Fabinho is going to Madrid
We don’t know whether he will start of course. But I think he will and I, at least, hope he will.
I wonder what the lad is thinking now. He probably had a certain idea of what it might mean to play for Liverpool, to play under Jurgen Klopp, to play at Anfield. Long gone are the days when the only thing Brazilians knew about Merseyside football was that Pele got kicked off the park there during the 1966 World Cup and that Flamengo once beat Liverpool FC in a World Club Championship in Tokyo. We’ve had a few illustrious Brazilian footballers wearing the famous Red now and Anfield – or “This is Anfield” as the ground seems increasingly to be known around the world – is now considered a premium destination for any Brazilian footballer with his aims set on the highest peaks.
On Day One though Fabinho might have been excused for thinking he’d bitten off more than he could chew. He was part of that group of first-team squad members who’d assembled at Melwood while the World Cup was still going on, and after a few peremptory hand-shakes of welcome for the new guy - they do it differently at showbiz outfits like PSG and Barcelona – Fabinho was being kitted out for a lactate test. The drill, a Klopp speciality designed to measure aerobic endurance, involves increasingly quick 400 metre laps of the Melwood playing fields, with a blood test administered on each player after each round. After each round the unfittest player drops out leaving, eventually, a ‘last man standing’. James Milner won that, hands down, while Adam Lallana was runner up. No surprises there. But Fabinho was first to fall, and if you look at his face as his body folds and seeks the shade it reminds you of those Don McCullin portraits of battle-fatigued American GIs in Vietnam who’d spent too much time at Khe Sanh.
Welcome to Klopp’s Liverpool – and welcome to the Premier League.
Clearly what happened next, and what Liverpool’s scouting department expected to happen, is that Fabinho knuckled down, redoubled his efforts and dedicated himself to becoming competitive. It took a fair amount of time. Throughout autumn there were noises that Fabinho wasn’t going to cut it. Unlike the other new boy, Keita, he wasn’t featuring in the starting eleven and he wasn’t making many appearances from the bench either. The fella wasn’t injured. He just wasn’t ready for the demands that Liverpool wished to place on him. When he eventually got a start it was in a double pivot alongside Gini Wijnaldum who curbed his own attacking instincts to sit alongside Fab - in a home game too! We won. Fabinho did well.
This isn’t what Klopp wanted in the long term though and he made a point of saying so in the after-match interviews. The team had had to adapt to accommodate the Brazilian midfielder. If Fabinho was to have a future playing for Liverpool, however, it was clear he was going to have to do the accommodating. We play with a single pivot, not a double. Fabinho was on probation. He needed to step up.
Like thousands, maybe millions, of other Reds I was desperate for him to succeed. It was clear, even as he was adapting to the new environment, that he had something we needed – something that we were missing last season, especially in the European Cup Final against Real Madrid. Most of us had got used to calling this missing thing a “Number Six.” That’s to say someone who read play well, anticipated problems before they happened, covered ground quickly and snuffed out counter-attacks before they’d achieved real momentum. But also someone who, at Number Six, injected pace into our game when faced by a wall of eleven opponents. Last season showed us we needed a player in that role who was able to collect passes from the defence, turn so smoothly that you didn't even notice the turn, and get Liverpool on the front foot quickly.
Fabinho has done that. He’s done it in spades. We are a far better team because of it.
By early winter his appearances were becoming more frequent. By the turn of the New Year it was a little bit distressing – to me anyway – when his name wasn’t in the starting eleven. His passing had become penetrative – some of the passes fired like arrows to the attacking trident as if he were channelling the spirit of Xabi Alonso, some floated delicately and seductively beyond the opponents’ defence for our front-line speedsters to chase, and some whacked with curve and bend from one side of the pitch to the other. He was also giving us an extra aerial authority in defence, something we’d lacked since Lucas Leiva had taken the slow boat to Italy. And then he started to unveil the telescopic leg – or the “gadget leg” as Joel Matip recently called it. Strictly speaking the telescopic leg should probably be illegal, since it involves a mechanical contrivance attached to the human body which allows the player to extend his limb up to three feet further than he would do if unaided. Numerous tackles have been made by Fabinho this season using this artificial mechanical device and until the Premier League, or UEFA, is able to come up with photographic evidence that the Devil is at work, our Number Six will continue to do it.
Messi felt the power of the telescopic leg minutes into the second (unextended) leg at Anfield. Instead of powering his way into the Kop goalmouth with the ball stuck to his left foot, as he’d wanted to, Messi struck the deck instead. Fab’s gadget had nicked it away. And then Andy Roberston ran past the prone Messi, rearranged his hairstyle, and shouted “Telescopic fucking leg mate.” No wonder Messi was confused.
The other thing that Matip said about Fabinho after this game was that there were times when he thought there were three of them on the pitch. When I read that my mind cast back to that first day at Melwood. The exhausted lad in the shadows had emerged into sunlight. Not to a put a too fine a point on it, it might be said that in closing Messi out of the game, he had even managed to eclipse the sun.
We needed Fabinho that night. We needed all our players of course. But we especially needed him. A destroyer and a creator. Not two separate players. Just one.
So what does it mean to play for Liverpool, under Klopp, at Anfield? The answer to all those questions could be seen on Fabinho’s face as he stood in front of the Spion Kop and joined teammates, stadium and Jurgen himself in a chorus of You’ll Never Walk Alone. If you’ve not seen the video, check it out. And look for Fabinho.
He’s going to Madrid.