One of the spin-offs of football’s glitzy awards season is the secondary game of sour-grape spotting.
At the Ballon d’Or award, television viewers and news conference listeners look for resentment in the silver medallist.
This year they found Cristiano Ronaldo honourable enough at finishing second to Lionel Messi.
He has looked more churlish at other of the five occasions he has finished beneath Messi on the podium.
The really tart, acidic sour grapes were tasted at the Confederation of African Football’s equivalent to the Ballon d’Or, the naming of Africa’s best player in 2015, where Yaya Toure, finishing second to Pierre-Emerick Aubamayeng in a ranking he had topped the previous four years, expressed his surprise at not winning again.
Speaking to Afrique Foot, Toure said “Africans favour more what’s abroad than our own continent, and that is pathetic”.
'Pathetic, indecent, unfair': Man City's Yaya Toure in stunning outburst after losing African player award
He reckoned that being part of the Ivory Coast team who won the Cup of Nations last year ought to have made it his best year in the last five rather than a year in which the Gabon striker Aubamayeng’s stand-out goalscoring for Borussia Dortmund would not only trump Toure’s own achievements with Manchester City but count for more than Ivory Coast’s historic win in Africa’s showpiece tournament.
Toure can be a puzzling character. He is a majestic, match-winning footballer, and probably unlucky never to have been the Premier League’s Player of the Year in at least one of the three or four seasons when he has truly galvanised City.
An articulate man, he can also seem strangely needy. Recall the complaint of his agent that on his birthday, City had not made enough of a fuss of him.
Toure endorsed his representative’s authority to speak on his behalf when that surreal story gathered headlines, and indeed, raised eyebrows.
The knee jerk response when a valued, coveted footballer expresses any sort of unhappiness is to wonder if he wants to move elsewhere.
Toure, 32, was not criticising City when he grumbled about finished second in the Caf vote, he was grumbling about the Caf vote, but it would be understandable if he was minded to wonder, in a January where his status as his continent’s leading figurehead in its most popular sport was challenged, whether there might be a few more silver medals, not golds, coming his way.
Another one, perhaps, like last season’s in the Premier League, where City have not fully taken advantage of Chelsea’s muddled defence of their English title.
A few days after Toure’s petulant reaction to Aubamayeng’s prize-giving, another leading star of the game apologised for not respecting a variety of people in the No 1 position in their fields.
Pep Guardiola, a coach widely regarded as peerless in his profession, had publicly expressed his desire to take up, next July, a job in the Premier League.
He knows he will be offered several good ones. City are well placed in the queue waiting for him to say ‘Yes’.
Guardiola, who last month told current employers Bayern Munich he would not be extending his contract with them at the end of this season, then apologised for saying he wanted a Premier League job, acknowledging the subsequent speculation it had caused.
“I have always respected my colleagues,” he insisted, acknowledging that one of them would, by definition, have to vacate a job in order for him to occupy a Premier League bench.
City already have a successful manager, Manuel Pellegrini, though Pellegrini frequently gives indications he would not surprised if Guardiola replaces him.
If Guardiola does, many in City’s squad should anticipate changes to their status. Toure could advise them of that.
The Ivorian was a Barcelona player when Guardiola launched his stellar managerial career. The pair have a past. It is not a negative past, by any means.
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Toure featured in the treble-winning Barcelona, under the novice Guardiola in 2008/09, did great service for Barcelona by taking up, in emergency, a centre-back role in the semi-finals and final, of the Uefa Champions League that season.
But, by the end of the next season, 2009/10, he had become dispensable at Barcelona. City offered a large fee for him which Barcelona accepted.
Guardiola had by then established that Sergio Busquets was his preferred anchor midfield player, which was the position in which Toure was most often used by Barca.
What Toure was not, according to Barcelona’s coaches, was as adept as other midfielders there at keeping to his designated role in the rigorous tactical vision Guardiola liked. What he was not, either, was a front-line taker of direct free-kicks.
As Toure told this writer recently: “At Barcelona, in my time, there was Ronaldinho, then Deco, then Xavi or Messi to take free-kicks. Even at training, Deco told me I was too young to do it.”
City’s gain has been to see, and exploit, more in Toure’s brilliant repertoire than the Barcelona of Frank Rijkaard, Guardiola’s predecessor, or Guardiola himself did, to channel the best from an attacking midfielder with a goalscoring knack – Toure has more than 50 goals in well under 200 games for City.
Barca, under Guardiola, went on to thrive without him, but his transfer to City was good for City and good for a player who some at Barcelona had suspected might become more prone to back and muscle injuries than he actually has been as he approached and entered his 30s.
So any marriage between City and Guardiola, a union that seems likely, will be intriguing for what it means for Toure, more than almost any player.
He is a hero in the blue half of Manchester, far more than Guardiola would be initially, and apparently more than he feels he is in Africa.
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