Ballon d’Or awards lacked imagination and Ronaldo-Messi spotlight put Neuer in shade

From left, Manuel Neuer, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo during a press conference before the Ballon d'Or awards ceremony in Zurich. Walter Bieri / EPA

Let’s hear it for Mohammed Kenadid, the media representative from Djibouti on Fifa’s Ballon d’Or voting panel, which comes to about the size of a small country.

Kenadid was the only voter who thought Karim Benzema was the best player in the world last year. He was not, but it was good that a guy could think a little differently.

Cristiano Ronaldo deserved it. He is a truly worthy winner of the Ballon d'Or.

He scored more goals for club and country last year than there are weeks in the year. He won almost every title that he competed for, including modern football’s pre-eminent one, the Uefa Champions League. He had the most chiselled jawline, the most photographed six-pack, the most generous use of wax since the pomp of Hercule Poirot’s moustache and, without counting, probably endorsed the most brands.

He was and has been so good that there has emerged a flip side to his goodness.

He scores goals with such improbable regularity that those statistics alone are in danger of becoming the most important thing about him, like Don Bradman and his 99.94.

Those numbers, the end product, increasingly overshadow everything that goes into bringing them to bear. His temperament, his speed, his idiosyncratic technique, his training regimes, his highly evolved physicality – all these melt away in the heat of those goals.

But he was the most predictable winner, too. But sometimes it is good that awards are a little less predictable.

I prefer them somewhere between Rocky winning the Oscar over Taxi Driver as a palatable surprise and Kumar Dharmesena winning the International Cricket Council’s umpire of the year award as a little too much.

Maybe if Ronaldo had ripped off his tuxedo during the acceptance speech and posed like he did after scoring in the Champions League final last year, it might have made it a little ­edgier.

What would really have been left-field though was for Manuel Neuer to have won it. It probably is pretty left-field anyway that he was voted third and worth noting that UAE forward Ismail Matar was one of the few to vote him as the best.

Goalkeepers are not usually regarded as among the world’s best players. Only one – the legendary Russian Lev Yashin in 1963 – has ever been considered worthy of the accolade and that was when the Ballon d’Or was voted on by football writers, not Fifa.

Only four other goalkeepers have made the top three. Dino Zoff was second in 1973, Ivo Viktor third in 1976, Oliver Kahn third two years in a row in 2001 and 2002 and Gianluigi Buffon runner-up in 2006.

No goalkeeper other than Kahn in 2002 made the top three of the Fifa Player of the Year award, with which the Ballon d’Or is merged.

Goalkeepers inhabit an inescapable catch-22: needing their team to be poor defensively so that they can show off their skills, while also needing the defence to be good enough to win trophies so that the keeper has a chance to be recognised at year-end awards.

This is the predicament of David de Gea.

Was there a case to say Neuer was the world’s best player last year? He was certainly one of its most successful.

Also see: 2014's 10 best goals (including d'Or award winner James Rodriguez)

He was also one of its most pioneering, breaking through the long-frozen frontiers of his profession and expanding the potential of the role in a way no one had done before.

On the back of several years of sustained quality, 2014 felt like a peak for Neuer – captured best by that nonchalant one-handed save to deny Benzema and France an injury-time equaliser in the World Cup quarter-final.

It looked like he was high-fiving what was a fiercely-struck shot. In making a stupendously difficult act look so mundane, so unpractised, Neuer was exhibiting Ronaldo and Messi-level genius.

This may sound as if this moment in time – with Messi and Ronaldo, together – is not being cherished enough; that overexposure to how extraordinary they are can sometimes fool us into imagining it to be ordinary – another game, another hat-trick, yes, move on.

The big four in men’s tennis has been like that.

We should not take it for granted because years from now, you can be sure, we will be complaining that days are not as golden as they were when Ronaldo and Messi played.

As radical as it may have been, it would not have felt gimmicky or undeserved if Neuer had won.

He would have won it for his individual excellence and not as some upstanding token of a long-ignored breed.

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