the Liberty Stadium reception one day.
Vorm added that when “he gives you a play punch, he doesn’t realise that it really does hurt”. That’s the powerhouse of a striker who has made a far bigger mark on English football and who will soon achieve the dream he has long held of joining a Champions League club.
It’s the ambition that he has stated in numerous text messages to his countryman, friend and confidant, Didier Drogba – one that has driven him since he went eyeball to eyeball with his father as a 14-year-old to spell out his own plans for life.
Bony grew up as the eldest of three children in the Plateau area of Abidjan, in the south of the Ivory Coast. His father was a teacher and his mother, a black belt in judo, worked in administration.
They weren’t poor but they didn’t have much, which is why it was significant when, aged 14, Bony quit the expensive school in which his father had enrolled him two months earlier.
In an interview a year ago – Bony’s first with a British newspaper after his £12m move to Swansea in 2013 – the striker explained how badly the news went down.
He said: “My father paid for me to go to this school for a year but I said, ‘I don’t want that, I want to play football. Don’t pay anything’.
“He would say, ‘Go to school and after that you can play. There are other people, like doctors, who play football’.
“But I said, ‘Dad, no. Every- one has a destiny’. Man, he went f****** crazy. My mum helped me. She bought me boots, black boots, because I used to play without shoes. I used to hurt my feet.”
After falling out with his father, Bony joined an academy set up by Cyrille Domoraud, the former Ivory Coast defender who played for Inter and AC Milan.
Bony used to be a defender, but during one game the academy’s striker was injured and he took his place. Two goals gave Bony’s coach a brainwave. “He came up to me and said, ‘ You’re not a stopper any more’,” Bony recalled.
In 2006, aged 17, Bony joined his first professional club, Issia Wazi in the Ivory Coast, and a few months later was invited for a trial at Rafa Benitez’s Liverpool. They liked him but wanted to monitor him rather than offer a contract.
Having just had the second of his two sons – they and their mother live with him in Swansea – and with only a few more coins to his name, his instincts were finely tuned to providing instead of waiting. An offer was available to join Sparta Prague there and then, so Bony took it.
When he arrived, he saw snow for the first time and thought, “What the f*** is that?” By the time he left in 2008, Bony had learned fluent Czech, could ski and had scored 30 goals in 75 games.
He moved to Holland, where he hit 53 in 73 games for Vitesse Arnhem, and then he joined Swansea for an initial £12m and has scored 34 goals in 70 games.
It is believed there was a clash last summer between Bony’s representative and Swansea chairman Huw Jenkins, such was the former’s desire to capitalise on a 25-goal debut season with a transfer. Liverpool were keen.
Bony could have forced the issue but he has largely kept faith that Swansea would not stand in his way if a top club made an acceptable offer. That time is approaching, with a £100 000-a-week salary believed to have been agreed with champions Manchester City.
Certainly, Bony will not have sold himself short. But the greatest incentive, he has long claimed, is the desire “to show what I am”.
That person is a 26-year-old of huge intensity, who once said: “I have to be in control – at the end of the season I want to do this, after next season I want to do that. Goals, objectives. I know who can help me, who can’t help me. The people who can help, from the beginning I talk to them. If you help me, I help you.
“I am quite an intelligent guy and I like to use my power. In the disco or anywhere, I tell my teammates, ‘If you have time to put in a cross do it because you know I am good with my head. If I head the ball one time it can be a goal. If I am not there, it is my mistake’. I have absolute belief in myself.”
That extends to believing he can play for the best clubs in Europe. “Every player wants to play Champions League football,” said Bony this week. “When you get that opportunity you go on, or not.”
Drogba reinforces the mes- sage with texts that read: “Don’t let anyone destroy your objectives.”
Bony tends to reply: “I will never let anyone destroy my objectives.” So far he has been true to his word. – Daily Mail