im sure he will go along anyway to support his boyfriend Pique
He might have time to visit that sick kid now.
Anyone ever notice how you never see zlatan, adrien brody and mac in the same room?
Fuckin hell
:D:D:D
Why âI am Zlatanâ should be Book of the Year: Ibrahimovicâs book is so much better than the usual stage-managed guff
The player dispenses with the usual self-justification of todayâs football output
[U] Ian Herbert[/U]
There is a nice irony about the title of the work which ought to be the runaway winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, announced tomorrow. After all those football autobiographies which profess through their titles to penetrate the meaning of how it is to be in the game â Managing my Life, Off the Record, Strikingly Different â the one which breaks the mould makes an extremely minimalist claim. I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, it says on the cover, a simple statement of fact.
The discussion of its merits has been relatively sparse and certainly pales compared with the acres of space allocated to Sir Alex Ferguson, Harry Redknapp and Sven Goran Erikssonâs autobiographies in recent months. The English version has not even been serialised in the UK. The spellbinding opening chapterâs annihilation of Pep Guardiola, characterised as a creepy control freak, claimed some British headlines but the bookâs supreme beauty as an immigrantâs tale â the best of that kind since Zadie Smithâs White Teeth writes the author and journalist Simon Kuper â has been largely overlooked. The encapsulation of the immigrant experience is rarely heard beyond the realms of fiction, though this bookâs early sections â the best of the work â provide a vivid sense of that dislocation: Ibrahimovic watching Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films with his father because âSwedish TV didnât exist for us. We lived in a very different world from the Swedes.â
Perhaps it is because Ibrahimovicâs ghostwriter, the Swedish author David Lagercrantz, visits his subject from outside of the football bubble that he provides what you might describe as the âfive to three momentâ: the tunnel, bench and pitch-level sense of what it is to be in there, right in the midst of the fray on a football field. âI saw a gap, a chance,â Ibrahimovic tells of how he prepared to seize and change a Malmo training game immutably, with Ajaxâs coaches on hand to observe. âIt was one of those images that just pop into my head, one of those flashbulb moments. Football isnât something you plan in advanceâŚâ
This kind of small, precise detail can be so difficult to procure from footballers â who donât understand why youâre asking for it when you go looking. There are exceptions to the rule. Gary Nevilleâs Red and Jamie Carragherâs Carra, for example. But fine detail is so hard to come by. Writer Duncan Hamilton, whose new George Best biography Genius is another of the best, tells me that he warns interviewees beforehand that heâll be asking them about the colour of the wallpaper or the sky, to prevent the slant of an interview suddenly throwing them. I still recall the fairly dismal consequences of once trying to discover the story of Paul Koncheskyâs Polish surname when interviewing him at Leicester City. I had heard that his grandfather had been Polish and looked for more. He took this to be me imputing a lack of commitment from him to England and a very brief interview was terminated a few minutes later.
You might contend that Ibrahimovicâs story â whose chaos is rooted in the years of being passed between divorced parents, his father a Bosnian Muslim, his mother a Croatian Catholic â is an open goal. And the stories certainly do keep crashing in. Zlatan masquerading as a cop with his mates, armed with an empty shampoo bottle to order a kerb-crawler to put his hands in the air. Zlatan and his mates taking a bus around the Malmo training run so they can sprint nonchalantly past the girls towards the end. But that should not disguise the extraordinary compact between player and ghost. Lagercrantz writes entirely in character, making the experience of reading this book akin to pulling up a chair with a player. (âI promise youâŚâ âHow can I put it⌠As I like to sayâŚâ) And the player dispenses with all the usual self-serving and self-justification which footballers and managers seem to think no one notices, in todayâs battery of football output. âA bunch of blah, blah, blah,â as he calls it in the book.
It takes a remarkable player to lay bare the bombast of his younger self â telling how, in the mid-1990s he âfelt, or wanted to feelâ like the hero of Gladiator, unmasking himself to declare: ââMy name is Maximus Decimus Meridus⌠And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.â This was how I felt, or wanted to feel. I wanted to stand up to the whole world and show everyone who doubted me who I was and I couldnât imagine anyone whoâd be able to stop meâŚâ More crazy, wonderful detail.
The book drives like a hurricane across the modern landscape of football-speak; a place of more manufactured âcontentâ than ever before. More rapidly than in previous seasons, we are witnessing the creeping advent of âgroup huddleâ, PR interviews, offered with so many multiple strings attached â demand for copy approval, sponsorâs plug and pre-agreed photograph â that the whole enterprise is suffocating. More and more words, frequently signifying nothing.
The William Hill shortlistâs sublime examples of investigative journalism take us a long way from that barren land. David Walshâs Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, the favourite for the ÂŁ25,000 prize, is a work of huge significance, just like those shortlisted titles by Ed Hawkins and Jamie Reid, who expose cricketâs illegal gambling underworld and horse-doping respectively. But Zlatan, the most compelling autobiography football has known, offers something more than the rewards of a journalistâs eye. It has a quality to make the heart soar. Not all football writing is in possession of that.
Zlatan the other day: âTo be honest the kind of goals Iâm scoring you canât even imitate on computer games.â
Zlatan scored an astounding goal for PSG against Nantes tonight.
[quote=âchewy louie, post: 905541, member: 1137â]Two goals tonight against Leverkusen.
Where is that fucktard @gola now?[/quote]
Think he was posting about being on a flight with the Taliban earlier.
Yet another topic which @The All Seeing Eye[/USER] / @[USER=80]The Wild Colonial Bhoy / @North County Corncrake was well ahead of the curve on
His second goal tonight was an absolute screamer.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic: Iâd have DESTROYED Premier League defences if Iâd moved to England
Zlatan Ibrahimovic believes he would have âdestroyedâ the Premier League, had he moved here.
Paris Saint-Germain and Sweden striker striker refused a trial at Arsenal when he was a 16-year-old, opting for Ajax instead.
And Ibrahimovic, 32, said: âEngland is a very strong league, with three or four of the best teams in Europe â but, if I had played there, I would have destroyed it, like I have everywhere else.
âArsenal could have happened, as everybody knows â but I would not do a trial. Who do you think regrets that more, Arsene Wenger or Zlatan?
Ibrahimovic, who scored four goals in a 2012 friendly against Roy Hodgsonâs England side, added: âThe last time I faced England, which is supposed to be the best players in the Premier League, what happened?
âMaybe people need to be reminded that it was the Zlatan show.â
England have the best players in the premier league? He doesnât watch the epl at all obviously.
Another hat-trick today.