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Roma therapy
After an acrimonious departure from Leeds under Terry Venables, life in Serie A is sweet for Olivier Dacourt. By Ian Hawkey
Overcoat weather in Rome, and no contest for the city’s most dazzling one. Olivier Dacourt arrives dressed in what looks like an atlas made of felt. It is a parka, Carnaby Street style, with a map of Great Britain embroidered on the left flank and big, bold letters spelling “London” across the back. Dacourt, who left England a year ago, carries his anglophilia like a badge.
He is also wearing combat trousers tucked into long lace-up boots and his heart on his sleeve. We have barely finished the pleasantries — “Nice coat, make it yourself?” — when an impish grin creeps on to Dacourt’s face. He is telling how contented he feels, and adds: “Now I can say thank you to Terry Venables. The bastard.” And Dacourt’s smile turns into a roar of laughter. “You can put that in the paper.”
In the paper it is. Agenda set, it now needs a little context. Spool back 14 months or so through the modern saga of Leeds United. The tawdry Venables-Dacourt feud would be one of the middle chapters, the bones of it these: Venables, the then Leeds manager (there have been two since) barely picked Dacourt, took umbrage at some words attributed to the player which seemed to reflect badly on the club and, with some evidence, formed the impression that Dacourt had his mind set on moving away from Elland Road.
It turned into a Punch and Judy show when Venables announced he’d willingly drive Dacourt to Italy himself if a buyer could be found. One was. Dacourt never did ask for a lift to Roma, who initially took him on loan and bought him for about £3.5m last summer.
Others left Leeds at the same time, more have taken flight since, but few have seen their fortunes reversed as sharply as the Frenchman. Dacourt’s new club, Roma, have been prospering in Serie A — although last night’s 1-0 defeat at Brescia was a setback — as Leeds struggle at the foot of the Premiership. Dacourt has been excellent in the centre of their midfield, his prospects of going to Euro 2004 with France very high indeed. That this crafty, tough footballer should be thriving would surprise nobody who recalls the first 18 months of his career at Leeds, nor those who remember his season with Everton in the late 1990s.
But he is anxious that his change in circumstances makes a point. The feud with Venables is past, but a grudge remains. “I like that phrase in English, ‘What goes around, comes around’. I see where I am and I see where he (Venables) is now. He’s doing nothing.
“I didn’t say much about it when I left Leeds because the best thing is always to speak on the pitch. I think some people will ask now, ‘How is it possible he was not getting a game for Leeds and now he’s playing for Roma?’ ” So, how is it possible? “Terry Venables had too much power. Everybody is scared of him. I didn’t care. It’s too easy to sit in front of a TV camera as a pundit and say a manager should do this, or do that. When you are in that same position, it’s different.”
Might Dacourt himself have made some misjudgments during the stand-off with Venables? Could he have demonstrated a firmer commitment to Leeds? “When you work in a factory, you don’t have to kiss your boss,” he replies. “You do your work as positively as you can. My relationship with the supporters was always good and that was my safety net. They used to sing my name when I wasn’t in the team.”
Dacourt made only four Premiership starts for Leeds under Venables, having been an automatic choice with David O’Leary, the manager who acquired him from Lens for £7.2m. Injury accounted for some absences, he still can’t understand the others. “I’m sure it wasn’t about football,” says Dacourt, recalling his isolation in the final months, training with the reserves. “I’m exactly the same player as when I was at Leeds. What’s important for me is that a coach like (Roma’s) Fabio Capello, who’s won everything, wanted to sign me. Terry Venables tried to kill my career.”
Suffice to say, Christmas cards have not been exchanged. He does keep in touch with other former colleagues, notably Mark Viduka, and reads news of the club’s perilous position with growing alarm. Half the Leeds team who played in the 2001 European Cup semi-final have left, debt now defines the club, and the possibility of relegation flashes its hazard lights at potential investors. “It’s hard to imagine what has happened,” says Dacourt. “It’s crazy.”
