Posts Tagged ‘Zest For Life’

When West Ham United’s players report for training Thursday, they will have a new mentor. Their previous coach, Alan Curbishley, quit last week, claiming the club’s Icelandic owners and Italian sporting director kept him out of the loop when buying and selling players.

Curbishley is a local man reared on the traditions of West Ham in London’s dockland. The Hammers’ kindergarten shaped fine young professionals – Curbishley himself, and before him Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, and subsequently Trevor Brooking and Frank Lampard. The club’s ethos was the closest London gets to Brazil. The ball is played on the turf, and moved with a sense of artistry, not merely clubbed into the air the way an English football used to be.

If West Ham’s new coach is the man we all expect to be announced Thursday, some of that romance has a chance of being revived. Gianfranco Zola is back in town. He is in contention for the coaching role at West Ham, although the club had been sifting through 30 applicants and narrowing down the search to such candidates as Slaven Bilic, currently the Croatian national coach, Roberto Donadoni, recently fired by Italy, and Michael Laudrup, the Dane who is heading for Moscow as the new Spartak coach.

Why would Zola, once a fabulous player but with no practical experience in club team management, head that list?

Because West Ham’s decision makers have talked to him, twice. And because once you are in Zola’s company, you feel a zest for life, for his beloved sport, for the challenge of taking size and stature out of the equation.

Of all the players who came to England over the past decade, Zola, at 1.66 meters, a shade over 5-foot-5, would be the smallest. Of all the foreigners who influenced the English, who inspired a fresh passion for the craft, I would place Zola at the top. He gave work ethic a good name. I struggle to recall one match in which he played for Chelsea and did not leave a mark on the performance, a smile on the face of the game.

Born in Sardinia in July 1966, the month Bobby Moore led England to World Cup triumph, Zola is a product of his own personality and his unremitting desire to make physical force irrelevant. He learned tricks as an apprentice to Diego Maradona down in Naples; he was ushered out of Italy by the intransigence of Carlo Ancelotti when, as coach to Parma, that Italian had a rigid team structure that considered Zola too small, too unpredictable, too free-spirited. Ancelotti has since learned to relax the reins sufficiently for many triumphs at AC Milan.

Zola was chosen, at 30, by Chelsea’s manager then, Ruud Gullit. The giant Gullit and the manikin Zola opened the door for floods of overseas players by the way they showed the English that there are so many ways to the end product.

Yes, they won matches, and trophies. None sticks in my memory more than the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1998, when Chelsea beat VfB Stuttgart in Stockholm. Zola probably should not have played. He had a two-centimeter tear in an abdominal muscle, but begged to sit on the bench in case he was needed. He was, and barely 22 seconds after being summoned to leave his seat, he darted as quick as a lizard between the Stuttgart defenders.

Zola tricked men with his subtle imagination, then scored with real venom. “It wasn’t planned,” he told us afterward.

“In the moment, I used my positive strength and I got a reward for passion, also for the work that not only I but the masseur Mimmo Pezza did together in Rimini,”

where he trained to make the final.

“I thank this man for a beautiful moment which will be in my heart for as long as I can remember,”

he said.

No one can be sure Zola’s rare qualities will translate from playing to management. But it promises to be an engaging experiment.

By The Herald Tribune

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This post was submitted by The Herald Tribune.