The Peter Crouch Paradox

The Peter Crouch Paradox steals its own aerial thunder
Stoke's new signing has alone opened up the possibility of a Third Way: the big man with a surprisingly bad head

The closure of the transfer window passed, as always, in a swirl of suffocating repetition. Certain set phrases were repeated throughout its gruelling 18-hour strangulation. "Niall Quinn is in a secret location," the man on Sky Sports News seemed to bark several times, although exactly why this was, or what might happen if his secrecy was compromised – Quinn's legs spotted protruding from behind a gorse bush, the top of his head poking up above a stack of pallets — was never made clear.

At one point the word "Yakubu" was being added randomly to the end of sentences simply for additional emphasis – "Roman Pavlyuchenko, Craig Bellamy, a small, sad-faced old man and Yakubu all in the mix" – like the last desperate exclamation mark left in the world.

In my opinion, one major transfer passed off with perhaps too little fuss, too few flags to mark its passing. Peter Crouch's move to Stoke was poignant for several reasons. First, because it raises Crouch's cumulative transfer fees to £47m, placing him just behind Darren Bent and close to reclaiming his crown as the most expensive English striker ever. Crouch may not have many more of these big-money moves left in him and I have for some time been worried that he may soon begin to fade from view. With this in mind, it is perhaps time to celebrate an English player who seems to define a particular moment, a mood, even a generation.

There is an easy crack to make about Crouch going to Stoke, the notion that this is simply a meeting of tallness, a debauchery of tallness. As Crouch's move to the Britannia drew closer, a story appeared on the Guardian website with the headline "Tallest squad in the world becomes emblem of Venezuela housing crisis" and I found myself thinking: "Christ, what are they blaming Stoke for now?" In fact, it was a story about a very large "squat", but this is still indicative of the kind of broad-brush pshawing often unfairly aimed at Tony Pulis's men.

This is a lazy assumption for other reasons, mainly because it ignores the basic tenets of the Crouch Paradox. Generally in English football there are two kinds of big men. The big man with unsurprisingly bad feet. And the big man with surprisingly good feet. Crouch alone has opened up the possibility of a Third Way: the big man with a surprisingly bad head.

His occasional ineptitude in the air is surely a function of being 6ft 7in tall in a sport otherwise peopled by normos. All too often, Crouch must deal with the ball being punted towards him at his height or even slightly below, which explains why England's second-most expensive striker can often be seen launching himself wildly, almost perpendicular to the ground, like a glider struggling to take off.

Then there are those feet. Part of the appeal of Crouch is that you always feel you know what he's trying to do because it appears to happen in slow motion on a grand scale. "Crouchy's doing a backheel," he seems to mutter to himself, or "Crouchy's going to try a scissors kick again", as he manoeuvres his flailing limbs into "collapsing pine forest" pose.

This is also a large part of his irresistible charm. The fact is that if you can't enjoy watching Crouch play football you have no joy left in your soul (the last time any England team was even close to feeling happy was five years ago when Crouch was bodypopping in front of Prince William). I first saw him during his emergence as a beanpole target man at QPR, during what might be called The Rodney Years.

He ran around an awful lot then, somehow mixing a fierce sense of purpose with a feeling that here was a kind of a footballing hallucination, a balsa-wood giant, a backwoods string-man twined together out of deckchair ends and leather offcuts.

This early, untarnished Crouch was conjured again on transfer deadline day as the TV cameras captured him being ferried about in his blacked-out people carrier. Crouch's people carrier has returned, we were told. Crouch's people carrier has now left again, the message came later, Crouch himself apparently laid out across the back seats, glazed, supine, condemned to an endless circulation.

There is undoubtedly a sense of sadness about the mature Crouch, a stamp of unfulfilled potency that has little to do with his own excellent achievements and more to do with perception. With England in particular, the promise has always been that he "gives you that option" – specifically to punt the ball at his surprisingly bad head, a tactic based around the belief that there is still a place out there where Ay Caramba-ing foreigners will prostrate themselves fearfully before our own aerial thunder.

In this respect Crouch can almost seem like a parody of an English centre-forward, a living satire of those "traditional strengths", football's version of a braces-twanging pearly king or a champion Morris dancer. "They can't live with Crouchy," it has often been claimed, rather hopefully.

But really it is perhaps English football that can't live with Crouchy, what with its sense of a diminished, righteous physicality, still propelling the ageing Crouch about the place in his funereal minivan, like an exhibit, or waxwork, or a totem pole, of long-distant triumphs.


[Not my favourite story to be honest]

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/02/peter-crouch-paradox