58 2GM Wednesday April 8 2020 | the times
SportFootball
5
While Premier League players have
been forced to find ways to keep fit at
home during the lockdown, Son
Heung-min can look forward to a
gruelling three weeks of military
service later this month.
The Tottenham Hotspur forward will
enlist with the navy in his native South
Korea on April 20 and faces a 30km
group march, chemical warfare
training and live-firing exercises as part
of the three-week programme.
Son has been recovering from aGary Jacob
win something with my national
team.”
Last year, Senegal reached the
Africa Cup of Nations final, in which
his team lost to Algeria by a freak
deflected goal despite Mané being
man of the match.
“In 2019 everything changed,” he
says, “and they tried to be a bit
positive with me.”
Mané has built a school and
hospital for his village and theback to Liverpool and I scored two
goals [against Tottenham Hotspur,
which sealed victory] and the people
came back to my house and broke
everything. They were really upset
with me. I try to do with my country
what I do with Liverpool but there is
not the same understanding.
“They think I play really well for
Liverpool but with Senegal very bad.
The hard work with Liverpool was the
same as with Senegal. My dream is tosee myself being a teacher like
they wished,” Mané, whose
father died when he was seven,
says. “I had to follow my
dream.”
He was spotted by Olivier
Perrin, a scout from Metz,
which meant that Mané
would have to take his first
flight. He arrived at the club
in January 2011, the biting
wind a shock — and worse
was to come. He came on for
the last 20 minutes on his debut
but he could barely run. He had a
serious hernia problem requiring
surgery but had kept his pain a
secret.
Mané moved to Red Bull Salzburg a
year later and then met Klopp, with a
view to signing for Borussia
Dortmund. In the documentary,
Klopp recalls that the forward looked
like a young rapper and that he
thought: “I don’t have time for this.”
Mané laughs at the memory.
“I met him in Dortmund, always I
am wearing my cap,” he says. “Maybe
my look in 2013 was not like now and
I was younger, I wear the clothes I
thought were the best.”
Klopp was forced to re-evaluate
when, in March 2016, Mané came off
the bench for Southampton and
scored twice to help Ronald Koeman’s
team defeat Liverpool 3-2. Did he
have a gut feeling that Klopp would
try to sign him after that?
“Not really. We [he and his agent]
were thinking most about Manchester
United,” he chuckles. “That was a
tough time for me as I was on the
bench so I was not thinking about
anyone calling me but I was pleased
he [Klopp] did and was not thinking I
was a rapper.”
He is in lockdown in his Allerton
home and for some reason the
documentary cuts every now and
then to Mané walking down his open
polished wooden stairs in his slider
sandals. It is scary stuff.
He shows me his feet during the
interview. He is wearing sliders.
“Hopefully, I will never fall down,”
he says. “When I was young, if you
are not going to school it’s normal to
walk without shoes.”
It has taken time for him to be
considered a hero in Senegal, the
widespread perception being that if
he can light up the Premier League,
why can he not guide his national
team to glory.
“When I missed the penalty at the
Africa Cup of Nations, people broke
into my house and the car of my
uncle and it was really not safe,” he
says. “I try to understand everything
but I never doubted myself.
“After I missed the penalty, I cameafford boots, it would be unfair to
wear them as they would injure the
majority of barefoot players. He could
not even afford a football and instead
played with a grapefruit, not that it
impeded his skill; he became known
among his team-mates as the ballon
buwa, the ball wizard.
He smiles at the suggestion that the
French word for grapefruit —
pamplemousse — is the funniest word
in the language, made more amusing
by the image of him kicking one until
it dripped sticky juice over his feet.
“One pound was a lot of money to
spend on a football,” he says, “and my
family hated football. I didn’t have the
money for a ball so me and my
friends, we tried to use a
pamplemousse because it is bigger
than an orange. When it’s green, not
ripe, it doesn’t explode, we really
enjoyed it.”
That his family hated football is
another reason why Mané should not
have made a career from it. They
were the village imams and football
was not compatible with their beliefs.He begged to join an academy, they
refused. So in 2008 he crept out of
the village and caught a bus to Dakar.
