Dazzling Dwight
byFazeer Mohammed (Express)
Chalk up one more accomplishment for the man from Canaan.
One of his celebrated liming partners has bowed out of the limelight in less than illustrious circumstances, but Dwight Yorke's star keeps on shining in the twilight of what is already the most successful career of any footballer from Trinidad and Tobago.
It would not be surprising in the least if Brian Lara was among the first to communicate his congratulations to Yorke for his role in Sunderland's amazing transformation from incompetent cellar-dwellers after four games of the season to winners of the English Football League's Championship Division, clinching the title on the last day of the campaign with a 5-0 hammering of Luton Town yesterday.
Before the advent of the Premership 14 years ago and the more recent re-branding of the League, this level of competition went by the considerably more modest title of the Second Division. Yet whatever the name, it still doesn't take away from the enormity of the achievement, especially as the reward is a place next season in the money-spinning Premiership.
There are more than a few lessons from this experience, one of the most significant being the importance of strong, purposeful leadership in effecting a turnaround. West Indian fans have been waiting in vain for 12 years now, and while it is ludicrously simplistic to compare the complex arena of Caribbean cricket with the considerably more limited sphere of a football club, the principles remain the same.
Roy Keane may not have been everyone's favourite footballer, but the supremely successful former Manchester United captain is nothing if not intense, uncompromising and purposeful. His combative manner has sometimes run him into trouble, as when he was sent home from the 2002 World Cup finals following a fall-out with the Irish team manager, but that attitude in charge of Sunderland seems to have been the perfect elixir to resurrect their season so swiftly and effectively.
With the West Indies squad leaving tomorrow for the tour of England, it doesn't seem the worst suggestion in the world for team management to consider inviting Keane to speak to the players before the first Test at Lord's. Well, Digicel is really run by the Irish, isn't it? Maybe they can pull a few strings to help the team they have been sponsoring for more than two years now without any significant success to show for it. Keane's brusque manner could just be the sort of treatment they need after years of teddy bear treatment from a succession of apologists.
Part of developing a successful structure is getting the right personnel in place, and it is instructive that one of Keane's first signings on becoming the Sunderland manager was Yorke, who was just into his second season with Sydney FC in the Australian "A" League, having guided them to the Championship in the competition's debut season a few months earlier. As teammates in Manchester United's record-breaking treble-winning season of 1998/99, Keane would have had first-hand knowledge of Yorke's value, even in his mid-30s, amid the frenetic pace of English football.
That the former national captain has teamed up with two other well-established Trinidad and Tobago players-midfielder Carlos Edwards and striker Stern John-in playing key roles in Sunderland's remarkable transformation again puts a lie to the oft-repeated notion that sportsmen and women from this part of the world are primarily about flair and excitability, and therefore lacking in the ability to endure a punishing schedule or the hard, remorseless grind of professional sport at a high level.
Like Lara ("backlift too high") and another good friend, Russell Latapy ("too small"), Yorke has made a habit of confounding the critics in more than 20 years on the national and international stage.
He was already exciting fans on the local scene with his skill and pace in the Secondary Schools' League as the spearhead of a successful Signal Hill Senior Comprehensive side when he came on for his senior national debut as a late substitute in the World Cup qualifier against Honduras. A couple of mesmerising runs in near darkness at the Queen's Park Oval made the 16-year-old an instant celebrity, but critics had seen such rich promise fail to deliver many times before.
The possible difference between Yorke and the likes of "Gally" Cummings and Leroy de Leon is that he not only had the ability and ambition, but also the opportunities, which he took with both hands and both feet. Being signed by Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor in the midst of the "Road to Italy" campaign in 1989 might just seem to be a case of being in the right place at the right time, but those nine seasons at Villa Park also tested his resolve through prolonged lean periods when he often wondered if football officials back home really cared about him at all.
Yet he has come through that, and being described as a "cancer" to T&T football during a three-year self-imposed exile from national duty, to compile the most impressive resume of any local player ever, a list of achievements that kicked off at international level when he led this country to the Under-19 World Cup in Portugal in 1991 and climaxed with last year's appearance, also as captain, at the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany.
Now the 35-year-old is set to play for his fourth club in the English Premiership, and it doesn't seem that anyone, certainly not at Sunderland, is pushing him to retire as yet.
