David Villa’s time at Melbourne City will be remembered as short but sweet. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images
Melbourne, as any Melburnian with functioning vocal cords will tell you, is the sporting capital of the known universe. And we’d be right too — Sir Donald Bradman, Rod Laver, Ron Clarke, Roger Federer, Dawn Fraser, Betty Cuthbert, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Lionel Messi and Graeme Souness, to name but a handful, have all expressed their talent here to capacity crowds. But never in this city’s 179-year history has it been home to a truly world-class practitioner, at or near his prime, of what is by any measure the world’s most popular game — association football — plying his trade at a competitive level for a local club. Until now.
For most of the past decade, David Villa has been the obsidian spear tip of, arguably, the greatest international sports team in the history of the world. It was Villa who, more than any other individual, was personally responsible for converting the sublime, symphonic, collective passing artistry of Spain (circa 2006 to 2014) into the hard currency of goals which won matches and tournaments. For all the justifiable praise heaped upon the artists who saw and made those passes — Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, Cesc Fàbregas and Xabi Alonso — their works of art would have signified nothing in the absence of the finishing touches of Euclidean precision applied by Villa.
No-one knew this better than Pep Guardiola, the man widely regarded as most responsible, in an immediate philosophical sense, for the recent flourishing of that Spanish passing art. In April 2012, after his Barcelona side, deprived of the services of Villa through injury, blew a truckload of goal-scoring chances in the first away leg of their Champions League semi-final against Chelsea, Guardiola observed — presciently, as it turned out — that: “The game is about putting the football in the goal. It is the most difficult thing in the game.”
Villa did that thing better than anyone else in the world, quite possibly better than any other human being has ever done. And he’s here, a stone’s throw from the Yarra, to do it for Melbourne City Football Club on this spring evening. According to the early June announcement on Melbourne City’s official website, Villa “will play, train and contribute to Melbourne City FC-s Hyundai A-League campaign between October and December 2014”.
It’s October now. And Villa has already scored a goal in each of his first two games for Melbourne City. As I walk down Harbour Esplanade towards Docklands Stadium, I hope he can make it three (or perhaps even four or five) from three in this evening’s Melbourne derby. The sun is setting low on the horizon over Victoria Harbour, its light reflecting fiercely off the still water. Thank Jebus I remembered to bring my sunnies. All around me I see people clad in navy blue Victory shirts — crossing the road, milling about the stadium, and drinking (lawfully) and talking loudly in an outdoor bar on the stadium’s outer edge.
The match is a sell-out and the atmosphere is one of audible, palpable excitement, but sans the mildly dangerous edge that accompanies so many of the derby games that I’ve been to in Europe over the years. I spy a grand total of one divvy van cruising down Harbour Esplanade, but no horse-mounted riot police or armoured military trucks à la the CSKA-Spartak derby at Arena Khimki on the outskirts of Moscow in late 2010. That’s a good thing. I’m all for passion in football, but wanton acts of violence — not so much.
In order to avoid the queues at the general admission gates, I flash my press pass to enter the stadium via the outdoor bar on its outer edge. For the first time in my life, I find myself in what looks like a members-only area of Docklands Stadium. I think it might be a Melbourne Victory members’ or Medallion Club members’ lounge/bar/casual dining area. I’m not entirely sure. What I am sure about is that, in a town where even a scoop of ice cream or a coffee can now set you back four bucks, $11.50 for “Herb and spice rubbed Gippsland beef [s]erved in a crusty roll filled with Etihad coleslaw” sounds like a bargain. No wonder there’s a sizeable queue leading up to the stylish counter where a professionally attired chef slices up the delicious-smelling beef. I abstain on the basis that, like any self-respecting freelance writer, I fully intend to gorge myself on the free grub in the press box.
I exit the casual dining area and go for a stroll around the general admission areas. What I see is this: the FFA’s dream of an inclusive, multicultural, multiethnic, family-friendly national football competition made flesh. There are pre-teenage kids and families everywhere, way more than I’ve ever seen at a European derby. I nearly trip over a team of under-11s who’ve come from their Saturday match straight to the stadium, still dressed in their red kit. There are Australians of all colours and backgrounds here — Anglo-Celtic, south and central European, east Asian, south Asian and African. It’s not hard to work out why — the slightly dangerous edge felt at so many European derbies is absent here, but not at the cost of genuine passion and excitement.
City are warming up at the Lockett End (otherwise known as the South End). Victory are warming up at the Coventry End (otherwise known as the North End). It seems fitting that Villa will make his Melbourne derby debut at a ground where both ends are named after legendary AFL full-forwards, pure goal scorers. It’s a Victory home game so, naturally, I expected Victory fans to outnumber City fans, but not quite to this degree. Victory fans own both ends behind the goals and the only group of City fans that I can see in the entire stadium is the small cluster situated on the left wing near the Coventry End where the City players are warming up.
Yet, it is the City fans who look more pumped. As their players warm up in front of them, they sing, chant, clap and wave their scarves. They only quieten down after the City players move over to the opposite wing to continue their warm-up. The famously vocal Victory fans are strangely subdued.