And lest any of this makes him sound smug to have moved on and up, Dacourt is not. When he learnt that his former colleagues had been asked by the Leeds board to accept a wage deferral, his first instinct was to think how quaint that employers should actually ask their staff if they minded not getting their usual salary cheques this month. Roma, whose debt is greater than Leeds’s, are months in arrears paying most of their players. Was Dacourt paid properly last month? No, he confirms, he wasn’t.
But, hey, this is Italy and the rules here are different. Clubs such as Roma live in a perpetual juggle of borrowing and pleading for payback time. They just don’t feel like Leeds right now because they have been setting the pace in their championship. Of course, acknowledges Dacourt, Roma’s economic uncertainty is unsettling. “It is a difficult situation and you have to accept that and just get on with it. The important thing is what ’s happening on the pitch. The main thing is to win the title.”
To do so, Roma will need to see off two super-heavyweights, the European champions, Milan, and the defending scudetto-holders, Juventus. It is a tall order, and Dacourt, the metronome of their midfield, concedes self-belief has been dented a little since the turn of the year. “Milan and Juve are used to winning the title. There is a difference. Roma have won the League three times in their history, Juventus have won it 27 times, Milan 16 times. That means something. It may be they have more confidence.”
January was not a perfect month. “We’ve played Milan three times (twice in the Coppa Italia, once in Serie A) in the last three weeks and lost 2-1 every time. Milan are not better than us. We know they are not better than us. Maybe we are a little bit scared but if we play to our best, we can beat them.”
Roma are a more coherent team than when Dacourt arrived in January last year. Capello’s Serie A champions of 2001 had become an erratic, even indisciplined mid-table side, and the supporters were angry. Dacourt’s compatriot, the defender Jonathan Zebina, had been attacked by fans at Trigoria, the training headquarters outside the Italian capital, and Dacourt’s first three matches were all defeats.
“Last year was difficult, for many reasons,” recalls Dacourt. It was a culture shock, too. “The fans here can be crazy. It can be a good type of craziness, but they are truly crazy. When things are good, they are great, but when they are bad, it gets very, very bad. And things got very bad last season. But the Italians are a passionate people, unbelievably so, much more than the French or the English, or anybody in the world. It can be great in a derby against Lazio when things are like that. But we also feel the pressure and in the last few weeks in the race for the title, we’ve felt it.
“The game here is more about results than England is. We dropped into second place last week, and the pressure builds around every single game. The press kill us too. I know the press in England can be hard but what they write is less about the actual football. I don’t talk a lot to the press here because, well, sometimes I’m a bit too direct. Once I said something which was a bit of a bomb and they hammered me. I’m honest. I’m not a hypocrite. I am tolerant with people, but if I see things I don’t like in someone’s behaviour, I’ll say so straight away.”
Dacourt says he has always been that way. He grew up knowing how to look after himself and left home — a suburb north of Paris — when he was 13 to pursue the idea of professional sport at Strasbourg. “Sometimes people imagine it’s an easy life,” he says. “But there is sacrifice, and it’s not easy every day.” He made it, and in 1998 took what was then an intrepid decision to join Everton. His instincts said English football would suit his midfield game; he liked “to get stuck in”. He promptly got booked, regular as clockwork, nearly every other game. “I had a reputation that first year,” he concedes.
At the end of it, Everton had a handsome offer from Lens, and Dacourt went back to France still thinking he wanted to return to England. Twelve months later, Leeds beat Newcastle United to his signature and he boarded a rollercoaster that would carry him to an unlikely place in the last four of the European Cup. Of England he says: “I wanted to be in the place where football was born and I enjoyed every day of it because of the fans and because there’s always that special spirit: you see it in the tackling in training, which is the same whether you are in a match or in a practice, there’s always that element of competition.
“My English was not so good at Everton, but by the time I got to Leeds it was better. I took to it like a duck to water. I felt more confident, I was in a better team, or certainly one that was getting better results.”
He was also noticed, by Juventus, by Roma, and by his country, for whom he had been a fringe figure for a couple of years. It would, he acknowledges, require injury or loss of form to Patrick Vieira and Claude Makelele for Dacourt to expect a place in the France starting line-up in their opening Euro 2004 match against England next summer, but, after a recent run in the side, he should be on the bench at least.
