Kyle Walker's talents deserved much more than his crude tabloid caricature | city of manchester
England ace Kyle Walker has SENSATIONALLY asked city of manchester to get divorced, and his friends fear that the sharp drop in his rate of recovery may be to blame.
According to inside sources, a jilted Pep Guardiola was left heartbroken to learn of Walker's decision to leave their seven-year partnership, having publicly defended the right-back with an expected goals contribution of 0.06 per 90 minutes in numerous occasions this season. A source exclusively told The Guardian: “It will be an amicable split given everything they have been through together. But there is a mutual recognition that a club of City's caliber cannot continue to have a player with an average of 7.7 turnovers per game and a personal low of 5.8 passes in the final third per 90.
walker, 34 years old, dropped his BOMBSHELL news last week City boss Txiki Begiristain, 60, in the middle persistent rumors about a budding romance with Italian studs AC Milan, 125, whose new coach, Sérgio Conceição, 50, might see Walker, 34, as a better fit for his dynamic, transition-based defensive style than Emerson Royal, 25 years old, or Davide Calabria. , 28.
“Obviously Pep is trying to reestablish his stability in possession, get something pause return to its attacking phase, and for that you need a rest defense worthy of the name,” said the friend. “Kyle is not naïve: he has seen what people have been saying about him online, that his recovery rate has been affected by multiple groin injuries, that City have an 18% win rate this season when begins, and without either Calabria or Royal really getting it right. “If we get a place in the first team at San Siro, a new start could be the best thing for everyone.”
It took me about three hours to write that part of the column. I'm not even sure it's funny. I can certainly confirm, from intense exposure to research, that celebrity gossip journalism may well be the strangest form of the English language ever invented: a brain-melting slang of multiple compound nouns, made as adjectives, adjectives as exclamations, exclamations as facts. Commas are less of a punctuation and more of a lifestyle choice of sorts. A whole spurious fabric of quasi-truth emerged from the unattributed and indisputable testimony of “close friends,” albeit the kind of close friends happy to reveal their most intimate personal secrets to a tabloid journalist.
This is, for the most part, how Kyle Walker's life has been recorded. Based on media footprint alone, Walker could well be one of the most talked-about English footballers of the last decade, and largely for reasons unrelated to anything he did in a defensive transition. Search the internet for this player with 93 England caps and virtually every medal at club level and you'll be inundated with several keyword-rich snippets of celebrity gossip swimming in pound signs, house prices and gigantic photos taken from Instagram.
This is pretty weird, right? An entire industry of lewd Kyle Walker content that depends for its news value on the fact that he is a star footballer, without ever mentioning football at all. Nor is this the exclusive domain of gossip pages. Social media has long been fertile ground for Walker's jokes, usually based on the fact that he has several children (haha) with more than one partner (hahaha!).
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I do not set out to judge or analyze Walker's life choices in great detail. Partly out of a sincere belief that Walker's personal life is his business, particularly when the well-being and sensitivity of young children are involved. Mostly, though, it's because I don't give a shit. I don't care how many children Henri Camara has. I don't care if Nabil Bentaleb violated social distancing rules during Covid. I don't care if James McAtee's ex has finally “broken her silence.” Why should I do it? Why should you do it?
But the player: This part matters to me, if only because it's a race that basically shouldn't have happened. From the moment Walker broke through early last decade, there was always an exciting point of difference for him. Not just the speed, which was visceral to the point of violence. Not just the engine, which never seemed to run out. Not just long distance shots. But the sheer sense of emergency in his steps, the leap and gallop of a terrified child, the way he ran as if he would ever stop running, the world would explode, and that would be the end of it all.
Walker was always running from something. At first it was the Lansdowne estate in Sheffield, where substance abuse was rife and horror was woven into the tapestry of life, where Walker once saw a woman burnt alive in her flat. Then came the cloak of doubt, the constant, nagging feeling that I would never be good enough.
I interviewed Walker when he was still at the Spurs and was surprised when he described himself at one point as “an average player.” At that point he was already an England international, a young player of the year, one of the most exciting full-back prospects in world football. But of course he kept running, and in a way he was right. Over the next decade, Walker added levels and tones to his game we never knew he had: overlapping winger, auxiliary midfielder, centre-half in a back three.
However, six first division titles and a Champions League later, something is still missing when we talk about Walker. Maybe it's the laser focus on his physical gifts, as if you could survive as a full-back in a Guardiola team for more than seven years on raw pace alone. Perhaps it's the influence of all those sensational revelations and Twitter jokes, subtly encouraging us to see Walker as a unit of flesh, all drive and no refinement, all body and no brain.
Maybe, if you're a tabloid editor, Walker is what you want people to think all footballers are. Certainly, this could explain the grotesque intrusion into his personal life, the human drama mined for palatable content, a prurient obsession that generously underestimates his exploits as an athlete and has likely contributed to his departure.
As he prepares to walk away from the club that made him champions, it's hard not to feel like he deserved better.
