Old-Fashioned Values Paul Scholes 14th OCTOBER 2009

Frankly speaking....

OLD-FASHIONED VALUES

Paul Scholes doesn’t look like a modern superstar footballer, does he? In fact, if you did a clever Photoshop job and put him in an old-fashioned shirt he could have come straight off the pages of a Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly from the fifties.

 I once met Paul Scholes. It was at Manchester Airport on a Sunday in 2002. I was flying off on holiday with my family to Malta and he was on the same flight with his family. It was the day of the World Cup Final and in fact the game took place while we were in the air. He had only just returned from Japan a few days earlier following England’s elimination in the quarter -final. One of my daughters, aged nine at the time, approached him and asked for his autograph. He was pleasant and more than happy to oblige. Later, as were going through the hand luggage check alongside each other, I thanked him on my daughter’s behalf. His smile as he said, ‘No problem’ , was genuine and seemed like that of one family man to another. On the plane he flew in economy, a row in front of me and throughout the flight was an attentive father to his quite young and demanding children. At one stage, just before we landed, the captain came through on the intercom to tell us that Brazil had beaten Germany in the final. I watched Scholes at the time and he hardly reacted. He seemed to be in family mode.

I have always liked Paul Scholes. He can’t tackle and he does play for a team whose wealth makes it so far removed from Norwich City that at times it seems hard to credit the fact that I’ve actually seen The Canaries win at Old Trafford, but he just seems like a decent bloke. The sort of bloke I’d like to think plays for my club. Two or three years after I went to Malta I got invited to a game at Old Trafford by a mate and we had tickets near the tunnel. As the teams ran out Scholes turned and waved directly at someone in the family enclosure to my left. I looked across and there was his ginger-headed son (presumably one of the little charges he looked after so well on the plane) grinning and waving back to his dad. It was a great moment. Seventy thousand people there, and in amongst it a father waving to his son.  I imagined the lad at school the next day (‘What did you do last night?’ ‘Oh, not much. I just went to watch my dad play football’.)

Closer to home, one of the things I liked most about Iwan Roberts’s autobiography ‘All I Want For Christmas’ was that he, too, came across as an ordinary, decent bloke. The sort of bloke I want to go and support on a Saturday afternoon. A man with a wife and kids, a car full of rubbish and who worries about his weight.

I just can’t think in the same way about Didier Drogba. Or Christiano Ronaldo. Or Emmanuel Adebayor, Joey Barton, Joleon Lescott, Sol Campbell, Lucas Neill, Gareth Barry, El Haj Diouf or Lee Bowyer to name but ten. OK times have changed since Jackie Milburn used to travel to the ground on the bus with the fans but players like Scholes and Roberts show that there is still a place in the modern game at professional level for ordinary blokes.

So what a treat it is now for us City fans to have Grant Holt as our new talisman. I haven’t met Holt and probably never will, but everything about him tells me he’s the right sort of man for my club. His interviews, always willingly given it seems, sound honest, open and fair. His performances display the same qualities and though he may never be an England international like Scholes, he will never give anything less than his best, which to me suggests that he appreciates the fact that he is lucky to be earning a good living from football. And we have a manager who seems solid, too. That quote when he said he was cautious about praising youngsters too much because he worries that if they get carried away they will soon be playing with their socks over their knees, wearing three earrings and driving a Mercedes was the comment of a man who is grounded, aware of what matters in the game and who will guide his charges well.

For me the most encouraging thing about the last two months since I sat at Carrow Road in disbelief on Saturday 8^th August is that the team seems somehow to have been reclaimed by ordinary blokes; we are seeing lads from our academy led on the field by a captain who embodies (dare I call them) old-fashioned values and fashioned by a manager in the same mould.  I, like many City fans, and indeed fans of so many clubs, have often been disappointed as my dreams of Norwich’s successes have been shattered. We always want the club to do so well, don’t we?  Now, though, I don’t just want success but for the first time in years, I actually think we deserve it. And that’s a good feeling.

I don’t know if he’s bothered about what Paul Lambert’s doing but I bet Paul Scholes would approve..