Lance Beauregarde
Okay, I’m going to begin with a confession - my main motivation for writing this article was that I wanted use the title, which, as I’m sure most of you have spotted, craftily weaves together a well-known expression with the name of an Arsenal midfield general with ridiculous hair. To be honest with you, I actually came up with it a few years ago, but at the time, Alex Song was crap, so using it just didn’t seem apt.
Imagine my delight, then, when Song emerged this season as one of the leading players, not only in his position, but in the whole league, establishing himself as a tough-tackling defensive ‘anchor man’ who is also capable of landing an elegant, lofted pass on a sixpence (the sixpence being Robin van Persie’s left foot, which is, ironically, probably worth about twenty million quid). It was at about the halfway point of the campaign that I felt the urge to rush to my computer and start typing a gushing, glowing tribute to the man they call Alex (because that’s his name), but on further reflection decided to wait until the end of the season, just in case he fell foul of the curse that seems to cause around twelve Arsenal players to suffer crippling, long-term injuries every five minutes.
But, as it turned out, Song managed to make thirty-four league appearances for the first team this season and, according to the impressively-named EA Sports Player Performance Index on the Premier League website, was the eleventh best player in the league overall. Now, statistics don’t always tell you the whole story, and, according to this particular index, Theo Walcott came eighth, which bears further examination, but it is based on a huge array of statistics which pertain to the number of passes each player completes, the number of tackles he makes, the number of goals he scores and sets up and so on.
It also deducts points when the player is involved in losing matches or fails to keep a clean sheet, which means that if you were to remove the enormous drag-factor of Arsenal’s apparent unwillingness ever to defend and their propensity to lose matches to teams who look at them in a slightly intimidating way, Song would have finished even higher up the table. As it is, he sits proudly above the likes of Scott Parker, who, if you believe some people, is the second coming of Christ, the human battering-ram that is Yaya Touré, and some Spanish bloke called Juan Mata, who, like all Chelsea players, is blessed with being very, very lucky.
So, let’s all take a moment to reflect on a player who, in a world where Joey Barton could probably hack someone’s head off with a chainsaw and only get a twelve-match ban, where John Terry can claim that Alexis Sanchez ‘fell onto his knee’ whilst knocking up his best friend’s girlfriend and still get a Champions’ League medal and an England call-up, and Carlos Tevez can take a golfing sabbatical in the middle of the season and stroll back into the team with a few games left to win the Premier League, gets on with his job quietly and efficiently without getting the attention or praise he most certainly deserves.
