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A few extra pounds never detracted from quality

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

One summer’s night in 1974, Jimmy Keaveney came out of retirement to rejoin the Dublin footballers. He wasn’t in the best shape of his life but Kevin Heffernan’s desperation for a free-taker meant aesthetics couldn’t factor into the decision. As Keaveney alighted from his car at Parnell Park that first evening, Robbie Kelleher was unimpressed. “Here we go,” recalled Kelleher in Tom Humphries’ “Dublin v Kerry, “one win and they’re bringing back the fatties from St. Vincent’s.” Without that particular fatty from Vincent’s, Heffo’s Army might never have left the parade ground.
Remind any Dub about the way Keaveney used to gather an incoming pass to his vast expanse of midriff and turn slowly before curling the ball between the posts on the Hill and he’ll smile broadly at the memory. Ask a Corkonian to recall days when the husky Seanie O’Leary used to lurk around the small square, plundering goals and he’ll be instantly transported to Thurles and Tipp in 1984. They won’t worry what either man might have scored on the dreaded bleep test. They’ll just grin fondly and search out photographs to offer the kids a glimpse of a time when the games weren’t the exclusive preserve of lean greyhounds.
Nobody is questioning the merits of the new fitness regimes, the benefits wrought from players checking the color of their urine or the worth of monitoring calorific intake. It’s just, well, don’t you kind of miss the larger players? Call them heavyset, thickset, anything but fat. Those hurlers and footballers and soccer players who looked more like us up in the stands than their high cheek-boned, slender peers. The guys with a little paunch around the middle slightly distending the shirt and the tell-tale start of a fleshy fold in their chin(s), the men who relied on skill to overcome the inevitable pace problems caused by excess baggage.
All of the above is why so many journalists and fans seem to have such a soft spot for Sunderland’s Andy Reid. This is not one of those columns bashing Giovanni Trapattoni for his admittedly bizarre policy of refusing to pick the Dubliner in a squad over-run with less-gifted and less musically-inclined midfielders. There have been enough of those. No, this is one of those rare columns pointing out that the newly-svelte Reid is in danger of losing the very constituency that loves him so much. By shedding a stone or so, the left-footer now looks like all the other superfit footballers in the world. More’s the pity.
Up to this point, when Reid would saunter around the Stadium of Light, stretching every available fiber of the red and white striped shirt, he was a welcome throwback to a more pleasant time in the game. Watch any rerun of an old Division One game from the 1980s and you’ll see what we mean. The pace is perceptibly slower because the players are not as fit and some – it would appear to the naked eye – are carrying a few pounds. It doesn’t detract from the quality of the play and indeed, whenever Reid’s weight became an issue before, Sunderland fans were quick to recall being destroyed in the 1992 FA Cup final by the relentlessly accurate passing of Jan Molby, a rather plump midfielder who scarcely left the centre-circle all that afternoon.
“Right up to the day that Jan left Anfield, you knew that whenever he was on the ball it was going to a red shirt, no matter what his weight was,” said Alan Hansen of his former teammate. “He’s probably the only player who was sixteen stone but could play so well. The problem was he couldn’t get up and down, so he’d stand in the middle of the park and be given the ball. Then he’d play. If he’d been playing at fourteen stone, or something, then I think we’d have been talking about the best of the best.”
Long before he bought so belatedly into the new fitness obsession, men of a certain age were willing Reid to survive and thrive because he was a living memory, a reminder of a different time when body fascism hadn’t yet ruled the day and players were picked for the smoothness of their first touch rather than their score on a fitness test – Sam Allardyce’s supposedly preferred selection tool.
“Take John Robertson,” said Brian Clough of his own talismanic winger back in 1975. “He’s a little fat lad. When you come down to it. That’s a good description. He’s a little fat lad. But once you’ve got him to accept that, you can go on to say he is one of the best deliverers of a ball in the game today and therefore a lad who can do great things on the park. But there is no way he is going to get the most out of that fact unless he accepts the other.”
A little fat lad, even one with preternatural crossing ability, wouldn’t get as far as a professional contract today. The game has changed utterly. Once upon a time, “When Saturday Comes” used to run a column called “Great Goals Scored by Tubby Left-Backs.” The magazine couldn’t do that now because there are no more tubby left-backs. There are plenty tall, sinewy left-backs who look more capable of competing in the Olympic decathlon than they do cutting inside on their weaker foot and having a pop from distance. And some of us old-fashioned fools think the game is all the poorer for that.

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