Someone better read this 
umpkin:
Source: The Sunday Times
Described as 'half ballerina, half gangster', Sweden's Juventus striker could be England's undoing in Germany 2006, reports Ian Hawkey
Leipzig, deep in what used to be East Germany, late on Friday evening, and the talk was turning to eulogy. The speakers were all sober sorts, not given to hype or hysteria, and accustomed to handling the frenetic expectation that events such as the draw for a football World Cup can generate. On one subject, though, they all reached for superlatives.
Lars Lagerback, the head coach of Sweden, broke off from assessing his country’s immediate challenge — Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago and England as Group B opponents — to declare his team had possibly the best forward partnership of any country. One of that pair, he continued, “must be among the best centre-forwards in the world”.
The Trinidad manager, Dutchman Leo Beenhakker, was not so much strolling but sprinting down memory lane, boasting: “I was the one who picked him up to bring him abroad.”
A little later, over a glass of red wine, Sven-Göran Eriksson rolled out a red carpet: “If Zlatan Ibrahimovic goes on like he is at the moment, he will be the best in the world.”
World Cup 2006 has identified its central figure six months early. He is the giant Ibrahimovic, 24 years old, 6ft 4in, strong as an ox and with feet like Fred Astaire. Sweden might soar with him; Eriksson’s England might suffer because of him.
And Beenhakker will keep telling everybody that it was he who found Zlatan, the teenager from the ghetto with a tendency to impolitic behaviour but with gifts so out of the ordinary that his national coach sometimes struggles to recognise him as one of his own. “He can do things we have never seen Swedish players do before,” added Lagerback.
Actually, Ibrahimovic can do things that most football cultures sit up and take notice of. This season an Italian journalist came up with a nice phrase to describe the player’s recent work for Juventus: he was “half ballerina, half gangster”.
It paints a fine picture of an athlete whose subtle touch co-exists with a physical authority that can bully the biggest, strongest opponent. The phrase also captures some of Ibrahimovic’s edge. He can be provocative and confrontational, and he used to be a bit wild.
REWIND three weeks, to an autumn Thursday morning in northwest Italy. Juventus, runaway leaders in Serie A, are training at their temporary practice headquarters near the centre of Turin, next door to a prison.
Zlatan’s name is being shouted sporadically over the high wall that separates millionaires from miscreants. “Fab-i-o, Fab-i-o Capello,” the prisoners chant in honour of the Juventus head coach, and then “Ibra-ca-da-bra!”, turning Zlatan’s surname into a magician’s command. The serenade from the prison, by the way, is a regular enough ritual. Eventually somebody from the Juve staff hoiks a ball over the wall. The inmates cheer and start to play football among themselves.
Twenty minutes later, showered, dressed in leather jacket, long, baggy trousers, with his dark-brown mane trailing out from beneath a baseball cap, Ibrahimovic emerges, towering. Within the first minute of the interview, he swears; not a harsh expletive, but one strong enough to express his opinion of a section of the Swedish press, with which, he explains, he has long severed relations.
He has just received an award partly sponsored by a Swedish newspaper, and that is how the subject comes up. He is pleased to have been named his country’s footballer of the year, but cannot quite shake off the recollections of how his youthful celebrity once opened him to uncomfortable scrutiny.
For the next 45 minutes he doesn’t swear again, as he tells the story of gathering fame, confidence and various brief derailments on a career that he believes has found its right track at the summit of Italian football.
His tale starts in Malmo in the early 1980s, and a district called Rosengard. His parents were both from the Balkans, his mother a Croat, his father a Bosnian. They would count as New Swedes, but where they lived they would not be in a minority for that. “I would say there were a lot of immigrants in our area, maybe 90%,” Ibrahimovic recalls, “and in our area everybody knew each other and got along with each other.” He smiles, adding: “Even if it had the baddest reputation in Sweden.”
What reputation? “For me it was not a problem, but if you ask people from outside about this area, they feel a little bit scared.” Of what? “What can I tell you? Criminals, gangsters, a lot of stuff.” Some reports of his early years suggest a tearaway, although he describes growing up “in a compact family who stick together and share everything”.
