Can anyone post the Drogba Times interview?

It is called, 'you have to take control.' And starts....Sportsmen do not get to script their own finales, which is why Don Bradman finished with a Test batting average of 99.94 instead of 100, and Muhammad Ali ended up losing to bums. Sport is capricious, even for the very best.

 

Its a fantastic article! I'd love to send it to you , but I'm IT totally clueless! I'll wait til my son comes to visit me and get him to do it!

 

Thanks Blue, you have to pay to get on The times website. If you could cut and paste it in, that would be great

 

Gents

I've done this on my iPad so can't be arsed to separate all the paragraphs etc as its a ball ache!


Didier Drogba on leaving Chelsea, winning the Champions League – and that penalty kick
Sportsmen do not get to script their own finales, which is why Don Bradman finished with a Test batting average of 99.94 instead of 100, and Muhammad Ali ended up losing to bums. Sport is capricious, even for the very best.
Yet to see Chelsea’s epic triumph in the Champions League on May 19, 2012, was to watch the Hollywood ending made real. In Drogba, we watched a footballer grab destiny and bend it to his will.
After almost a decade of trying and failing to win the prize they craved, of clambering so close to the summit only to slide down again, usually in a fury of disciplinary controversy, Chelsea finally claimed the Champions League, the club game’s greatest prize, and it was as if one man, Drogba, had decided that no other result were possible.
Drogba had tasted so many defeats, cursed so many referees, raged against so much bad luck. If this chance went, it would surely be gone for ever. “When you are young, you lose a final and think, ‘There’ll be another one next year,’ ” he says. “The older you get, you start to think, ‘This might be my last.’ ”
He reflects on another life lesson that served him well as the minutes ticked down in Bayern’s Allianz Arena. “If there is one thing I learnt over eight years at Chelsea, it was not to blame other people. When I first came to London, I was maybe stubborn; I pointed at others. But life taught me that you have to take responsibility. You have to take control.”
So he did. It was the Ivorian whose header rescued Chelsea from defeat by Bayern Munich two minutes from the end of normal time. “I’m not even sure why I ran to the near post,” he recalls. “That was a header for Frank [Lampard]. It wasn’t planned that way.” But Drogba made it happen.
He had taken the game to extra time. Thirty minutes later it went to penalties. Four years earlier, in Chelsea’s only previous Champions League final against Manchester United, Drogba had been sent off for violent conduct.
Now, deep into the night in Munich, he found himself making a very different, long and lonely walk – this time to take the tenth penalty kick. Score and he would win the trophy for Chelsea. Miss and, well, who knows? He placed the ball down, straightened his socks, shirt and shorts, then took four deliberate paces backwards, a run-up so carefully measured that we might have been watching Jonny Wilkinson.
Drogba is celebrated for his muscular energy, his ceaseless movement, his powerful dynamism. But in this defining moment, he was still, composed, a man with a job to do and the absolute certainty that he could do it. He had picked his spot in the bottom left corner as he looked at Manuel Neuer’s goal.
The rest – the shot, the ecstatic run, the scrum of Chelsea players and coaches who leapt on top of him – remains a warm, fuzzy feeling in his guts and a joyous blur in his memory.
“My son bought the Champions League DVD so we can watch it again and again,” he says. “At the time it all happened too fast. You have to see it again to take it in.”
Chelsea, finally, were champions of Europe, Drogba was the hero and, with that tenth and most cherished trophy, his mission had been accomplished. A few days later, he confirmed that, at 34, he would be leaving Chelsea after eight years. Soon after, he signed for Shanghai. But England is still home for Drogba. His wife, Lalla Diakité, and children (they have three together, Isaac, Iman and Keyran; an older boy, Kevin, is her son from a previous relationship) are still based just a short drive from the Chelsea training ground in Cobham, Surrey.
So why did he leave English football this summer when still fit and strong and about a thousand times better than Fernando Torres?
To look at Chelsea sans Drogba is to be sure that his old team misses him and, for all the money he now earns playing for Shanghai Shenhua in China, doesn’t he miss us? Did he leave too soon? Any regrets? Drogba chuckles. It is not the first time he has considered this question, and the long pause suggests he is still not 100 per cent convinced by the answer. Eventually, he says: “I had eight amazing years at Chelsea; it was time for a new experience.” He pauses. “And it was the perfect way to go.”
Working so far away from his family is not easy, but he has been back recently for a close-season break ahead of the African Nations Cup in January in South Africa. Chelsea miss him, and so does English football. He arrived in 2004 as a young hothead. “When I left Marseilles, I was the king. The team was built around me,” he says. “Then I came to London, to Chelsea, and found there were 23 kings.”
His talent as a muscular battering ram for José Mourinho’s bullying Chelsea soon became obvious, but admiration for the goal-scoring forward came with distaste for some of his histrionics. He would dive, complain to referees, fall to the ground faster than Audley Harrison and wave his arms in rage and self-pity.
“It was tough at the start, learning a different game, a different culture, different referees,” he says. “I’d look outside and it was snowing and you’d still play the game. That didn’t happen in France. And my English wasn’t great. It wasn’t easy at first, but I learnt to love this country. It’s become my home.”
In return, Britain learnt to respect Drogba as the emotional, sometimes overwrought footballer revealed himself to be an impressive statesman off the field.
He has set up the Didier Drogba Foundation to which he diverts all the considerable money he earns from commercial endorsements. He hopes to build five health clinics throughout the Ivory Coast, with the first in the economic capital, Abidjan, and has so far invested £3 million.
Drogba has appeared on the cover of Time magazine as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people, although he remains wary about how to use his clout in Africa.
“People back home in the Ivory Coast want me to get involved in politics,” he says. “Some politicians want to use me. But I like to stay independent, to have my own voice. I can say to you now that I have no plans to go into politics.”
But then he chuckles again. “In life, sometimes you see people end up doing exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.”

 

Brilliant, thanks, as I was searching for it as well, and I can pass this on to my son as well now