DIEGO MARADONA HAS BEEN THE World Cup’s highest-profile fan, a working-class millionaire who wears his heart on his sleeve and his extra-large Argentina shirt on his middle-aged belly. His palpable love of the game is refreshing for anyone who views footballers as jaundiced mercenaries and the name on his lips yesterday was that of Francesc Fàbregas.
“I hope you carry on playing football like that,” was Maradona’s message to Fàbregas after the Arsenal teenager had inspired Spain’s comeback against Tunisia and spared his team a humiliating fall to earth. “It was spectacular.”
Speaking on Cuatro, the Spanish television station, Maradona enthused about the impact made by Fàbregas after his arrival as a half-time substitute. He created two goals, tested a goalkeeper old enough to be his father and continued to make a cliché of every Ab Fab headline. Maradona was left in no doubt; on a wet Monday night in Stuttgart, Fàbregas had become a man. “Cesc gave Spain the final ball that it was lacking in the first half,” he enthused.
Albeit tied by their backgrounds as Barcelona prodigies, it would be overstating the case to say that the baton has been passed from the hand of god to the nimble feet of a North London demigod, but Fàbregas has given Luis Aragonés, the Spain coach, cause for thought as he plots a way through the knockout phases and the country’s traditional insecurities.
Can he still ignore a 19-year-old whose pace and precision revitalised a Spain midfield who had been neat and tidy but largely ineffective until he came on? “That’s the boss’s decision,” Fàbregas said. “I had the opportunity, I tried to do my best and I’m happy with what I’ve done.” Aragonés certainly seemed to be oiling the bandwagon after the match. “Cesc interpreted his role really well,” he said. “He directed the team to play our game.”
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To do that at a World Cup evinces a lustrous ability that previously shone brightest when he dethroned Patrick Vieira in the Champions League quarter-final between Arsenal and Juventus, scoring a goal and scampering over the generation gap. Marcos Senna, the Villarreal player, is now in danger of losing his place, his pre-tournament comment that Fàbregas was not the future of Spain but the present having a prophetic ring to it.
Xabi Alonso, the Liverpool midfield schemer, did his best as a lobbyist. “I’m not surprised because we know what he can do, we see what he does in training every day,” he said. “He is not fazed by the World Cup. He is very young, but he shows a maturity on the pitch and has the ability to show what a great player he is and how important he is to us. He has an old head on young shoulders.”
Fàbregas’s 45-minute cameo spared Spain their blushes, an inquest and the wrath of a media that instead spent yesterday celebrating the team’s best start to a World Cup. Aragonés remarked that it is time for Spain to live up to expectations and close the gap on the “great teams”, but he will be alarmed by the weaknesses exposed by a Tunisia team who had needed a stoppage-time goal to draw with Saudi Arabia.
In putting Raúl on the bench, Aragonés has shown that he is happy to resist popular opinion, but it may prove false pride to keep Fàbregas in the wings of the bigger stages ahead. He has already become Spain’s youngest player at a World Cup finals by a year; now Maradona is not alone in thinking that he can become their most influential one.
“At half-time, he [Aragonés] just said try and play the same way, nothing different, just try to turn it around,” Fàbregas said.
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Certainly, with Maradona’s blessing and the possibility of Thierry Henry lining up against him in the last 16, there is no chance of Fàbregas remaining a semi-secret weapon. “It could be very difficult because they are a great side and an experienced side, but I think we are showing people that we don’t have to be scared of anyone,” Fàbregas said of a possible meeting with France. “Of course, I know Thierry and Patrick well from the training ground at Arsenal. It would be very difficult, but not impossible.”
The same might be said of Spain’s attempts to advance beyond the quarter-finals for the first time since 1950. Their expected opponents in the last eight are Brazil. Argentina, in the shape of Maradona, expects.