He grew up bilingual, speaking “Swedish with my brothers and sisters, and with my parents, Yugoslavian . . . I think. The other day one guy asked me, ‘Is that Serbo-Croat or what?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’. You see,” he laughs, “I don’t know myself what I speak.”
Young Zlatan’s most diverting passion was football and discovering its tricks. His obsession was not pushed by his mother, Jurka, or his father, Sefik. “They knew what football was, but they didn’t follow it like they do now that they follow me. Maybe my father knew a bit more. But he didn’t like it in the same way he does now.”
Zlatan and his friends tried to find unique ways of enjoying the game. “When I was young, I always had a ball with me and we took turns. It was always, ‘Who can do the most beautiful trick, who can do the most difficult thing?’ That was what we tried, all the time, in the playground.” Space was limited, so ball skills sharpened.
“There was a small field where we lived. But we played there all the time, after school. When I was younger, even when we had played a proper match, we’d still go back home and play in that garden.
“Every day I’d try to do a new kind of trick. But after a bit, it’s something you stop learning. It’s just something you do. When I try something on the field, it’s not that I’ve decided, ‘Hey, now I’m going to do something nice’. It’s just something that happens by itself.”
With Ibrahimovic, it has a habit of happening on the big occasions. For instance, his donkey kick — a back-heel chip, if you like — to score for Sweden against Italy at Euro 2004.
Or the improbable back-heeled volley he used to take the ball past his marker, Sammy Kuffour, with his back to goal, on the halfway line against Roma for Juventus last month. Ibrahimovic retrieved the ball, to go on and score.
Or the goal with which he said farewell to Ajax fans in 2004. He beat five NAC Breda players, one of them twice, during his goalward slalom. He thinks he owes some of that to learning his football on unpredictable surfaces in enclosed areas, with his friends from FBK Balkan, his first club, in Rosengard.
By his mid-teens he was tall and, if a bit stringy, good enough to be taken on by Malmo, who had fading memories of keeping elite company: 1Å years before Ibrahimovic was born, they had been in a European Cup final.
By the time he came under their charge, they were a long way from repeating that, and any good Swedish player — he was in no doubt he was Swedish and not inclined to answer any call from Bosnia or Croatia — would aim to move abroad. Arsenal had had word of him and Arsène Wenger travelled to speak to the teenager and give him an Arsenal shirt, although Malmo told them he was not for sale.
Ajax then found Ibrahimovic before he could really get restless. He was still a rookie, with barely two dozen games to his name with Malmo, when the Amsterdam club offered nearly £6m to take him to Holland. He would not be an immediate, soaraway success.
“Like every young guy at Ajax, he had a difficult start,” recalls Beenhakker, who was Ajax’s director of football at the time. “But I was absolutely convinced. That’s why we bought him for a lot of money and I knew he would be great player.”
Others shared that instinct, but one or two incidents would erode their confidence that Ibrahimovic had the good sense to make the most of his potential. For instance, when he got himself into trouble for impersonating a policeman in the red-light district of Malmo and “arresting” a kerb-crawler.
He also acquired a reputation for badinage with the local press that may help to explain the hostility that developed between him and some newspapers. To the inquiry, when he was 20, “What might stop you becoming No 1 in the world?’ he apparently answered: “Injury.”
On being asked whether he had bought a flashy car, he replied: “Absolutely not. I’ve ordered a plane. It’s faster.”
On being told that the mammoth John Carew, the Norway forward, had described Ibrahimovic’s tricks with the ball as largely fruitless and indulgent, his published retort was: “What Carew does with a football, I can do with an orange.”
After five months at Ajax, mostly as a substitute, he vowed, to doubting reporters: “My time will come.”
“Did I have any doubts? No,” says Beenhakker. “I wanted to help him and we did a good job together. We have a good relationship. And apart from that, he’s a great player, a great person and I like him. Sometimes I thought I was the only guy in Holland who ever believed in him. I just said, ‘Wait’. And he did it.”
Twelve goals followed in his second league season, and at the spearhead of a fine Ajax run in the Champions League. Thirteen goals came in his next, and the nature of some of them, if not the quantity, mean that soon enough he
was being called the new Marco van Basten.
