The Chelsea Exiles don’t see too much of one another, Crespo reports. He and Veron were close colleagues, but he won’t go so far as to declare that they are “amigos” — “that’s a big word” — and he will say hello to Mutu when he next bumps into him. The exiles have different reasons for departing, but all are back in the nation that gave them their happiest times professionally. Veron is playing well at Inter, if not with all his old flourish and swagger.
Mutu remains banned from competitive football until May after testing positive for cocaine. The ban expires just before the Champions League final, though it is fanciful to imagine that he would play any part in it. And Crespo? Well, Crespo thrives. Without him, there might be much less of a title race in Italy. Consider that halfway through November, Juventus led the table by six points and were conceding an average of one goal every three games while Milan, in second place, were anxiously studying their dependence on Andriy Shevchenko. Then Crespo, 29, stepped forward. He now has nine goals from 17 starts, seven since December. With Shevchenko injured in last night’s defeat of Cagliari and ruled out of the first leg against United, Milan have even more reason to be grateful for Crespo’s resurgence.
So he’s happy then? He is, although there was something nagging at the back of his mind when we met in Milan nine days ago, and Crespo kept returning to it. It concerned his unfulfilling time in English football, 11 months on board the Abramovich juggernaut. Chelsea paid about £16m to Inter in the summer of 2003 to recruit the striker, and although his appearances were interrupted by injury, he still scored goals with something close to his usual frequency when he did play. But when Jose Mourinho, the new Chelsea coach, met his squad in July, he quickly got the picture: Crespo did not feel at home in London. “He’s obviously someone who listens,” Crespo recalls of his meeting with Mourinho. “He said that he wanted me to stay but he understood my situation at a human level, and that’s not a small thing in our profession.”
So Milan offered to pay some of Crespo’s salary and will probably negotiate a price to take him for good when the loan expires in June. What went wrong at Chelsea? First, Crespo arrived still recovering from a thigh injury and had no pre-season. “I never got a run going,” he explains, “or a sense of continuity. If you look at my goals ratio, it wasn’t too bad 10 in 13 Premiership starts but football is the easiest bit. It’s up here that’s important,” he said, tapping his forehead. “If you’re not happy here, then you will not be at your best.”
Crespo is an intelligent man and like a lot of Argentinians, he likes to talk. But in London he found learning English a fearsome challenge. He encountered barriers when the electrician came round to his house and when an engineer turned up to install the internet. These hardly count as hazards over which a multi-million-pound career should stumble, but Crespo uses them as examples of his frustration. “My problems weren’t about the football, they were more social,” he says. “I found it hard getting used to another culture.”
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He was also at a club making its own cultural leap, from the edge of penury to extravagant plenty. “It was a time of big, big changes at Chelsea, the first year of Abramovich, and you don’t expect everything to be perfect straight away when you have such a big set of changes.”
Did things improve in that respect? “You’d expect it to, because things usually settle down after a year. They would have reached a new level of organisation.” He leaves the impression that he felt alone: “Let’s say that in terms of taking on new players, clubs in Italy are different.” Milan, he continues, was a class above anything he’d known. “What sets Milan apart is the way they look after the players, the way of training, the level of organisation.”
It is assumed that he will want to stay there beyond June. “A part of me does, yes,” says Crespo. “But what still gets me is that I never really repaid the confidence Abramovich had shown in me and the support he gave me. My disappointment is that I was never able to show my true standard in England.”
He has an early chance to put that right: on Wednesday, Manchester United play Milan at Old Trafford, where the Italian club won the last of its six European Cups two seasons ago. Milan have since turned a little more South American — apart from Crespo, there are Brazilians Cafu and Kaka in the team, veteran and Wunderkind. It is, says Crespo, a fine team to be a forward in, to have service from passers such as Andrea Pirlo and Kaka, the width given to them by the adventurous Cafu. “I’m happy to have got a run of games,” he says.
Few strikers in Serie A come with better guarantees than Crespo. He came to Italy in 1996, and although his impact with Parma was not instant, he soon established a ratio of a goal every two games. When Lazio, then coached by Sven- Göran Eriksson, launched their defence of the scudetto in 2000, they made him the most expensive footballer in the world at about £38m. When Lazio’s creditors began to catch up with them in 2002, Inter signed him and he scored nine times in his first eight Champions League games. Then on to Chelsea and now Milan, his fifth club in six years.
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As for Wednesday, he’s given some thought to another duel with Rio Ferdinand. “I’ve got to know him a bit and although we haven’t spoken much is to blame, I’ve got to like him. As a marker, he’s one of the best. I remember from when I played for Lazio against Leeds.”
Crespo has also considered the aspect of the tie that most intrigues: teenagers Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo against a defence including Paolo Maldini, 36, Cafu, 34, and maybe Alessandro Costacurta, 38. “These guys like Maldini have achieved things again and again over a very long time,” he says. “The younger ones still have to show us why they’re thought to be so good.”
Crespo mentioned it to Gabriel Heinze when they played for Argentina two weeks ago. They talked about their new clubs. “He said how much he loves it in Manchester.”
It is a source of genuine regret to Crespo that he couldn’t say that about London. How will he feel when Chelsea, without him, win the Premiership, or if they win the Champions League? “I’ll be really pleased. They were great teammates and I never had a problem with any individuals there. I’ll be pleased especially for Abramovich, because he’s wanting to build something great and to do things right.”
And if Chelsea do much better than Milan? “The objective of any footballer is titles, and Chelsea are heading that way. But I’ll give you a metaphor: I’m sitting here, and in the next room is the bar. Let’s say that’s where I want to go. There are two doors to get there. One is locked. So I take the other door. The other door is Milan. The same objective is on the other side.”
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It’s just a metaphor. Crespo doesn’t need a bar, of course. He has no sorrows to drown.