A Blog [Lighthearted but could it contain an element of truth? As Freud said, âDreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.â] Martin Jol: Living The Sodding Dream He's doing exactly what most of us would do if put in charge of a middling Premier League club - he's brought in the sexiest players he can find. All power to him... In theory, building a Premier League squad should be a fairly intuitive business. Take, say, Bryan Ruiz, a foppish, floppy-haired, translucent delight of a player, whose undoubted and vaguely sensual technique comes at the price of a physique so delicate that he can't train, instead spending the time between games swaddled in bubble-wrap. He once missed a month with a bruised aura after Brede Hangeland sneezed unexpectedly. So if you're a manager, and you've got yourself a Ruiz, you lucky thing, then who do you play him with? Clearly, you'd be looking for a certain amount of grit to go alongside the guile. Football is about partnerships, and partnerships are about complementary skills, since nobody can do everything (except Clayton Blackmore, and he's a bit old now). You buy a big man. Yes? Not if you're Martin Jol you don't. You sign Dimitar Berbatov. Okay, so now you've got Berbatov and Ruiz. Once you've cleaned yourself up and calmed yourself down, where do you go next? Surely this only increases the need for some strength, some oomph, some blundering thuddery. Time to start looking at some real, proper, bastardy bastards. Yes? No. If you're Jol, you sign Adel Taarabt. Obviously. This isn't all he's done this summer, of course. There have been sensible signings too: Derek Boateng and Fernando Amorebieta have come in to do some constructive destruction, while Sascha Riether (on loan from 1. FC Köln) has become plain old Sascha Riether. And perhaps Jol's being pragmatic. Players like Ruiz, Taarabt and even the almighty Berb tend, by their very nature, to blow both hotter and colder than their more solid, more mortal, more mundane contemporaries. Best to stock up on stardust, since it tends to run out when you least expect. But alternatively, and entertainingly, he could be planning to play them all at the same time. Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club, the football club that is in Liverpool, once said that a football team was like a piano. "You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing." While it doesn't bear too much scrutiny as an analogy - are they going to play in shifts? was Shankly a big fan of piano six hands? - it does, when it comes to Fulham, conjure the thoroughly pleasing image of Steve Sidwell and Giorgos Karagounis running a removal business on the side. And if Jol does pick all three of them, Gorgeous George and his ginger sidekick are going to be doing one hell of a lot of fetching and carrying. Having a slightly odd squad suits Fulham, because they're a slightly odd club in a slightly odd position. They're perhaps the quietest of the established Premier League teams: generally well-liked (Chelsea aside), unlikely to get relegated, equally unlikely to start regularly bothering the silverware. They - along with a couple of other clubs - exist in the Premier League's central limbo, relatively well-protected against the bottom, effectively excluded from the top. And this means they don't have to be quite as careful. Managers in this position are afforded a rare opportunity to indulge themselves. As long as they're careful not to accidentally sell all their goalkeepers, they can rely on the constant churn of teams below them to have a little fun. Tony Pulis, for example, used his sinecure at Stoke to conduct grotesque experiments into human physiology, and was only fired when Robert Huth escaped from his holding pen and rampaged through a Stoke suburb, causing thousands of pounds of property damage and eating a small bus stop. (They hushed it up.) Alan Pardew - for all that he nearly cocked things up last season - is slowly but surely closing in on the perfect recipe for ratatouille. Sam Allardyce...well, nobody knows what he's doing, but he's finally got the Andy Carroll he's always dreamed of, so be afraid. And Jol? Jol's the best of the lot. Jol is doing what an actual, real, proper person would do if they ever got asked to run a football team. He's looked carefully over his shoulder, realised that nobody's watching too closely, and bought as many fun footballers as possible. Another! And another! To hell with your sensible strategies, your careful approach, your solidity and structure. Martin Jol wants none of it. He wants the through balls. He wants all of the through balls. Source: http://www.football365.com/profile365/8870226/Profile365
As you say, there's an element of truth in this. For all our frustrations, expressed in great detail on other threads, I think we're going to see more than a few moments of magic this season when our creative types start combining.