He had also accumulated the experience of the 2002 World Cup,
where he had been an occasional presence in a Sweden looking largely to Henrik Larsson for their goals. By Euro 2004 he was a guaranteed starter in his country’s line-up, and if, come June, there seems a familiarity about some of the names in the 2006 Swedish side set against the one England met in the
2002 World Cup, Sven-Göran Eriksson will be the first to caution against mistaking one for the other.
“Zlatan is definitely a bigger player for us in every way now,” says Lagerback. “When he was at the last World Cup, he was coming in as a substitute. Zlatan
is a much better player than when Beenhakker brought him to Ajax. I don’t know if you want to talk top 10s or anything, but now Zlatan is up high as one of the best centre-forwards in the world. He can decide a game with a pass.” He scored eight times for Sweden in qualifying for Germany.
THE VAN BASTEN comparison sticks. It has followed him to Italy, partly for the parallel circumstances of the two players. The prolific Dutchman wore No 9 for Ajax and went to Milan. Ibrahimovic wore No 9 for Ajax and went to Juventus, for about £12m on transfer deadline day in August 2004.
Some months later, after practice in the shadow of the prison, he changed and showered and was asked to pop into the office of Juve’s head coach. Capello
sat Ibrahimovic down on a chair, turned on the television and told him to watch.
It was highlights video of Van Basten goals, many of them scored while Capello was his manager at Milan in the mid-1990s.
Capello left the room and Ibrahimovic felt for a moment like an errant schoolboy being told to do lines. But as he watched the volleys, the headers,
the drives, it made sense. “They do compare me a lot to Van Basten,” he recalls, “and Capello said, ‘You can learn a lot from watching him. He was a similar player and he scored goals: more than you do’. And he left me there in the office, with the video. He said he wanted me to be more like Van Basten in the penalty area.” Ibrahimovic hopes to get somewhere close: “Van Basten is exceptional. I have never seen a player like that.”
Capello had another piece of advice, given to Ibrahimovic soon after he arrived in Turin. He asked to him to put some more meat on his bones. Contrast images of Ibrahimovic of two of three years ago with those of him in Juve’s zebra stripes, and the difference in physique, especially the upper body, is striking. “I am much stronger now,” he says. “I was 82 kilos (12st 12lb). Now I’m 95. When I first came here, Capelllo asked me if I ever trained in the gym.
I said, ‘No, at Ajax, we never trained in the gym; it’s only technical practice there’. He said: ‘It’s time to do gym’. I feel bigger, but not so it stops the great moves or the quality. I like to play football, you know. I’m not a player who just wants to score goals. I also want to create them for my colleagues.”
And he wants to keep the tricks, the courage to try new ones, even if his coaches frown when they don’t quite come off. “That’s the thing with tricks. When you make it and it works, it’s very, very nice. When it doesn’t, then it’s bad. But what you have to think then is, ‘I will try it again’.
“That’s confidence — you have to believe it will succeed the next time, not that it won’t. Not everything can be perfect, and you have to learn that. That’s the balance.”
And, yes, he can remember times when failing with one of his “blind” passes, or trying to trap a long pass dead, instead of cushioning it, he has provoked mirth from opposition supporters and rage from his own bench. “It has happened a lot. But you have to make the mistakes to learn from them. I have my qualities, and you can’t have a team with 11 players all exactly the same. My qualities mean I try to invent things.”
He feels that he handles the ebbs of confidence — and he has the kind of braggadocio about him that suggests they exist — better than he used to. “You must understand that it is about a whole year, and there will be moments when you are in form — and other moments. And you have to learn to fight for it. I have learnt a lot, coming to Juventus, and feel I am playing at the highest level now.
“I think I’ve learnt much more in one year with Juventus than in three years with Ajax. And I gave my club much more in a year with Juventus than I did
in three with Ajax. At Ajax I had to
play in one position in their 4-3-3, because of how they played, and you couldn’t move about so much, just
stay up front. I like to move around and be a creator.”
Turin suits him better, he suspects, than Amsterdam. “People here are
very cool. They don’t leave me alone,
but they are more respectful. But also when I came here I was feeling very confident.
“When a club like Juventus asks for you, you look at the history, what they have won, the players they have had. How can you say no? You think, ‘Juventus want to buy me, Capello is their new coach’. I was very happy I was the first on his list.
