=Jan.26:Nytimes.com
Juan Mata and Radamel Falcao are players of international
renown. Their paths have crossed before, and in a perfect world, the Spaniard
and the Colombian would now be looking forward to representing their countries
at the World Cup in Brazil
in June and potentially meeting again.
The world is not perfect, even for soccer’s elite.
Mata has lost the better part of half of this current season
because he fell out of favor with his London
club, Chelsea. He was
perfectly healthy. His attitude had not changed. He had not lost his skills or
his appetite to play, and the fans had voted him their Player of the Year for the
past two seasons.
But Mata spent from August until now mostly on the bench.
José Mourinho, who returned to Chelsea
as manager last year, changed the team’s tactical approach, and Mata became at
best a substitute.
He was sold for 37 million pounds, or about $61 million,
plus salary, to Manchester United on
Saturday.
That, to date, became the most expensive move in the January
transfer window that still has a week to go.
Falcao was sold for even more money, a reported
$80-million-plus transfer fee, when he left Atlético Madrid
for Monaco
last summer. He was adjusting to the new league, the new life, until his left
knee buckled under the weight of a clumsy challenge during a French Cup match
last Wednesday.
He underwent surgery in Portugal on Saturday. In what
became a very public aftermath to that operation, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel
Santos, posed for photographs with him at his bedside.
Falcao’s surgeon confirmed that the operation to repair a
tear in the anterior cruciate ligament had gone as well as could be expected.
“I’m going to exaggerate a little, but I think he’ll have a 50 percent chance
of going,” the surgeon, Dr. José Carlos Noronha, said, according to Reuters.
“We must go step by step, and within three and a half months we’ll be able to
say something more sure.”
Pressed by the assembled reporters and TV crews, the doctor
said more. He said that every patient recovers at a different pace. That the
surgery entailed a graft onto the torn tissue. That anterior cruciate ligament
injuries cannot be rushed. But, Noronha concluded, “The light at the end of the
tunnel isn’t small.”
Falcao — called El Tigre, or the Tiger — burst out when he
was a mere 13 years and 199 days old, playing with the players on his Colombian
team, Lanceros Boyacá. Even then, he was quick and brave, and he would go for
the main chance — the goal — no matter the odds against him.
We have gotten to know Falcao’s opportunism at the highest
level since then. He moved from Colombia
to River Plate in Argentina.
And then to Porto in 2009, which, combined
with the fact that his agent is Portuguese, was why he knew and trusted the
surgeon there.
Porto sold him in 2011 to Atlético Madrid, where he scored at a phenomenal
rate. Not the least of those goals was the hat trick that he scored in August
2012 in the U.E.F.A. Super Cup against Chelsea,
which at the time was the European champion.
A few months earlier, Mata had set up Didier Drogba’s tying
goal late in regulation in the Champions League final. Falcao had scored time
and again as his teams, first Porto and then
Atlético, won Europa League trophies. And after their game in Monaco, Chelsea
owner Roman Abramovich strongly tried to buy Falcao and put him on the end of
Mata’s fine crosses.
It never happened. Falcao had long been a player owned by a
complicated arrangement of clubs, of agents, of third parties. Chelsea, and
others, did not get a chance when Monaco, owned by another Russian
billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev, won the auction to buy him, helped in part by
the principality’s tax breaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment