Makelele:The French Water Carrier

Makelele: The French Water-Carrier

People associate the job of a water-carrier with him, an unenviable job in which all he has to do is stop the opposition’s moves and pass the ball unselfishly to his teammates. He is a sort of player who hardly evokes much inspiration, someone who would hardly make a 10-year old wild-eyed boy jump with excitement(provided of course you are not Javier Mascherano). Yet he is indispensable, a player whom you do not notice until he is not there. For over 15 years Claude Makelele has been playing, well, the ‘Makelele Role’ and now he is seemingly on his way out of the footballing realm. His contract at Chelsea came to an end in the summer and he is now at Paris Saint Germain on a one-year contract with an option to play for one more season. Yet Claude Makelele has left behind a legacy that, although not Zidane-esquely glittering, is certainly monumental. The 35-year old Frenchman has come to define the entire role of the defensive midfielder in a game of football, a role that is now considered fundamental for any team’s success. All his life Claude Makelele has played the second fiddle: always the first to kickstart an attack, always the last to be acknowledged; a man who in spite of jokingly telling The Guardian in June 2003,”But you do have to believe in yourself, to sell yourself. There are too many great players to choose the very best in the world. So, it’s me, then,” the DR Congo born Frenchman has never quite relented, never begged for public attention, carrying out his job with the humility of a priest listening to confessions of sins. At Real Madrid You just need to ask some former Real Madrid players. Claude Makelele was not so much as booted out of the Bernabeu in 2003 as spitted out like Anaconda vomiting out Paul Sarone when the then Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, the self-conscious man who thought himself as an emperor but was more like Frankenstein unable to manage his monster, refused to hand him a better pay package and promptly sold him off to Chelsea, claiming, “We will not miss Makelele….Younger players will arrive who will cause Makelele to be forgotten.” Not that Perez was entirely wrong in his view, since in three years from 2000 to 2003 the Bernabeu had realized that although Makelele was an adept anchoring midfielder, his ball distribution left much to be desired and would moan and groan whenever Makelele would mispass a ball. Yet that was the pivotal move that crumbled Perez’s Galacticos policy leading Zidane to doubt,”Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?” and Fernando Hierro to note,”The loss of Makelele was the beginning of the end for Los Galacticos…You can see that it was also the beginning of a new dawn for Chelsea.” Makelele’s recruitment at Real Madrid in the summer of 2000 had been overshadowed by signing of the first Galactico Luis Figo but he had arrived after spending two successful seasons with Galician side Celta de Vigo. He would go onto feature in 126 league matches for Los Merengues and win the Spanish league title twice and the UEFA Champions League crown once. At Chelsea In football, one man’s loss is another man’s gain. Makelele at Chelsea was an even more success. Here too he went relatively unnoticed(until, to put it ridiculously, he was not playing) but at least he was receiving the due respect. The then Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho heaped Makelele with eulogy on every possible occasion and in five seasons at Chelsea, Makelele was not only the best defensive medio in the Premiership, he was the best in the world by a country mile. In over 200 league matches, Makelele could manage just two goals(and one of them was that goal against Spurs in November 2006) but he saved countless goals for the Blues and it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Chelsea without Makelele would have imbibed a different hue altogether. But then again, Claude Makelele is 35 and understandably is trekking towards the twilight of his career. He might still be in large parts an unsung hero but he has won everything there is to be won in club football. And glue that to a healthy 71 international appearances for France and you are forced to acknowledge his greatness. In the summer of 2008 Claude Makelele’s five-year contract at the London club expired and although there were calls for him to carry on playing for the Blues, the club decided to release him on a free transfer. Back In France And now the anchoring midfield genius is back in France, where he started his professional club football adventure with Nantes and progressed at Marseille. At PSG the pressure would be muted and the stress not severe as the Parisian aims to do better than a 16th place finish in French Ligue 1. Claude Makelele is not quite finished but he is nearing the point when he would have to bow out and then pass off in the mist of history as a footballing legend. Greatness, these days, is an often elaborated, overcooked and loosely used term. A single classy goal or a single Maradona-esque flick and you have commentators parroting the term ‘greatness” at the top of their voice. But when it comes to Claude Makelele, greatness actually doesn’t come anywhere near in describing the player who has almost radically altered the perception of a holding midfield player.