The brontosaurus-thighed supreme competitor is an all-time England great. But as the former Arsenal and Tottenham defender leaves football, a decent send-off seems to be missing
Farewell, then, Sol Campbell. Although – like many others I suspect – I wasn't actually aware that you were still here in the first place. Campbell's announcement of his retirement this week was a characteristically perplexing piece of timing from a man who is 37-years old, hadn't played football in 409 days and who, it is fair to say, most people had simply assumed was already spending his time immersed in the ex-footballer's cycle of rigorous high-end leisure, strolling the Emirati shopping boulevards, recumbent inside a squash court-sized hot tub, occasionally attending the kind of charitable event that involves simply turning up somewhere grand and eating a quail's egg roulade sculpted into the shape of a malarial mosquito.
But apparently not. Campbell, one of England's two or three genuinely top-class international footballers of the last 20 years, has instead been spending his days fretting by the phone, ears-pricked, primed to leap up off his white leather corner sofa and strap himself back on to his horse one last time. And while it seems fitting that a footballer of such unyielding resistance should have clung on so doggedly, there is more than simply bad timing to the general lack of fanfare at the passing of a player who managed to embody both English football's much-trumpeted technical demerits but also, less fashionably, its outstanding qualities. Who also managed, for reasons that remain far from clear, to make quite a lot of people unaccountably, perplexingly cross. Campbell has gone! And it turns out nobody really seems to care much.
Perhaps it has been too easy, with the slackening of his powers, to forget how good he was in his pomp: veteran of five international tournaments, a Fifa select XI half-of-famer at consecutive World Cups, goalscorer in a Champions League final and, to date, England's greatest black footballer. Peak-era Campbell was a master of the concussive arts, a total defender immersed in the austere close quarter mechanics of his own smothering physicality, from his first appearances as a thrillingly athletic super-teenager to the telltale yearly enlarging of his already massive shorts which, towards the end, were closer in scale to a set of drawing room curtains or a bridal tablecloth.
Campbell was relentless: being marked by him must have felt a bit like like being repeatedly run over by a small van or trapped beneath an overturned piece of gym equipment. But he was also a spoiler who rarely spoilt, the cleanest of hugely physical players, a highly skilled human obstacle who, under pressure, reacted not with malice but by sinking into a kind of defensive-hypnosis, ever more focused, ever more minimal in his range of lunges and nudges and jiggles and jostles.
Of course, he was far from complete. In possession Campbell could resemble at times a guest athlete from another discipline, a football-curious strongman, a soccer-style grappling person. Playing for England, and exposed by a lack of midfield rhythm in front of him, he could occasionally make the ball look square, a horrible, helium-filled thing to be stamped and cuffed and punted fearfully. One of Glenn Hoddle's final games as manager was a stunningly ugly 0-0 draw against Bulgaria at Wembley, where Campbell seemed to have the ball pretty much all the time, constantly rumbling after it like an iron giant clanking off in pursuit of a passing butterfly, and spending what felt like hours scuffing and shanking, lofting and launching while 80,000 people fidgeted uncomfortably, like the audience at the world's worst ever one-man juggling show.
There were moments of course: who could forget Campbell's caveman-Maradona moment against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup where he smash-tackled his way half the length of the field, gaining momentum like a runaway motorbike sidecar, before shinning a bobbling ball just over the bar. But the galloping joy of that younger Campbell was rarely seen in his later years. Perhaps this is unsurprising. For an endearingly passionate, commendably scandal-free all-time England great, he attracted a surprising degree of animosity, both specific and diffuse. Most obviously there was the tribal hatred surrounding his move to Arsenal from Spurs, aggravated by Campbell concealing his intentions to the last, and worse, going on to win lots of medals. This isn't Rangers and Celtic though, or even Millwall and West Ham, and the response was still disproportionate: a trailing ambient fury of howls and jeers and wanker-signs that became for a while a portable personal soundtrack.
Perhaps it had something to do with English football's wider bafflement over Campbell, a coolness that never quite thawed, or reconciled itself to his vulnerability, his pensiveness, his failure to sit happily with the archetype of the raging, thrusting centre-half with a head like a blood-soaked butcher's block and a brain made entirely from canned pink man-meat. Campbell has been confusing for some: a beef-caked defensive warrior who also looks like he probably smells of something really nice; a brontosaurus-thighed supreme competitor who admits he doesn't like being shouted at and who could quite easily have a secret collection of really bad modern art, or unexpectedly want to talk about the novels of Anthony Trollope.
In many ways Campbell is perhaps simply unlucky. If he'd played in an England team that funnelled the ball about with more care we might have seen only the silkier side of his game, less of the hammer-footed channel-hoofer of those bleaker moments. Perhaps in a less intellectually-rounded country – unlike the one illuminated by some of the reaction to Roy Hodgson's appointment– his basic seriousness, that sense of slightly mannered self-possession would not have set him apart, allowing him instead an affection proportionate to his talent. Put out more flags! Campbell has gone! And maybe now we can even start to miss him a little. Read More
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