Heroes & villains: Paul Scholes
Posted in News on Monday July 3rd, 2006 10:01am
John Carlin eulogises in The Observer Sport Monthly:
Had Paul Scholes been born with David Beckham’s looks he would have been a football legend. The enemy of glamour, a timid homebody whose soul belongs to his native Salford, Scholes is the most naturally gifted player England produced between Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney, the closest thing to a homegrown Zinedine Zidane.
Scholes possesses a superior footballing intelligence. Both his feet and his mind work faster than other players’. He has that split-second advantage in skill that separates the merely good from the great and he has an almost unfailing instinct for how best to use the ball - to hold it, to spread it wide, to pass it back - the instant he receives it.
That was why he was the player around whom the Treble-winning United attack revolved. The rampaging urgency with which they swept forward, down the left with Ryan Giggs or down the right with David Beckham, the penetration through the middle to where Dwight Yorke or Andy Cole lay in wait: it was down to Scholes, the cog at the centre of all that.
He was, with that ginger hair of his, the spark of the United machine. Without him the engine would neither have fired nor purred the way it did. Without the self-effacing Scholesy orchestrating the show, the rest of the team would never have looked as good.
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