“I wanted to move to a bigger competition, to make sure I could handle the big competitions. It was time. I am more stable in my game, and I am more happy about the way I want to be. I’m bringing out more of my qualities. My game is more secure. I like to see a lot of the ball and feel in control. And I have fantastic players around me, even on the bench here.
“I think it has gone well. In fact, it has gone more than well.”
Indeed. Ibrahimovic gave Juve 16 goals towards their Italian title in his first season, and he played so well that some good judges reckoned him one of the best three footballers on the planet. Step forward Eriksson, who nominated Ibrahimovic as his third choice for Fifa World Footballer of the Year, an award Barcelona’s Ronaldinho is expected to collect next week.
Ibrahimovic makes a few references
to his maturity, although it is not absolute. A week after his exhibition against Roma, he was drawing attention to himself by heading the ball out of the hands of an opponent as he tried to take
a throw-in.
Italy has taught him to use his elbows, too. “The defenders here are much harder if you mean they’ll do anything to stop you. They will. They are very good tactically and very physically strong.
“You ask them after the game, ‘Did you play well?’ And they say yes. And you say, ‘Why?’ And they say, ‘Because my striker, who I was marking, didn’t score’. Simple. That is the way they work, and this is one of the best places in the world for defenders.”
So to June 20, in Cologne, when Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell or John Terry will go might-for-might against Ibrahimovic, keeping an eye on the possibility of an audacious back-heel. With Ibrahimovic fit, Sweden will enter the tournament confident. His partnership for Sweden with Larsson, the Barcelona striker 10 years his senior, grows, and feels more and more satisfying to the younger man.
“We’ve got to know each other much more, we understand each other’s moves and we talk a lot on the field,” he says, “and Henrik is such a professional guy.” It’s a good bet Larsson and Ibrahimovic exchanged calls yesterday to talk about what the World Cup draw has given them.
In the meantime, in Turin, our talk is closing. Ibrahimovic needs to get home to the flat he shares with his girlfriend. That day, her parents have come to visit. Their arrival means he has to be on his best behaviour. “Of course,” he grins. “I always am.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1920072_1,00.html
umpkin: Source: The Sunday Times
Described as 'half ballerina, half gangster', Sweden's Juventus striker could be England's undoing in Germany 2006, reports Ian Hawkey
Leipzig, deep in what used to be East Germany, late on Friday evening, and the talk was turning to eulogy. The speakers were all sober sorts, not given to hype or hysteria, and accustomed to handling the frenetic expectation that events such as the draw for a football World Cup can generate. On one subject, though, they all reached for superlatives.
Lars Lagerback, the head coach of Sweden, broke off from assessing his country’s immediate challenge — Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago and England as Group B opponents — to declare his team had possibly the best forward partnership of any country. One of that pair, he continued, “must be among the best centre-forwards in the world”.
The Trinidad manager, Dutchman Leo Beenhakker, was not so much strolling but sprinting down memory lane, boasting: “I was the one who picked him up to bring him abroad.”
A little later, over a glass of red wine, Sven-Göran Eriksson rolled out a red carpet: “If Zlatan Ibrahimovic goes on like he is at the moment, he will be the best in the world.”
World Cup 2006 has identified its central figure six months early. He is the giant Ibrahimovic, 24 years old, 6ft 4in, strong as an ox and with feet like Fred Astaire. Sweden might soar with him; Eriksson’s England might suffer because of him.
And Beenhakker will keep telling everybody that it was he who found Zlatan, the teenager from the ghetto with a tendency to impolitic behaviour but with gifts so out of the ordinary that his national coach sometimes struggles to recognise him as one of his own. “He can do things we have never seen Swedish players do before,” added Lagerback.
Actually, Ibrahimovic can do things that most football cultures sit up and take notice of. This season an Italian journalist came up with a nice phrase to describe the player’s recent work for Juventus: he was “half ballerina, half gangster”.
It paints a fine picture of an athlete whose subtle touch co-exists with a physical authority that can bully the biggest, strongest opponent. The phrase also captures some of Ibrahimovic’s edge. He can be provocative and confrontational, and he used to be a bit wild.