The City players move onto the final stage of their warm-up. They split into three groups. The forwards trot off towards goal to work on their shooting. It doesn’t take me long to find Villa — like an American football quarterback in a team training session, he is wearing a bright-coloured bib (in his case, yellow) that distinguishes him from his colleagues. The forwards take turns playing the ball to the feet of a coach with his back to goal on the edge of the box, then dashing forward to receive the return pass and unleash a shot at goal. Even during this simplest of training drills, the gulf in quality between Villa and most of his colleagues is evident. Whilst most of the City players, including the Premier League-winning winger Damien Duff, fail to score with a substantial proportion of their shots, Villa calmly (and successfully) works his way through his full repertoire of finishes, scoring at the first attempt with almost every one.
The Victory fans at the Coventry End hoist up three signs directed squarely at the City (nee Heart) fans: “Change your name”, “Change your colour$” and “This city will always be ours”. Cheeky, but not nasty. Are there flares? Hell yeah. Yellow and red to be precise. The Victory team walk out onto the pitch to the strains of Ben E King’s Stand By Me. The 43,729-strong home Victory crowd hold their scarves up and make a decent fist of singing the song. I’m a tad (pleasantly) surprised by their vocal efforts — most Australians (myself included) can’t even sing the second verse of the national anthem.
The match itself — a rollicking seven-goal affair — is a neutral’s wet dream. City dominate the opening exchanges. Within five minutes of kick-off, City win the ball back in midfield and play a quick ball out to Villa on the left. He glides inside onto his favoured right foot and spreads the ball out to Duff on the opposite right wing who drives towards the right byeline then cuts the ball back towards the penalty spot — just out of Villa’s reach. This is pretty much City’s Plan A: playing quick balls to the feet of their world-class wide forwards then encouraging them to get to the byeline and cut the ball back to a teammate to slam home. That’s precisely how City created Villa’s equaliser against Sydney FC.
Two things are immediately apparent about Villa when you see him play in the flesh: his speed and his technical economy. Despite being middle-aged (32) for a modern professional footballer, Villa is still so much quicker than his opponents, gliding effortlessly across the pitch like a stream of water down a hill, that he reminded me of Fred, the Brazilian star of Victory’s first double-winning side, who used to just pick up the ball and run past defenders. Villa does dribble, but he does so efficiently — he does what is necessary to get past the defender, no more no less; there are no extravagant flourishes.
Villa’s first shot on target comes as early as the seventh minute: a left-foot shot from an acute angle on the left, after wriggling and spinning through a quartet of Victory defenders, that is saved by the Victory keeper, Nathan Coe, at his near post. Three minutes later, City play the ball quickly to Villa’s feet and he tries to chip the Victory keeper with a four-iron from 30 yards out. His shot’s on target but Coe comfortably gets back in time to make the save.
Villa is excellent in the first half. He is a constant, reliable outlet on the left, always willing to get on the ball, and makes intelligent vertical runs in behind Victory’s defence to receive diagonal balls. But for Coe’s perfectly timed interception one such ball would’ve put Villa clean through on Victory’s goal. As the first half draws to a close, City are leading 2-1 and banging on the door to add more — a Villa back-heel deep on the left-wing starts a gorgeous, flowing move that nearly results in a tap-in for Duff, and Duff curls a ball just outside Coe’s far post.
The match turns on its head deep in first half stoppage time when four City players, including Villa, try and fail to win the ball off the irrepressible Kosta Barbarouses as he bustles into City’s box from the right flank. Victory score, then score again in the first 30 seconds of the second half to go 3-2 up and, from that point on, as City manager John van’t Schip himself practically admitted in the post-match press conference his team had been mentally defeated — “just after half-time, immediately, the 3-2, the boys didn’t recover from that”. Victory ran out 5-2 winners and it could easily have been more.
After sparkling in the first half of the derby, Villa has little impact on the second half. When the full-time whistle blows, Villa carefully unwinds his wrist tape, picks up a drink from a runner then walks impassively down the tunnel. The rest of his City teammates stay on the pitch to shake hands with the Victory players.
Perhaps Villa was discomforted by the sudden, awkward announcement, just three days before the Melbourne derby, that he would be leaving for New York just one month into his scheduled three month stint in Melbourne in order to fulfil marketing commitments with his club New York City FC and help his family settle into New York. Perhaps there was a language communication difficulty of some kind. At half-time, van’t Schip’s team talk was beamed live onto a TV in the press box. Villa was seated in the front row. There was no translator in sight, which might have been problematic given that Villa’s English is so non-existent that his friend Cesc Fàbregas once joked that he couldn’t even say hello in English.
Whatever the reason for Villa’s walk-off, it was a deflating way to end what looks to be his second-last game for Melbourne City. It’s a shame really — if he gave Melbourne a proper go, he’d find that Melburnians would be happy to embrace a world-class footballer of humble mining stock whose original goal-scoring celebration was to mimic the distinctive cider-pouring action of his native Asturias.
