STICKY TIMES
Roberto MartÃnez is 41 but it is believed that his seventh birthday party is still in progress somewhere in Catalonia, where a gaggle of bearded, straggly-haired and desperately weary guests have not yet reached the end of the Byzantine game of Pass the Parcel designed by their host. Of course, MartÃnez himself had to retire early from that game in order to give interviews to his school magazine, the parish bulletin, a pair of chatty hairdressers and everyone in the area with a functioning public address system, which, as it turned out, amounted to two stationmasters and a popular ice cream man, Señor Flake.
In each interview MartÃnez exuded his usual positivity. Indeed, if you were to ask him even now about the epic ongoing parcel circulation at his childhood home, he would no doubt hail the character of his haggard former playmates, who have remained committed to a passing philosophy even after layer after layer after layer after after layer after layer after layer after layer after layer after layer of unwrapped paper revealed just another layer of paper.
Or maybe not. Maybe some long-suffering, middle-aged Spanish version of Romelu Lukaku has finally had a word with MartÃnez. The Belgian sometime goal-getter, you see, has disclosed that he and several of his Everton team-mates banded together during the half-time break in Tuesday’s night FA Cup tryst with West Ham to plead with the manager to allow them to get to the point more quickly. “We all said to the manager: ‘Can we play a bit more direct sometimes?’” explained Lukaku, who as a result of the tweaked tactics hit a late equaliser against West Ham to end a streak of four defeats in a row for Everton. “We have a style of play where we keep the ball a lot but knew we needed to take more responsibility, play to my strengths more, and they did it perfectly,” added the striker.
While some see Lukaku’s revelation as evidence of rising dissedence against MartÃnez, the manager himself views it as a good thing. That is no surprise from a guy who could probably find positives amid the annihilation of earth by fire-breathing extra-terrestrial monsters but, in fairness, an ability to assimilate pertinent recommendations from underlings is a trait of a shrewd manager, whereas an inability to do so is a trait of the Fiver editor. “I’m always talking with the players and we try to prepare game to game and we always share a lot of information,” chirped MartÃnez, who stressed that he and his players are in regular consultation. It is surely only a matter of time before someone dares to put forward the notion of not defending like MartÃnez’s Wigan any more.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jan/08/the-annihilation-of-earth-by-fir
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