France have an abundance of strong central midfield players, and Italian club football values them highly. “Patrick and Claude are good friends. We’ve known each other a long time, and there is competition between us. You see it in the way we tackle in training; there is that competitive spirit. Since the World Cup, when France got a new coach, things have opened up in the French squad, people have been given chances where it was a bit closed before.”
Dacourt has been making his case powerfully. He was delighted, he says, when France found themselves in the same group as England for the European Championship finals. “I was happy because of Rio (Ferdinand, a colleague at Leeds). I have good memories of times with him and I was looking forward to seeing him there. That was before Rio’s ban. I’ve been trying to call him but he’s changed his number. I asked Mikael Silvestre to tell him to call me, but he said I’d just take the piss.”
Dacourt grins again. He has a reputation among colleagues for badinage. He also has respect, perhaps more than ever for his talent, not only as a combatant in midfield but also as a shrewd user of the ball. He may be a better player than he was a year ago, he says, Italy having sharpened his game.
“I’m more experienced, I’m 29 now and you get more time on the ball here, but opposing teams here are well organised, even the smaller teams, they will keep coming back at you. You get more big games, against Lazio, Milan, Inter, Juve, Parma, big teams, and there are big players in every team. Look at Brescia, where you have Roberto Baggio.”
He has also benefited from Capello’s coaching. “He’s the king. You learn something every day. He’s crazy too, mad. He’ll scream at you in training. But he’s fair. Everybody gets the same treatment here. If something’s wrong, he says so, whoever it is he’s talking to. Fabio Capello is The Man. Terry Venables might think he’s God in England but in the world he’s nothing.”
We’ve already been there. Dacourt is not obsessed with Venables. He is genuinely cheerful. “I like to laugh, I’m not scared of anybody and I’m happy here. I like Rome. After Paris, I think it’s the best city in the world. I live three minutes from the beach. And you get sunshine in January, which for me, who’s never lived in the south before, is something.”
For all that, he leaves you with the hunch he’d like to come back to England. In a year or two, maybe sooner if Roma forget to pay his wages for too many months. He wouldn’t find sunshine in January, or February or March — but he would get to wear his coat a lot.
Roma therapy
After an acrimonious departure from Leeds under Terry Venables, life in Serie A is sweet for Olivier Dacourt. By Ian Hawkey
Overcoat weather in Rome, and no contest for the city’s most dazzling one. Olivier Dacourt arrives dressed in what looks like an atlas made of felt. It is a parka, Carnaby Street style, with a map of Great Britain embroidered on the left flank and big, bold letters spelling “London” across the back. Dacourt, who left England a year ago, carries his anglophilia like a badge.
He is also wearing combat trousers tucked into long lace-up boots and his heart on his sleeve. We have barely finished the pleasantries — “Nice coat, make it yourself?” — when an impish grin creeps on to Dacourt’s face. He is telling how contented he feels, and adds: “Now I can say thank you to Terry Venables. The bastard.” And Dacourt’s smile turns into a roar of laughter. “You can put that in the paper.”
In the paper it is. Agenda set, it now needs a little context. Spool back 14 months or so through the modern saga of Leeds United. The tawdry Venables-Dacourt feud would be one of the middle chapters, the bones of it these: Venables, the then Leeds manager (there have been two since) barely picked Dacourt, took umbrage at some words attributed to the player which seemed to reflect badly on the club and, with some evidence, formed the impression that Dacourt had his mind set on moving away from Elland Road.
It turned into a Punch and Judy show when Venables announced he’d willingly drive Dacourt to Italy himself if a buyer could be found. One was. Dacourt never did ask for a lift to Roma, who initially took him on loan and bought him for about £3.5m last summer.
Others left Leeds at the same time, more have taken flight since, but few have seen their fortunes reversed as sharply as the Frenchman. Dacourt’s new club, Roma, have been prospering in Serie A — although last night’s 1-0 defeat at Brescia was a setback — as Leeds struggle at the foot of the Premiership. Dacourt has been excellent in the centre of their midfield, his prospects of going to Euro 2004 with France very high indeed. That this crafty, tough footballer should be thriving would surprise nobody who recalls the first 18 months of his career at Leeds, nor those who remember his season with Everton in the late 1990s.
