Graham's Blog

My chat with Harry Redknapp went on a bit, so we had to split it. Here’s the first half – extraordinary tales from an extraordinary life in football, including the dumbest move West Ham ever made; how not to sign Ian Wright; and what happens when you pull a fast one on Barry Fry.

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One of the more disappointing things in this business is the reasonably regular amount of times when you meet a player who’s been given the talent you’d have loved to make a footballing career out of and he either doesn’t actually like the game or isn’t aware of the massive good fortune he’s had.

And then there are guys like Darren Fletcher.

No sooner did we put up The Big Interview with this guy who played nearly 350 times for Manchester United than I got a message from Frank Cameron on Twitter (@rathersheepish) with the outlandish claim that he’d bumped into Darren in Oporto back in 2004 during the European Championships, when Italy were about to play Sweden.

Now the Frankster reckoned that he’d met the guy who’d win Fergie’s total admiration plus a handful of Premier League titles, the World Club Cup, the FA Cup and the League Cup (for evidence of how much that mattered to Darren just listen on to the podcast) dressed in a full leg plaster, his kilt and an Alex Del Piero top.

BackPage already know that’s the kind of thing I’d do, and I like to hang around with similarly eccentric people but …. Darren?

So I checked it out with him and when he’d stopped laughing at the memory he confirmed that it was word for word correct.

I guess it fits with the opening anecdote in the Big Interview with Mr F. We talk about him using some of that horrid time when he was out of the game and fighting back to health to go and follow United with their fans at City. “Did you sing?” I asked. No doubt about the answer there either. “Ohhhh… Yes!”

Maybe I should have intuited all this.

Again when Darren was still in his recuperation phase, he nipped over to the Camp Nou to watch Barcelona v Real Madrid with me in a massively entertaining Copa Del Rey tie (his first Clásico) and then subjected himself to a night out (featuring Aurelio Capaldi, Santi Ezquerro Jorge Messi and Jimmy Bullard – how’s that for a five-a-side team?)

He’s mad passionate about football. He loves it to its bones.

Never mind hell in a handcart, Darren will travel to Portugal in a plaster-cast to watch Del Piero, and away to City with the United fans to watch ‘his’ team because he was missing being a supporter, plus he’ll fly over to Barcelona just to sample that great Xavi-Messi-Iniesta era at first hand.

I like that. A lot.

People – he’s US! But with talent!

He’s always known, long before getting ill, how lucky he is to not only be gifted at football but intelligent about it, too.

I think there are some misconceptions about this guy – many of which stem from the fact that he’s smart, well mannered, honest, and a real gent.

My two main suspicions are that, because  it was easy for the eye to be drawn to Giggs or Scholes it was thus easy for some people not to watch Darren closely and to fail to understand how fantastically he complemented their work.

Fans and journalists like to wax lyrical about how a team ‘clicks’. How it’s fabulous to see all the working parts smoothly blending together to make a powerful, exciting whole. Yet when one of those components does a job which makes those around him better, greater, I think it can be too easy to fail to spot it. Or appreciate it.

More, I think that if Darren hadn’t chosen to play the way he did, in order to ‘click’ with those around him, he’d have been able to prove that he’s a rampaging, attacking footballer who was able to go box to box, who had more goals in his boots than he was allowed  to show and who also had the judgement about when to go, when to stay and how to pass to an extremely high level.

One of the anecdotes not in this podcast stemmed from me having lunch with Juan Sebastian Veron in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. “Send Darren a big hug from me,” Veron made me promise. “Great guy, smart footballer.”

DF told me that when he first saw Veron and Scholes playing one and two-touch football in the United dressing room he asked himself: “How am I going to get in this team?” But he did. Over and over again. And won big respect from Keane, Veron and from Fergie.

The other thing I reckon people get way wrong about Darren is that because he’s a kind, mannerly, articulate sort that, perhaps, he’s ‘just’ a nice guy. He’s both mentally and physically tough, he’s brutally determined to win and I’d bet you a million dollars that it was as unpleasant as hell to play against him.

He’d hunt you down all over the pitch like a Pinkerton Detective in football boots (®Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).

Top footballer, top man, great guest on the Big Interview.

Watch this space – one day you’ll see Darren Fletcher managing Manchester United to the Premier League title.

Stand on me.

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