David Beckham was not as bad as the Italian press suggested against Inter Milan this week. He was nowhere near as good as he was built up to be before the match, though. He would have to be in the form of his life to justify that hype.
And there is the Beckham conundrum. He is not a player, he is an industry, or at least a catalyst for debate. His strengths and weaknesses are rarely viewed objectively: everybody has a position to defend, or an axe to grind, and it makes independent assessment hard.
Beckham was pretty poor for AC Milan last Sunday but, in mitigation, so were the rest of his team. What he did not look like, though, was a player that had revived Milan’s season and made them title contenders again; a player we were led to believe had taken Serie A by storm.
It is easy to get carried away with reports of Beckham’s brilliance since he left this country because unless you are one of those anoraks who sits around watching Italian football, Spanish football or the MLS, the chances are you will not have seen him play. All you have to go on are the dispatches of freelance reporters or heavily-edited clips of the action on rolling sports new channels. These are not reliable witnesses.
Freelances are paid according to how much of their report gets in, so have a vested interest in talking up Beckham’s significance. He might be credited with making a goal in which he was only involved, or a fair display will be elevated to a match-winning turn. There is no living to be made in phoning the sports desk and informing them Beckham did OK. A stringer needs a line, an angle. Beckham has reasonable game will not pay the mortgage.
Brief television highlights are also misleading. Showing two near miss free-kicks in a 30-second report makes it seem as if Beckham was at the heart of the action. Yet suppose that is all he did in the match? Not much is it? Clips of his game against Inter would have revealed two or three decent crosses, yet viewed over 90 minutes his influence was negligible. He got behind Inter’s back line once, and made his most dangerous pass of the game. The rest of the time, Beckham hit crosses from in front of the defence that were easily watched and dealt with: get used to it, though, because he will not physically be able to do much more at the World Cup.
And that is the danger because the bandwagon is rolling and it states Beckham is reborn at Milan and is worth his England squad place purely on form, not just on experience or reputation.
It did not look that way in the Milan derby and those who had been devouring positively spun bulletins may even have been a little shocked. Faced with the toughest opposition – Inter looked good, even with 10 men for much of the game, so Chelsea beware in the Champions League next month —Beckham appeared significantly past his prime. No doubt his highlights looked good, though: with the money he invests in image, they always do.