The Sunday Times April 16, 2006
Hard act to follow
Juan Roman Riquelme makes up for his lack of pace with a speed of thought that leaves opponents chasing shadows, as Arsenal will find out at Highbury on Wednesday.
By Ian Hawkey
At the Ciudad Deportivo del Villarreal last Thursday lunchtime, a dozen children had come to spend the first free day of the Easter weekend in a small act of worship. The one with the loudest voice began a chant that on matchdays at the Madrigal stadium becomes a chorus for thousands. It goes “Ri-quel-me, Ri-quel-me, Ri-quel-me”, the second syllable drawn out long.
Juan Roman Riquelme, hearing this, beckoned to the lad to squeeze under the bars separating the players on the training pitch from the audience. He took off his training top and flung it in the direction of the boy. It was a generous gesture, but not one we can embellish with a description of Riquelme with a beaming smile ruffling the kid’s hair, wrapping an arm around him or asking what his favourite subject at school might be.
Riquelme tends to the remote, even when he gives out souvenirs. He is a peculiar sort of superstar. The natural expression on his round, flat face is halfway between glum and affronted. He wears his hair utterly unstyled, in a cropped pudding-bowl of a cut. His shoulders hunch. When he speaks, he doesn’t say very much, at least to those who aren’t his intimates. He is a dazzling footballer but when he runs, he doesn’t exactly zip.
And when he leaves the smart training premises of the club that has somehow made its way to a first European Cup semi-final, he turns in the opposite direction to the majority of his colleagues.
Most of Villarreal’s footballers choose to live in beachside Mediterranean spots such as Benicassim, with gardens and pools; Riquelme, the best paid of them, lives in a flat in the bland town of barely 48,000 people that football is granting a fame well beyond its little dot on the map.
When his family come over to stay from Argentina, the apartment must seem crowded. They are numerous. First, there’s his two children; when Riquelme scores goals, he celebrates with his hands cupped behind his eyes, to imitate a cartoon character his son and daughter both enjoy. He is said to have a strong sense of family; he’s bound to. He’s the eldest of nine brothers and sisters and his prosperity has changed all their lives. It meant his parents could move to a bigger house in the Don Torcuato district of Buenos Aires. Wealth has a downside, too. One brother was once kidnapped. Happily, he was released.
That may be one explanation why Riquelme doesn’t seem to enjoy or exploit fame. He does not collect endorsements in the way of a David Beckham, or grin for the cameras like a Ronaldinho.
Yet for the next three months, their sort of spotlight will be trained onto him. Riquelme will go to the World Cup as the principal figure in a gameplan that has persuaded a lot of wise people to make Argentina second favourites. He goes into the last four of the Champions League as important to Villarreal as Thierry Henry is to Arsenal, the focus, the centrepiece.
Nobody at Villarreal pretends otherwise. “When Roman hasn’t been there, we have often found it harder,” says one of his teammates, Marcos Senna, “and it’s true that when we have the ball, we look to where he is for the pass.”
Alessio Tacchinardi, the Italian midfielder who joined Villarreal from Juventus last summer, was immediately put in mind when he lined up with Riquelme of a former colleague, Zinedine Zidane: “We play to Riquelme the way we at Juventus used to play to Zidane. It can make things simple. You are under pressure and you give the ball to Roman.”
At his best, there may be no finer user of possession. “What he does so well,” explains Senna, “is to protect the ball even when there are two or three trying to take it from him. And he’s unpredictable. You think he’s only moving at 10kph, and there he is in the right place as if he’s moving at 80. He’s one of the best in the world, a pleasure to play with.”
Better still if you are a striker, served by Riquelme’s through-balls, pinpoint free kicks and corners. When I asked Villarreal’s Diego Forlan why his goalscoring record had improved so dramatically since transferring there from Manchester United last season, he offered one word: “Riquelme”.
Riquelme acquired his sharp sense of passing geometry, his charmed footwork, in one of the poorest areas of the Argentinian capital. Don Torcuato is tough, and he grew up “not having too much of anything, but never falling too short, either”.
His father was a bricklayer, his mother looked after her many children. Her eldest was aligned to Argentinos Juniors at the age of 10. It suited him, he once recalled, “because Argentinos was the one club that looked for talent more than physical strength”. Diego Maradona had also passed through there. Like Maradona, Riquelme would progress to Boca Juniors. They bought him at 16 and he was an idol there before he was 20. Inevitably, he was bound for Europe, and became the feted major purchase of a shambolic Barcelona in 2002. He made sporadic impact. It was not a good period, he says. Riquelme was 24, his career at a crossroads and being directed by coaches who were not inclined to build teams around him, as Boca had done. He had no part in Argentina’s poor World Cup campaign that summer, Juan Sebastian Veron being preferred in the conductor’s role.
Meanwhile, at Barca he would be guided by another fastidious theoretician, the Dutchman Louis van Gaal. By the middle of a poor campaign, Riquelme had become marginalised.
“The way Barcelona wanted to play him, running 60 yards up and down the flanks, was not what’s best for him,” the Villarreal head coach, Manuel Pellegrini says. “He needs to play where he has a view of the whole field.”
Barcelona’s loss would be Villarreal’s gain. With the arrival of Ronaldinho at the Nou Camp, Riquelme became surplus, not simply because the two men would be occupying the same territory, but because of the Spanish league’s limit on the number of non-European players. He went on loan to Villarreal, making the move permanent last summer. In doing so, he took a CV that included two Copa Libertadores – the South American version of the Champions League – to a club that boasted no more than an InterToto triumph.
He soon seemed a man reborn. He began to wear the word “Roman” on his shirt rather than “Riquelme”. He was back on first-name terms with his gifts, rediscovering his best football among compatriots and like-minds. Riquelme will be one of four Argentinians in Wednesday’s likely Villarreal XI, plus a Uruguayan, Forlan, and a Brazilian, Senna. Arsène Wenger is not alone in observing a team with a character “more South American than Spanish, with tactical tricks”, although the Arsenal manager chooses a metaphor from North American sport to describe Villarreal’s most valuable footballer. “Riquelme’s a kind of quarterback,” says Wenger, “ready to slow the game down and wait for a weak moment to kill you.”
Sometimes, that moment can take the breath away, a shot from an implausible angle, an eye-of-the-needle pass, a chip or a lob given such precise backspin that it appears programmed by computer. Last month, Riquelme scored direct from a corner. In both the last two rounds of the Champions League, his use of a dead ball has provided the impetus to take Villarreal through in tight circumstances, on away goals.
“He makes such a difference to them,” said Rangers manager Alex McLeish after the Scots were eliminated in a last-16 tie on away goals. Villarreal have been bad news for British clubs — they knocked out Everton in the qualifying rounds, and finished top of a group that left Manchester United bottom in the first phase. Inter then tried a number of ways, clever and crude, to stifle Riquelme. He left their coach, Roberto Mancini, flummoxed: “He has this unspecified role,” said Mancini. “He doesn’t defend much, but his moves are always decisive, and when he gets the ball he never loses it.”
What can Arsenal do with him? Not police him with a dedicated marker, insists the Arsenal manager. But Wenger had another suggestion, delivered with a smile. “Could they maybe leave him in Spain?”