REWIND three weeks, to an autumn Thursday morning in northwest Italy. Juventus, runaway leaders in Serie A, are training at their temporary practice headquarters near the centre of Turin, next door to a prison.
Zlatan’s name is being shouted sporadically over the high wall that separates millionaires from miscreants. “Fab-i-o, Fab-i-o Capello,” the prisoners chant in honour of the Juventus head coach, and then “Ibra-ca-da-bra!”, turning Zlatan’s surname into a magician’s command. The serenade from the prison, by the way, is a regular enough ritual. Eventually somebody from the Juve staff hoiks a ball over the wall. The inmates cheer and start to play football among themselves.
Twenty minutes later, showered, dressed in leather jacket, long, baggy trousers, with his dark-brown mane trailing out from beneath a baseball cap, Ibrahimovic emerges, towering. Within the first minute of the interview, he swears; not a harsh expletive, but one strong enough to express his opinion of a section of the Swedish press, with which, he explains, he has long severed relations.
He has just received an award partly sponsored by a Swedish newspaper, and that is how the subject comes up. He is pleased to have been named his country’s footballer of the year, but cannot quite shake off the recollections of how his youthful celebrity once opened him to uncomfortable scrutiny.
For the next 45 minutes he doesn’t swear again, as he tells the story of gathering fame, confidence and various brief derailments on a career that he believes has found its right track at the summit of Italian football.
His tale starts in Malmo in the early 1980s, and a district called Rosengard. His parents were both from the Balkans, his mother a Croat, his father a Bosnian. They would count as New Swedes, but where they lived they would not be in a minority for that. “I would say there were a lot of immigrants in our area, maybe 90%,” Ibrahimovic recalls, “and in our area everybody knew each other and got along with each other.” He smiles, adding: “Even if it had the baddest reputation in Sweden.”
What reputation? “For me it was not a problem, but if you ask people from outside about this area, they feel a little bit scared.” Of what? “What can I tell you? Criminals, gangsters, a lot of stuff.” Some reports of his early years suggest a tearaway, although he describes growing up “in a compact family who stick together and share everything”.
He grew up bilingual, speaking “Swedish with my brothers and sisters, and with my parents, Yugoslavian . . . I think. The other day one guy asked me, ‘Is that Serbo-Croat or what?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’. You see,” he laughs, “I don’t know myself what I speak.”
Young Zlatan’s most diverting passion was football and discovering its tricks. His obsession was not pushed by his mother, Jurka, or his father, Sefik. “They knew what football was, but they didn’t follow it like they do now that they follow me. Maybe my father knew a bit more. But he didn’t like it in the same way he does now.”
Zlatan and his friends tried to find unique ways of enjoying the game. “When I was young, I always had a ball with me and we took turns. It was always, ‘Who can do the most beautiful trick, who can do the most difficult thing?’ That was what we tried, all the time, in the playground.” Space was limited, so ball skills sharpened.
“There was a small field where we lived. But we played there all the time, after school. When I was younger, even when we had played a proper match, we’d still go back home and play in that garden.
“Every day I’d try to do a new kind of trick. But after a bit, it’s something you stop learning. It’s just something you do. When I try something on the field, it’s not that I’ve decided, ‘Hey, now I’m going to do something nice’. It’s just something that happens by itself.”
With Ibrahimovic, it has a habit of happening on the big occasions. For instance, his donkey kick — a back-heel chip, if you like — to score for Sweden against Italy at Euro 2004.
Or the improbable back-heeled volley he used to take the ball past his marker, Sammy Kuffour, with his back to goal, on the halfway line against Roma for Juventus last month. Ibrahimovic retrieved the ball, to go on and score.
Or the goal with which he said farewell to Ajax fans in 2004. He beat five NAC Breda players, one of them twice, during his goalward slalom. He thinks he owes some of that to learning his football on unpredictable surfaces in enclosed areas, with his friends from FBK Balkan, his first club, in Rosengard.
By his mid-teens he was tall and, if a bit stringy, good enough to be taken on by Malmo, who had fading memories of keeping elite company: 1Å years before Ibrahimovic was born, they had been in a European Cup final.
