Antonio Valencia: Nobody knows anything

Someone, naming no names, wrote this about Antonio Valencia in April 2012:

They tell you that football is a game played by eleven, not one, but what is this sport, like the chocolate selection box you feel guilty for constantly treating yourself to, if you haven’t got your favourites? Valencia is the caramel hazelnut.

Things have changed. The caramel hazelnut that tasted so good has mysteriously disappeared; the wrapper*, of some sort of green-y, blue colour, is the same, but the contents are different. Some factory negligence or something.

When you look past the silverware and the guard of honours (i.e the important stuff (also: topical)), your favourites alone can make football worthwhile. It’s soppy, but true. It’s what makes a live game a little more enjoyable and your own sense of nostalgia feel unique and personal. Valencia could have confidently called himself a favourite of many not long ago, but, like life, extended chocolate metaphors and ’90s boybands, things invariably turn ugly. Fine, except it’s happened too soon. Valencia was better when he was one of the favourites. The Rafaels, De Geas and the Welbecks remain the milk ganaches, praline truffles and tangy oranges, but Valencia, this champagne-coffee-coconut-strawberry treat, is no longer among them.

Anything can be made to look better — or worse — when you have something to compare it to. Antonio Valencia has not had a good season. Put it next to the one before that and it’s been close to terrible. And, when you consider the expectation a player of his/at this level carries, ‘close to terrible’ still stands even if you were to completely isolate this season.

What’s more worrying is that it’s difficult to pin down why. For a player to become worse is expected; heck, Valencia is like any other winger, cursed from birth, but from one season to another and by this much? At 27? For such a superior United side? Is Garth Crooks more entertaining than he is thick? To simply put it down to confidence seems lazy, regardless if true, because it’s not really known how much confidence affects a player and then, if so, why it has such an impact. Does it suddenly erase natural ability? It could all just be a coincidence; that instead of having five or six forgettable games like he had last season, he’s had 25 or 26 out of his 30-odd this time around. What about the change of shirt numb- no.

In reality, it might be that United have set up differently in a way that hasn’t favoured the Ecuadorian. Sir Alex Ferguson has been bold with selection and constant with his changes: happy times for the wide-men in this joyful season where, at times, the manager has played just one or none at all (Valencia, though, has made as many league appearances as he had in his award-winning year). But it still doesn’t completely explain Valencia’s profligacy throughout, where, with the ball, he’s stumbled and stuttered (and not in the Valencia way of ’11, where his Garrincha stutter was his chief weapon), been matched by defenders he would usually get the better of and produced balls so unworthy of its homonym in the shadow cabinet. His struggles and the lack of answers for it suggests that football is a game better left alone, where all attempts at analysis are futile. Perhaps he was never that good at footb- no.

It’s hard being hard on Valencia, but ultimately justified. Singling him out makes sense because, one, he’s played the most games of all the wingers, and, two, because his descent is the most surprising.

All of this is less a criticism of the player than it is an expression of disappointment in a season largely lacking in these. It’s what makes you say ‘close to terrible’ instead of just ‘terrible’.

How sad. And, anyway, his best performance? The title-winning game against Aston Villa, perhaps, and in those around it up to the 1-1 draw at Arsenal on Sunday, but there’s little about a slight improvement to be enthusiastic about. There was also Chelsea in a cup replay — where he played at right-back, of course.

*Well, the non-bourgeois chocolate selection boxes contain wrapped chocolates.