As baseball fields go, there aren’t many better views than the one from AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, on the edge of the bay as it sweeps towards the Bay Bridge and close enough to McCovey Cove there is always the temptation for anyone in the batter’s box to add their name to the list of sluggers who have sent one into the water for a “splash-hit”.
It was an unusual place to find Everton playing Juventus in a pre-season friendly in 2013 but, glossing over the fact Roberto Martínez’s team were competing in a tournament called the International Champions’ Cup, something happened in the penalty shootout at the end of that match that has lingered in the memory.
A couple of things, actually, because that was also the evening Andrea Pirlo showed he was not as infallible from 12 yards as everybody thought. Pirlo strolled up to his penalty with the insouciance of a man walking his dog in Pacific Heights. He always looked so effortlessly suave, with that immaculate hair and the pirate’s beard, and the mind went back to the previous summer, at Euro 2012, and the exquisite chip to bring the gurning, arm-flapping Joe Hart down a peg or two.
Except Pirlo put his shot wide of Tim Howard’s goal and he was still shaking his head when the youngest player in Everton’s team crossed him on the walk from the centre-circle. John Stones was 19. He had never played a competitive first-team fixture for Everton at that stage and Pirlo, one imagines, probably didn’t even know his name. Stones played his shot with the delicacy of a champion golfer holing in from off the green. It was the Panenka again, followed by a little hand gesture, as cocky as it gets, beckoning the goalkeeper, Marco Storari, to pick himself off the floor. Stones, a lanky kid from Barnsley, had done a Pirlo with the man himself among the audience.
There are not many footballers, never mind teenage centre-halves, with that kind of audacity and self-belief and, two years on, it is easy to see why David Moyes, the manager who signed him for £3m, always felt Stones was so elegant on the ball he could easily play in midfield.
Moyes’s only reservation about Stones as an out-and-out defender was that he needed to add some old-fashioned studs-and-thuds ruthlessness to prevent himself being vulnerable against a centre-forward in the mould of, say, Mick Harford. Except there aren’t many Harford-type players in the Premier League these days.
Stones represents a more refined type of stopper – a playmaker as well as a play-breaker – and when it comes to Chelsea’s advances we need only think back to his performance at Stamford Bridge in February to understand why they clearly have no intention of following Everton’s request to back off. Stones was the outstanding performer that night by some distance, desperately unlucky to be on the losing side, and there was one moment, chasing after Loïc Rémy, when he won the ball so cleanly, sliding in at full-length but still having the control and skill to emerge with it at his feet, it was reminiscent of some of Bobby Moore’s tackles.
If that sounds like a dangerous comparison then Stones is still some way short of the defensive knowhow that once compelled the sportswriter David Miller to observe that trying to find a way past Moore was like searching for the exit from Hampton Court maze. Stones can be too casual sometimes. There are occasional moments to remind everyone he has started 38 games in the Premier League and, as might be expected for someone of that age, he is still at that stage where his concentration can occasionally waver.
However, it isn’t difficult to understand why José Mourinho wants to make him his next acquisition and, if anything, it is just surprising Chelsea have not gone higher with their opening attempts to break Everton’s resolve. The first bid of £20m was little more than a tease. The second one, £26m, was comparatively high but in today’s market another piece of positioning.
Neither bid was ever going to be accepted and, though it isn’t always easy working out how clubs value players these days, let’s think back to the conversation Moyes had with Wayne Rooney when he started as manager at Manchester United a couple of years ago and Chelsea were trying to sign the striker. Moyes felt Rooney had slipped into the comfort zone and asked him whether he thought he was still a top player. Rooney replied that he did. Then Moyes came back with the killer line: “Then why have Chelsea offered only £25m for you?”
Stones is undoubtedly a grade-A player in the making, a potential England international for the next 10 years, and if Luke Shaw was worth £30m a year ago and Raheem Sterling is now valued at £49m, Everton are fully entitled to think Chelsea have come in pretty low. Chelsea sold David Luiz for £50m last summer and, whatever that says about Paris Saint-Germain, it still influences the market. If Mourinho believes Stones is qualified to graduate as John Terry’s successor, he cannot possibly think Everton are going to accept less than they banked for Marouane Fellaini two years ago.
What we have now is a staring contest between the two clubs. The assumption is that Everton will blink once Chelsea – and so far it has all been a strategy on the part of the London club – get to a more realistic figure of £35m and it is a surprise, perhaps, that the two Manchester clubs have not tried to intervene given what they could gain and, just as importantly, what they stand to lose.
United, in particular, have been looking for a centre-half for longer than they would probably care to remember. Ideally, that would be a more experienced player who could immediately slot in as the lynchpin of their defence, but they were led down Sergio Ramos’s garden path earlier in the summer. The gate was slammed shut and Ramos, with utter predictability, now has a new contract from Real Madrid.
As for City, they appear to be pinning their hopes on Eliaquim Mangala having a far more productive second season in English football and Vincent Kompany no longer being troubled by the recurring injury issues that have undermined his performances and damaged his status as one of the league’s more authoritative players. Neither, however, can be guaranteed. Kompany turns 30 this season and Martín Demichelis will be 35 in December. There has been a dearth of outstanding centre-backs on the market for the past few years and Stones – young, English, exceptionally talented – would be a formidable opponent. Mourinho has an appreciation of defence that Martínez does not possess and the improvement in Stones could be considerable.
All of that is assuming Stones’s current employer will eventually agree to sell him. Everton are a proud club and will not want to bend for anybody if it makes them look weak. They did, lest it be forgotten, repel United’s advances for Leighton Baines two summers ago and, in one sense, it would be nice to think that when a club say their player is not for sale at any price – as, say, Liverpool did for Sterling – they mean it, rather than it simply being part of the bargaining process. Martínez’s whole ethos has been to build a team around his best young players. They could make a fortune selling Stones but, in another sense, they would be poorer for it.
Unfortunately for them, the clubs at the top always come knocking when there is someone worthy of their attention and it isn’t always easy turning them away at the door. That is just the football business, just like it was for Barnsley lower down the food chain, and that presumably is why Chelsea seem sure they will get their man. There are not many occasions in the modern era when the super-rich don’t get their own way.
Slaven Bilic is mistaken about Croatia’s history of racism
Presumably it is because Slaven Bilic has only just returned to English football, where he has always been well liked, that so little has been made of his comments that it was “not racist” to mark a swastika into the pitch before an international match.
According to Bilic, the people who applied a chemical agent on the grass to form the swastika before Croatia’s last game against Italy were “doing it just for the sake of doing it”. The new West Ham manager went on to explain it was basically attention-seeking rather anything more sinister “because, nowadays, with this media, if you do something you are on YouTube all over the world, and you find yourself a hero for that group of people.”
To recap, Croatia’s record for offences of these nature is so long and comprehensive – including supporters forming a human swastika at one international – the latest case led to them being docked a point from their Euro 2016 qualifying campaign, as well as being fined and ordered to play two matches behind closed doors. They were already playing the Italy game in front of an empty stadium because of racist chanting in their previous match against Norway, when the CFF, the national football federation, turned its anger on Zoran Stevanovic, who works with Uefa as head of Fare – Football Against Racism in Europe – and publicly blamed him for having the temerity to report what had happened.
Bilic has spoken out about racism before so, to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was just a poor choice of words. But when you consider Croatia’s history of reoffending and the number of people involved it does stick in the craw a bit when he says the CFF could not be doing any more and claims that it is “maybe 10 or 100, but it is no more than that, who are doing these things”.