By the time he came under their charge, they were a long way from repeating that, and any good Swedish player — he was in no doubt he was Swedish and not inclined to answer any call from Bosnia or Croatia — would aim to move abroad. Arsenal had had word of him and Arsène Wenger travelled to speak to the teenager and give him an Arsenal shirt, although Malmo told them he was not for sale.
Ajax then found Ibrahimovic before he could really get restless. He was still a rookie, with barely two dozen games to his name with Malmo, when the Amsterdam club offered nearly £6m to take him to Holland. He would not be an immediate, soaraway success.
“Like every young guy at Ajax, he had a difficult start,” recalls Beenhakker, who was Ajax’s director of football at the time. “But I was absolutely convinced. That’s why we bought him for a lot of money and I knew he would be great player.”
Others shared that instinct, but one or two incidents would erode their confidence that Ibrahimovic had the good sense to make the most of his potential. For instance, when he got himself into trouble for impersonating a policeman in the red-light district of Malmo and “arresting” a kerb-crawler.
He also acquired a reputation for badinage with the local press that may help to explain the hostility that developed between him and some newspapers. To the inquiry, when he was 20, “What might stop you becoming No 1 in the world?’ he apparently answered: “Injury.”
On being asked whether he had bought a flashy car, he replied: “Absolutely not. I’ve ordered a plane. It’s faster.”
On being told that the mammoth John Carew, the Norway forward, had described Ibrahimovic’s tricks with the ball as largely fruitless and indulgent, his published retort was: “What Carew does with a football, I can do with an orange.”
After five months at Ajax, mostly as a substitute, he vowed, to doubting reporters: “My time will come.”
“Did I have any doubts? No,” says Beenhakker. “I wanted to help him and we did a good job together. We have a good relationship. And apart from that, he’s a great player, a great person and I like him. Sometimes I thought I was the only guy in Holland who ever believed in him. I just said, ‘Wait’. And he did it.”
Twelve goals followed in his second league season, and at the spearhead of a fine Ajax run in the Champions League. Thirteen goals came in his next, and the nature of some of them, if not the quantity, mean that soon enough he
was being called the new Marco van Basten.
He had also accumulated the experience of the 2002 World Cup,
where he had been an occasional presence in a Sweden looking largely to Henrik Larsson for their goals. By Euro 2004 he was a guaranteed starter in his country’s line-up, and if, come June, there seems a familiarity about some of the names in the 2006 Swedish side set against the one England met in the
2002 World Cup, Sven-Göran Eriksson will be the first to caution against mistaking one for the other.
“Zlatan is definitely a bigger player for us in every way now,” says Lagerback. “When he was at the last World Cup, he was coming in as a substitute. Zlatan
is a much better player than when Beenhakker brought him to Ajax. I don’t know if you want to talk top 10s or anything, but now Zlatan is up high as one of the best centre-forwards in the world. He can decide a game with a pass.” He scored eight times for Sweden in qualifying for Germany.
THE VAN BASTEN comparison sticks. It has followed him to Italy, partly for the parallel circumstances of the two players. The prolific Dutchman wore No 9 for Ajax and went to Milan. Ibrahimovic wore No 9 for Ajax and went to Juventus, for about £12m on transfer deadline day in August 2004.
Some months later, after practice in the shadow of the prison, he changed and showered and was asked to pop into the office of Juve’s head coach. Capello
sat Ibrahimovic down on a chair, turned on the television and told him to watch.
It was highlights video of Van Basten goals, many of them scored while Capello was his manager at Milan in the mid-1990s.
Capello left the room and Ibrahimovic felt for a moment like an errant schoolboy being told to do lines. But as he watched the volleys, the headers,
the drives, it made sense. “They do compare me a lot to Van Basten,” he recalls, “and Capello said, ‘You can learn a lot from watching him. He was a similar player and he scored goals: more than you do’. And he left me there in the office, with the video. He said he wanted me to be more like Van Basten in the penalty area.” Ibrahimovic hopes to get somewhere close: “Van Basten is exceptional. I have never seen a player like that.”
Capello had another piece of advice, given to Ibrahimovic soon after he arrived in Turin. He asked to him to put some more meat on his bones. Contrast images of Ibrahimovic of two of three years ago with those of him in Juve’s zebra stripes, and the difference in physique, especially the upper body, is striking. “I am much stronger now,” he says. “I was 82 kilos (12st 12lb). Now I’m 95. When I first came here, Capelllo asked me if I ever trained in the gym.
