Richard Williams
Thank heavens for little boys who just
want to play football
Lassana Diarra chose to proclaim his intention to leave Arsenal on
the morning of last month's home match against Chelsea, a vital
fixture for which it would be fair to assume that every scrap of
the club's collective concentration was required. He did so in the
most noticeable manner available to a French sportsman, via an
interview in L'Equipe, and having read or been apprised of its
contents some of us sat around the press room at the Emirates
Stadium that afternoon concluding that the 22-year-old had made a
bit of a prat of himself.
After joining Arsenal in September, already he had grown
frustrated. The lack of opportunities coming his way repeated his
experience under Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, where he had found
himself behind Michael Essien and Mikel John Obi in the queue to
understudy Claude Makelele. "When I signed with Arsenal," he said,
"promises were made. But since the start of the season I've only
played in League Cup games, or in Champions League matches of no
significance. I'm not a player who's just come out of the academy
and I'm not happy to wait around for someone else to get injured or
suspended before I get my chance. It's a tiresome and dispiriting
situation."
Ah, le pauvre petit garçon! Why on earth, we asked each other, had
he not followed the example of Mathieu Flamini, his compatriot and
club-mate, who came to London from Marseille in 2004, at the age of
20, and endured three seasons of apparent neglect before making his
mark?
On several occasions Flamini had made noises about wanting to leave
the club, most notably after Arsène Wenger redeployed him as an
emergency left-back. His reward has come this season in the form of
a regular starting place in his favourite role as the team's
holding midfield player, at the expense not just of Diarra but of
the much more experienced Gilberto Silva - the current captain of
Brazil, no less. Couldn't Diarra see the lesson in that?
He couldn't. He persisted in demanding a move and last week joined
Portsmouth for an undisclosed fee believed to be at least twice the
£2m Arsenal paid Chelsea for his signature six months earlier.
Portsmouth, he said, knew the score: a clause in his new contract
said that, if he did well and another big club came in for him, he
could go. On Saturday he made his debut for Harry Redknapp and by
all accounts acquitted himself well in a 3-1 victory over
Derby.
It was while the move was being negotiated that I began to see
Diarra's point. As a child he was told by Nantes that he would
never be tall enough to make a professional footballer (he is 5ft
8in). At Le Mans, his next club as a junior, he was simply
neglected. Not until he got to Le Havre was he taken seriously and
once he had been given his chance he did well enough to earn a
couple of dozen Under-21 caps for France. Even at Chelsea, where he
had only nine league starts in two seasons, he impressed Raymond
Domenech enough to be given his first senior cap last March, and he
has now participated in nine of France's last 10 matches, most of
them as the replacement for perhaps the most effective specialist
holding midfield player the game has ever seen.
"He panicked a little bit," Wenger said when the move had gone
through, and for once the Arsenal manager got it wrong. Maybe
Chelsea and Arsenal do have better holding midfield players. But
Lassana Diarra, 22 years old, doesn't want to pick up a couple of
million quid a year, or whatever it might be, for sitting on the
bench and being tossed the consolation prize of a League Cup medal.
He wants more than the money and the flash cars and clothes and
girlfriends. He wants to play football and he wants to represent
his country at the Euro 2008 finals. And now some of us, having
come round to his point of view, will be cheering him on.