But he is anxious that his change in circumstances makes a point. The feud with Venables is past, but a grudge remains. “I like that phrase in English, ‘What goes around, comes around’. I see where I am and I see where he (Venables) is now. He’s doing nothing.
“I didn’t say much about it when I left Leeds because the best thing is always to speak on the pitch. I think some people will ask now, ‘How is it possible he was not getting a game for Leeds and now he’s playing for Roma?’ ” So, how is it possible? “Terry Venables had too much power. Everybody is scared of him. I didn’t care. It’s too easy to sit in front of a TV camera as a pundit and say a manager should do this, or do that. When you are in that same position, it’s different.”
Might Dacourt himself have made some misjudgments during the stand-off with Venables? Could he have demonstrated a firmer commitment to Leeds? “When you work in a factory, you don’t have to kiss your boss,” he replies. “You do your work as positively as you can. My relationship with the supporters was always good and that was my safety net. They used to sing my name when I wasn’t in the team.”
Dacourt made only four Premiership starts for Leeds under Venables, having been an automatic choice with David O’Leary, the manager who acquired him from Lens for £7.2m. Injury accounted for some absences, he still can’t understand the others. “I’m sure it wasn’t about football,” says Dacourt, recalling his isolation in the final months, training with the reserves. “I’m exactly the same player as when I was at Leeds. What’s important for me is that a coach like (Roma’s) Fabio Capello, who’s won everything, wanted to sign me. Terry Venables tried to kill my career.”
Suffice to say, Christmas cards have not been exchanged. He does keep in touch with other former colleagues, notably Mark Viduka, and reads news of the club’s perilous position with growing alarm. Half the Leeds team who played in the 2001 European Cup semi-final have left, debt now defines the club, and the possibility of relegation flashes its hazard lights at potential investors. “It’s hard to imagine what has happened,” says Dacourt. “It’s crazy.”
And lest any of this makes him sound smug to have moved on and up, Dacourt is not. When he learnt that his former colleagues had been asked by the Leeds board to accept a wage deferral, his first instinct was to think how quaint that employers should actually ask their staff if they minded not getting their usual salary cheques this month. Roma, whose debt is greater than Leeds’s, are months in arrears paying most of their players. Was Dacourt paid properly last month? No, he confirms, he wasn’t.
But, hey, this is Italy and the rules here are different. Clubs such as Roma live in a perpetual juggle of borrowing and pleading for payback time. They just don’t feel like Leeds right now because they have been setting the pace in their championship. Of course, acknowledges Dacourt, Roma’s economic uncertainty is unsettling. “It is a difficult situation and you have to accept that and just get on with it. The important thing is what ’s happening on the pitch. The main thing is to win the title.”
To do so, Roma will need to see off two super-heavyweights, the European champions, Milan, and the defending scudetto-holders, Juventus. It is a tall order, and Dacourt, the metronome of their midfield, concedes self-belief has been dented a little since the turn of the year. “Milan and Juve are used to winning the title. There is a difference. Roma have won the League three times in their history, Juventus have won it 27 times, Milan 16 times. That means something. It may be they have more confidence.”
January was not a perfect month. “We’ve played Milan three times (twice in the Coppa Italia, once in Serie A) in the last three weeks and lost 2-1 every time. Milan are not better than us. We know they are not better than us. Maybe we are a little bit scared but if we play to our best, we can beat them.”
Roma are a more coherent team than when Dacourt arrived in January last year. Capello’s Serie A champions of 2001 had become an erratic, even indisciplined mid-table side, and the supporters were angry. Dacourt’s compatriot, the defender Jonathan Zebina, had been attacked by fans at Trigoria, the training headquarters outside the Italian capital, and Dacourt’s first three matches were all defeats.
“Last year was difficult, for many reasons,” recalls Dacourt. It was a culture shock, too. “The fans here can be crazy. It can be a good type of craziness, but they are truly crazy. When things are good, they are great, but when they are bad, it gets very, very bad. And things got very bad last season. But the Italians are a passionate people, unbelievably so, much more than the French or the English, or anybody in the world. It can be great in a derby against Lazio when things are like that. But we also feel the pressure and in the last few weeks in the race for the title, we’ve felt it.