I said, ‘No, at Ajax, we never trained in the gym; it’s only technical practice there’. He said: ‘It’s time to do gym’. I feel bigger, but not so it stops the great moves or the quality. I like to play football, you know. I’m not a player who just wants to score goals. I also want to create them for my colleagues.”
And he wants to keep the tricks, the courage to try new ones, even if his coaches frown when they don’t quite come off. “That’s the thing with tricks. When you make it and it works, it’s very, very nice. When it doesn’t, then it’s bad. But what you have to think then is, ‘I will try it again’.
“That’s confidence — you have to believe it will succeed the next time, not that it won’t. Not everything can be perfect, and you have to learn that. That’s the balance.”
And, yes, he can remember times when failing with one of his “blind” passes, or trying to trap a long pass dead, instead of cushioning it, he has provoked mirth from opposition supporters and rage from his own bench. “It has happened a lot. But you have to make the mistakes to learn from them. I have my qualities, and you can’t have a team with 11 players all exactly the same. My qualities mean I try to invent things.”
He feels that he handles the ebbs of confidence — and he has the kind of braggadocio about him that suggests they exist — better than he used to. “You must understand that it is about a whole year, and there will be moments when you are in form — and other moments. And you have to learn to fight for it. I have learnt a lot, coming to Juventus, and feel I am playing at the highest level now.
“I think I’ve learnt much more in one year with Juventus than in three years with Ajax. And I gave my club much more in a year with Juventus than I did
in three with Ajax. At Ajax I had to
play in one position in their 4-3-3, because of how they played, and you couldn’t move about so much, just
stay up front. I like to move around and be a creator.”
Turin suits him better, he suspects, than Amsterdam. “People here are
very cool. They don’t leave me alone,
but they are more respectful. But also when I came here I was feeling very confident.
“When a club like Juventus asks for you, you look at the history, what they have won, the players they have had. How can you say no? You think, ‘Juventus want to buy me, Capello is their new coach’. I was very happy I was the first on his list.
“I wanted to move to a bigger competition, to make sure I could handle the big competitions. It was time. I am more stable in my game, and I am more happy about the way I want to be. I’m bringing out more of my qualities. My game is more secure. I like to see a lot of the ball and feel in control. And I have fantastic players around me, even on the bench here.
“I think it has gone well. In fact, it has gone more than well.”
Indeed. Ibrahimovic gave Juve 16 goals towards their Italian title in his first season, and he played so well that some good judges reckoned him one of the best three footballers on the planet. Step forward Eriksson, who nominated Ibrahimovic as his third choice for Fifa World Footballer of the Year, an award Barcelona’s Ronaldinho is expected to collect next week.
Ibrahimovic makes a few references
to his maturity, although it is not absolute. A week after his exhibition against Roma, he was drawing attention to himself by heading the ball out of the hands of an opponent as he tried to take
a throw-in.
Italy has taught him to use his elbows, too. “The defenders here are much harder if you mean they’ll do anything to stop you. They will. They are very good tactically and very physically strong.
“You ask them after the game, ‘Did you play well?’ And they say yes. And you say, ‘Why?’ And they say, ‘Because my striker, who I was marking, didn’t score’. Simple. That is the way they work, and this is one of the best places in the world for defenders.”
So to June 20, in Cologne, when Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell or John Terry will go might-for-might against Ibrahimovic, keeping an eye on the possibility of an audacious back-heel. With Ibrahimovic fit, Sweden will enter the tournament confident. His partnership for Sweden with Larsson, the Barcelona striker 10 years his senior, grows, and feels more and more satisfying to the younger man.
“We’ve got to know each other much more, we understand each other’s moves and we talk a lot on the field,” he says, “and Henrik is such a professional guy.” It’s a good bet Larsson and Ibrahimovic exchanged calls yesterday to talk about what the World Cup draw has given them.
In the meantime, in Turin, our talk is closing. Ibrahimovic needs to get home to the flat he shares with his girlfriend. That day, her parents have come to visit. Their arrival means he has to be on his best behaviour. “Of course,” he grins. “I always am.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1920072_1,00.html
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