“I thought it [football] was the only
job I could do but no one tried to
support me because they all hate
football,” Mané says. “When I was
younger they got mad, they got
angry, they did not want me
to go to training, they
wanted me only to go to
school to study like
other boys. I wanted to be
a football player so I always tried to
convince them, but they never
trusted me. Since I was ten I
asked them, can I go to an
academy, so I left.”
It took his family a
fortnight to track him
down and at last they
relented. A deal was
struck. He could join
an academy if he
stayed at school for one
more year.
“For me it was the
only job, I cannotLiverpool’s Sadio Mané
tells Alyson Rudd about
his struggles with his
family and angry
Senegal fans
S
adio Mané is in his
Merseyside home, his face
beaming from under one of
his trademark baseball caps,
as he explains how he defied
his family to become a footballer,
overcame the poor first impression he
made on Jürgen Klopp to eventually
sign for Liverpool and won over the
unimpressed and angry fans of
Senegal.
“I am the most criticised player in
the history of Senegal football,” the
27-year-old says, via our Zoom chat,
without a hint of bitterness.
Fans attacked his home and
damaged his uncle’s car after he
missed a penalty against Cameroon
during an Africa Cup of Nations
quarter-final in 2017. His riposte, apart
from continuing to give his all for his
country, was to build a hospital and
school in the small village where he
grew up.
The story of Mané induces
incredulity that he has become one of
the most coveted forwards in world
football. While his peers were
ensconced in academies, he was
honing his skills with a grapefruit at
his feet. When he was, at last, scouted,
his debut was a disaster as he hid the
fact he was injured for fear he would
be sent home.
Documentaries about
footballers are often sanitised or
just plain indulgent but in a
film released today, Made in
Senegal, viewers see the
Liverpool forward’s house
being trashed by livid
fans, hear Klopp
bemoan how Mané
looked like a young
rapper he had no
time for and learn
that aged 15 he ran
away from home. There
is no airbrushing.
There are a multitude
of reasons why Mané
should have failed as a
footballer. He grew up in
Bambali, a poor village built
around farming. He and his friends
agreed that even if one of them couldyy
“
My agent and I were
thinking about
Manchester United
when Klopp called... I’m
pleased he did
Fans damaged Mané’s home after
he missed a penalty for SenegalMané was part of the Liverpool team who lifted the Champions League trophy
e
n,
ut
ad a
ing
aalzburg a
‘I grew up using a grapefruit
Sports feature
writer of the yearTottenham confirm
club legend Greaves
admitted to hospital
Tottenham Hotspur have confirmed
that Jimmy Greaves is in hospital (Gary
Jacob writes).
The club’s all-time record goalscorer,
80, has rarely been seen in public since
he suffered a near-fatal stroke in May
2015 that left him with difficulty with
his speech and confined to a wheel-
chair.
The club said in a statement: “We are
in touch with his family and will provide
further updates in due course.
Everybody at the club sends their best
wishes to Jimmy and his family. The
club hopes to give more details today.”Son faces different kind of
shooting drills in the navy
fractured right arm in his homeland
and has been in quarantine since flying
from London to protect against the
spread of coronavirus.
He will report to the 9th Marine
Brigade on Jeju Island, south of the
Korean Peninsula.
All South Korean men must
complete military service before the
age of 28.
Son, who turns 28 in July, is exempt
from the mandatory 21-month service
after helping his country win the Asian
Games in 2018 but must complete the
shortened programme.Fifa will seek further information from
the US Department of Justice (DoJ)
after investigators tabled fresh allega-
tions of bribes paid for votes for the
2018 and 2022 World Cups.
A new indictment produced by the
DoJ alleges that the notorious former
Fifa vice-president Jack Warner, 77, was
paid $5 million (about £4.1 million) in
more than 24 wire transfers through
offshore companies to vote for Russia
to be the 2018 host.
It also states that the three SouthFifa ask for further details
on World Cup bribe claims
American Fifa members — Brazilian
Ricardo Teixeira, the late Nicolás Leoz
from Paraguay and an unnamed co-
conspirator believed to be the late Julio
Grondona from Argentina — took
bribes to vote for Qatar’s 2022 bid.
Qatar’s Supreme Committee for the
2022 World Cup strongly denied the
allegations and added that “any claim
to the contrary is baseless and will be
fiercely contested”.
A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry
Peskov, said: “Russia received the right
to host the World Cup completely
legally.”Martyn Ziegler Chief Sports Reporter