football, maths, life, whatever else...but mainly football and life

Monday, July 16, 2007

The Law of Zanetti

If there's one absolute law, rule, theorem, whatever in football, it's the following:

Pupi's law: Javier Zanetti can not play a bad game, no matter how bad his teammates play.




I have not seen in 10 years of football and watching him play one single bad game of him. You might argue that maybe I have seen too little games of him, but my friend who is Interista and has seen all of his games over the past 10 years doesn't remember a single bad game of him either. It's simply impossible. Just like Kepler's laws, Maxwell's laws, Gauss Theorem or whatever else you want to come up with, this is a law of football, that it's impossible to catch Javier Zanetti having a bad day, a bad game, or whatever else.

The worse it feels to see this great player not getting the full credit he deserves. While Cafu is regarded by many as the best rightback of the past decade, I would argue the case for Pupi, simply because in terms of consistency no one came even close to him. His problem seem to be that he is too nice of a guy and he always faced a moron as a coach, at least for Argentina.
Whether it was Passarella, who didn't take the great Redondo to the World Cup in 98, Bielsa who played the great but old and out of form Batistuta, over the great and in good form Hernan Crespo, or benched the great Pablito Aimar for the rubbish Ariel Ortega or Jose Pekerman, who somehow thought Scaloni and Coloccini are just as good as rightbacks as Zanetti is and didn't take him to the World Cup at all, it somehow wasn't meant to be for Javier to have the great success on national team level. And despite the two scudettos the past 2 years and the UEFA-Cup...don't get me started on his career at Inter.

All in all, Pupi for me was one of the main reasons I always had a soft spot for Inter, despite everything. All the best for his future career. In my book, he will go down as a legend and the model rightback and athlete.



Official Site
Fundacion PUPI

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Javier Zanetti is one of the very few argentine players who not only is a good player but he is also a good person. Actualy argentine players always tend to have a little animal within themselves which shows up every then and when and whenever they get under pressure. I never saw Zanetti geting out of himself, i never saw him play dirty. Thumbs up.

Ulague said...

that's really it. he always stays a gentleman, on and off the pitch. definetly one of the classiest people in world sports.