How Do You Solve a Problem Like Taarabt?

206103 August is with us. Not long to go now. This tiresome land-fill of an interlude is beginning to be bulldozed aside and there’re definite signs of life at the bottom. Somewhere. Amongst all the bin bags and tabloid excrement. Yes. The season is tip-toeing nearer. Real, genuine, bona-fide soccer ball. Nine days and counting until kick-off at The Lane where a whole glut of new names and phizogs will be on show; all there to be oooed and aaahed at from a safe- no need for the Taser, officer– distance. As it stands, though, it looks like the majority of these glamorous tenderfoots on exhibit will be decked out in sky-blue rather than the lilywhite we’ve become so accustomed to. Yaya Toure, Silva, Boateng, Kolarov. No doubt countless others before you’ve even finished this sentence. Now there’s a team that know how to spend their capital. They’ve signed Milner, you say? Lordy lord.

It’ll all in end tears, of course. You can count on that. The same way Dubai’s manmade World Islands will crumble into the sea when all the money runs out.

And that, more than likely, is scientific fact.

Away from all that star-gazing at Eastlands, it looks as if Adel Taarabt has finally been given leave to worm out the back door and begin his ascent to stardom. Not that he’s done anything else but bemoan every second he’s spent at the club since arriving from the Gallic mainland. I should’ve signed for Arsenal. I should be playing for Real Madrid. Why aren’t I playing for Real Madrid? I should’ve signed for Real Madrid.

He’s signed for QPR.

I’m fairly ambivalent about this whole carry-on; as, I suspect, many others are. The hard-nosed- no-one’s bigger than the club- side of me is more than willing to clip the reins. Cut the umbilical cord. Let him float off into the cosmos and find his vocation. There’ve been plenty before him. And there’ll no doubt be plenty after. He’s made nine Premiership appearances since 2007 and, while at times dazzling, accomplished nada but a few step-overs and some balletic pirouettes. He hasn’t scored, he hasn’t procured a MOTM; he hasn’t ever really done anything. The other half, though, probably the romantic in me, thinks we’re making an almighty pig’s tit of this. As any man in a flat-cap and sheep-skin overcoat stalking a touchline will tell you: you can’t teach natural talent. And the young Moroccan has got the stuff to burn. Arrogant? Yes. Delusional? Almost certainly. A superstar in the making?

I guess time will tell.


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