“The game here is more about results than England is. We dropped into second place last week, and the pressure builds around every single game. The press kill us too. I know the press in England can be hard but what they write is less about the actual football. I don’t talk a lot to the press here because, well, sometimes I’m a bit too direct. Once I said something which was a bit of a bomb and they hammered me. I’m honest. I’m not a hypocrite. I am tolerant with people, but if I see things I don’t like in someone’s behaviour, I’ll say so straight away.”
Dacourt says he has always been that way. He grew up knowing how to look after himself and left home — a suburb north of Paris — when he was 13 to pursue the idea of professional sport at Strasbourg. “Sometimes people imagine it’s an easy life,” he says. “But there is sacrifice, and it’s not easy every day.” He made it, and in 1998 took what was then an intrepid decision to join Everton. His instincts said English football would suit his midfield game; he liked “to get stuck in”. He promptly got booked, regular as clockwork, nearly every other game. “I had a reputation that first year,” he concedes.
At the end of it, Everton had a handsome offer from Lens, and Dacourt went back to France still thinking he wanted to return to England. Twelve months later, Leeds beat Newcastle United to his signature and he boarded a rollercoaster that would carry him to an unlikely place in the last four of the European Cup. Of England he says: “I wanted to be in the place where football was born and I enjoyed every day of it because of the fans and because there’s always that special spirit: you see it in the tackling in training, which is the same whether you are in a match or in a practice, there’s always that element of competition.
“My English was not so good at Everton, but by the time I got to Leeds it was better. I took to it like a duck to water. I felt more confident, I was in a better team, or certainly one that was getting better results.”
He was also noticed, by Juventus, by Roma, and by his country, for whom he had been a fringe figure for a couple of years. It would, he acknowledges, require injury or loss of form to Patrick Vieira and Claude Makelele for Dacourt to expect a place in the France starting line-up in their opening Euro 2004 match against England next summer, but, after a recent run in the side, he should be on the bench at least.
France have an abundance of strong central midfield players, and Italian club football values them highly. “Patrick and Claude are good friends. We’ve known each other a long time, and there is competition between us. You see it in the way we tackle in training; there is that competitive spirit. Since the World Cup, when France got a new coach, things have opened up in the French squad, people have been given chances where it was a bit closed before.”
Dacourt has been making his case powerfully. He was delighted, he says, when France found themselves in the same group as England for the European Championship finals. “I was happy because of Rio (Ferdinand, a colleague at Leeds). I have good memories of times with him and I was looking forward to seeing him there. That was before Rio’s ban. I’ve been trying to call him but he’s changed his number. I asked Mikael Silvestre to tell him to call me, but he said I’d just take the piss.”
Dacourt grins again. He has a reputation among colleagues for badinage. He also has respect, perhaps more than ever for his talent, not only as a combatant in midfield but also as a shrewd user of the ball. He may be a better player than he was a year ago, he says, Italy having sharpened his game.
“I’m more experienced, I’m 29 now and you get more time on the ball here, but opposing teams here are well organised, even the smaller teams, they will keep coming back at you. You get more big games, against Lazio, Milan, Inter, Juve, Parma, big teams, and there are big players in every team. Look at Brescia, where you have Roberto Baggio.”
He has also benefited from Capello’s coaching. “He’s the king. You learn something every day. He’s crazy too, mad. He’ll scream at you in training. But he’s fair. Everybody gets the same treatment here. If something’s wrong, he says so, whoever it is he’s talking to. Fabio Capello is The Man. Terry Venables might think he’s God in England but in the world he’s nothing.”
We’ve already been there. Dacourt is not obsessed with Venables. He is genuinely cheerful. “I like to laugh, I’m not scared of anybody and I’m happy here. I like Rome. After Paris, I think it’s the best city in the world. I live three minutes from the beach. And you get sunshine in January, which for me, who’s never lived in the south before, is something.”
For all that, he leaves you with the hunch he’d like to come back to England. In a year or two, maybe sooner if Roma forget to pay his wages for too many months. He wouldn’t find sunshine in January, or February or March — but he would get to wear his coat a lot.
