Once upon a time, left-full backs were glamorous.
The dead ball specialist; the gazelle with quadriceps of granite; the poison arrow in every starting eleven.
I remember signing Roberto Carlos for Bayern Munich on FIFA 2005. He cost £11m from Real Madrid and he was the first player I bought. Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo and Thierry Henry would also be purchased that summer, but not before I endowed the squad with 73kg worth of pure muscle.
Carlos is regarded as the best left full-back of all time. The three-time European champion operated the flank like the blade of a rotary trimmer; slicing through attackers in his own half and cutting through defenders in his opponent’s.
But Real Madrid’s number three was perhaps best known for the way he struck the football. Packing each and every centimetre of his 26.6 inch thighs behind it, Carlos would wallop the ball through and around five man walls, straight into the back of the net. In fact, Carlos scored 47 times for Madrid, and his wonder free-kick against France in the 1997 Confederations Cup was measured at an incredible 137 km/h.
My tiny little new signing scored over 60 free kicks for me in that season with Bayern; Henry managed 24, but the left-back was the first name on the team sheet every time.
This article isn’t even about Roberto Carlos, but the excitement a defender of his kind provoked in young fans of the game. At the end of the day, full-backs are defenders, and although Carlos was a useful attacking outlet for Madrid, his qualities at the higher end of the field were subsidiary to his defensive ones at the bottom of it. If Carlos was a bad defender, I wouldn’t be writing about him eight years after he made an exit from Champions League football.
Bixente Lizarazu, Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Andreas Brehme can also be mentioned. Purposeful going forward, but also disciplined when defending. That’s what makes a full-back; someone with great quality in both attack and defence.
Today, the defending part is largely ignored. Full-backs are now encouraged to maraud down the pitch like teenage runaways, never to return to their homes. As I mentioned before; what’s the point, as a defender, at being a good attacker if you can’t make a tackle? For full-backs of the modern game, defending is a dying art, and there exists only a handful of players that even come close to the legends of the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Manchester City completed the £49m signing of Raheem Sterling on Tuesday afternoon – a fairly blusterous start to their summer business. Reports suggest Wolsfburg midfielder Kevin De Bruyne will be the next man targeted, but sooner or later, City will have to address their issues at left-full back.
It’s a weak area for City, regardless of what people will tell you. Aleksandar Kolarov may have a left peg that resembles that of Carlos’, but he regularly finds himself too far up the field to even make an attempt at defending. Gaël Clichy has a slightly different problem in that he can defend on occasion but lacks any real ambition going forward. Both can be fantastic on their day, but that day doesn’t come around too often. On the other days, they can be liabilities in a squad otherwise full of great talent.
If you look at the Premier League top four, only Manchester United have a natural left-back with any real promise. Chelsea have had to move César Azpilicueta across the field and he’s a great player, but surely Filipe Luís was signed so that Azpilicueta could move back to his natural position when the 31-year-old Branislav Ivanović eventually begins to slow. As for Arsenal, Kieran Gibbs isn’t the most convincing, is he?
So who do Manuel Pellegrini and Txiki Begiristain, and other Premier League managers for that matter, go for? Other than Jordi Alba and David Alaba who are most certainly not for sale, it will be difficult to recruit a left-back that could genuinely improve the squad. The papers suggest the Blues are in the race for Augsburg’s Baba Rahman whom I know very little about, but the guy is 21-years-old. Maybe that’s the route big clubs will have to go down this summer whilst the current crop of talented left-backs are clung onto by their respective clubs.
It’s clear that the well-rounded left full-back is dying breed and with not a lot to choose from, clubs will hang onto what they’ve got regardless of how good they are.
Aleksandar Kolarov recently announced that he would be staying with Manchester City this summer, but is that because the club cannot afford to sell whilst there are no replacements on the market? The Serbian has been in demand for two seasons now and City would be able to command a decent fee for him, but until someone like Angelino of the youth set-up reaches the standard or a club decide to sell, the left side of defence could be a vulnerable area for the Blues for years to come.
