‘This architect was Toyah’s idea, not mine,’ said Zarco. ‘I tell her, you want a house that looks Australian then go and live in Australia. This is London. This is where I live, this is where I make my living. Let’s have a house that looks like a London house, not the Sydney fucking Opera House. But this isn’t good enough for her and as usual Toyah gets her way. I swear, this woman is more difficult than any footballer I have ever had to deal with.’
‘That’s why we love them, isn’t it? Because they’re not fucking footballers. They’re women, who smell nice and who have nice legs. That’s why we buy them expensive Christmas presents.’
‘Who says I buy her an expensive Christmas present? That’s you, Scott, not me. I don’t buy women presents. I don’t have time. You’re the one who likes to buy presents.’
‘You must have bought her something, surely?’
Zarco grinned. ‘Toyah’s married to Zarco. She doesn’t need a Christmas present.’
9
Elland Road, the home of Leeds United FC, is no place for the faint-hearted in January. Even on a midsummer’s day the area is as bleak as the hair on a witch’s tit, but in winter a northwest wind whips off the Yorkshire Dales and seems to take the spirit right out of you. Doubly so when you consider that the stadium is right next to Cottingley Crematorium and they do say that sometimes, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, you can catch the pungent whiff of an afternoon service of remembrance. The beautiful game was rarely ever played in Leeds and certainly never when Billy Bremner was the Leeds captain back in the seventies, a time when Leeds United was one of the dirtiest sides in football. And I have the marks on my shins to prove it wasn’t much better in the nineties and noughties, when David O’Leary was the manager and the likes of Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were there.
Although my father knew Billy Bremner very well — Bremner captained Scotland at the 1974 World Cup — I met the man only once, not long before his untimely death in 1997. I mention Billy Bremner because I think there’s something very wrong about the statue of Billy that stands outside Elland Road. It’s only my opinion, but Billy Bremner looks like he’s black. In reality the diminutive Scotsman, who was born near Stirling, was a pasty-looking white man with red hair. I don’t know why the Billy outside Elland Road should appear to be black but it’s as if he’s been partly cremated in the crematorium nearby. The hair is the right colour, as it happens, and so is the Leeds shirt, but every time I see it I have a laugh because I’m sure Billy would have fucking hated it. Even the statue of Michael Jackson that used to stand outside Craven Cottage is more true to life than Billy’s statue; weirdly, Billy is blacker than Michael is, although maybe that’s not so strange. Anyway, Billy just looks creepy, like a shitty piece of sculpture by Jeff Koons, or a statue of a saint you might see in a shrine in Cuba or Haiti, as if he might come alive to put the fear of God and voodoo into any team turning up to play Leeds at Elland Road. Maybe that’s the idea. If so then it might work even better if the supporters were to carry it round the pitch before the match, because it certainly wasn’t working for Leeds when London City went there for the third round FA Cup tie.
Nothing was. Not even a spectacularly tasteless song about Zarco from Leeds fans.
It was Leeds United’s second loss in a new year that was only seven days old and their worst result since losing 7–3 to Nottingham Forest in March 2012. Christoph Bündchen, replacing Ayrton Taylor up front as our number one striker, gave City fans a very late Twelfth Night present of five golden goals in an eight-goal rout of Leeds United that proceeded without reply. This was the biggest win in our club’s history and it was doubly fortunate that Viktor Sokolnikov had flown back from the Caribbean aboard his private Boeing 767–300 just to see the match.
Bündchen was City’s hero but Juan-Luis Dominguin also scored two, and this was after Xavier Pepe made a forty-yard strike that was the first of the evening and already looks like being the goal of the season — a top-drawer goal conjured from absolutely nothing, which departed his right foot like an arrow from a longbow. There was nothing speculative about Pepe’s incredible strike: by contrast, Andrea Pirlo’s curling goal for Milan against Parma in 2010 seems like a long shot, in its full idiomatic meaning. Pepe’s shot was something else: head down, with every sinew of his muscular body engaged, he knew exactly what he was doing and the ball flew as straight as a high-velocity bullet. By the time the Leeds goalkeeper, Paddy Kenny, had started to move for it, the football was already in the top corner of his net. Small wonder that Pepe was recently ranked by Bloomberg as the seventh best footballer in Europe.
But it was Christoph Bündchen who gave the Leeds manager nightmares, and perhaps not just him. Bündchen is only twenty-one years old and has yet to be picked for his home country of Germany, and this prompted me to think that if the German manager, Joachim Löw, hasn’t yet found a place in his team for a player of Bündchen’s goal-scoring ability, then Roy Hodgson’s England had better watch out for the rest of the German team. It’s true that Christoph’s first goal was a well-taken penalty after a clumsy challenge brought Pepe down in the box when the score was ‘only’ 3–0. But the next four goals scored by the young German were nothing short of sublime, and at one stage it seemed as if it were Leeds United versus Christoph Bündchen, who, incredibly, doesn’t seem to have been ranked by Bloomberg at all. What made this even more satisfying to me was that I had persuaded Zarco to pay the German club FC Augsburg just four million quid for the boy when we joined City in the summer.
It wasn’t that Leeds failed to take their chances; in truth they only ever seemed to have one chance in the whole match and that was soon after Pepe’s goal when Lewis Walters intercepted a nonchalant pass by the City centre back, Ross Field, and chipped our reserve goalkeeper, Roberto Forlan — who had little else to do all evening — only to find our captain, the ever-reliable Ken Okri, hack his effort off the line.
At half time it was 4–0 and the lads seemed to take Zarco at his word when he told them to go and enjoy themselves and do the same in the second half as they had done in the first.
After that Leeds were seldom threatening. The fifth goal came within seconds of the game restarting when another scorching shot from Pepe was well saved by Paddy Kenny; he then rolled the ball out to Kevin Beech, who found Bündchen on him in a flash. Beech attempted a desperate square pass to Stefan Signoret but Bündchen read it as if it had been written on the advertising hoarding in six-foot-high letters, intercepted the ball at speed, sold the poor keeper a sweet dummy and then toed the ball across the line. 5–0.
Bündchen’s third goal was pure magic and was made more impressive by the near superhuman length of his stride. Bündchen is well over six feet tall and looks more like a defender than a striker, which makes him very intimidating when he’s running flat out at you. Scornfully hurdling trailing legs that looked like obvious penalties if they’d brought him down, and selling dummies as if the Leeds players were toddlers in highchairs, the German must have changed direction three times before he found the space for a shot that he seemed to dig out of the grass, and which left the poor keeper dumped on his backside with his head in his hands. For all the world it looked as if he was just checking he could still hold onto something round. Zarco ran the length of his technical area in celebration, threw himself onto his knees and slid for several yards, ruining the trousers of a good suit and looking like someone who was already in training for Strictly Come Dancing on Ice.