Chelsea striker is delighted by his reunion with former Inter Milan manager at Stamford Bridge and thinking positive about Cameroon's World Cup play-off
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| Stubborn: Chelsea's Samuel Eto'o says his success is built on his determination to prove Real Madrid wrong |
It is just after half-term in the club shop at Stamford Bridge, and a proud
father is buying replica jerseys for his children. It is a hefty order. He
asks for home and away shirts, bearing the forenames of each child, all four
of them, aged between six and the early teens. The dad arranges to have them
dispatched to his workplace, Chelsea’s Surrey training ground.
Because Samuel Eto’o arrived in London late in the transfer window, there have
been things to catch up on, such as the children’s new blue tops,
familiarising himself with a new league, and a language which Eto’o, who
comes from the French-speaking part of Cameroon, has never needed to perfect
until now. His first two months in the Premier League have left him, he
says, “generally quite happy”, though he feels English football has not yet
seen the best of him.
He, and Chelsea,
would anticipate more goals, for a start. The most consistently brilliant
centre-forward of the first decade of the 21st century is accustomed to
accumulating more than one every five starts, his record so far for Chelsea.
At Barcelona,
he averaged three in every four La
Liga games; at Inter Milan, a goal every other Serie
A match; the same in Russia, from where Chelsea recruited him after
two seasons with Anzhi Makhachkala.
But he gleefully points out he is already the owner of one significant
milestone, thanks to his goal against Cardiff
City. “I’m happy,” he smiles, “because, even coming in late, I was
still the first of Chelsea’s strikers to score this season in the Premier
League. That gave me a thrill.”
If that suggests a competitive edge to Eto’o’s relationship with Fernando
Torres, whose celebrated return to form only yielded his first
league goal six days ago, or Demba Ba, it is a healthy joust. He gladly
praises Torres, adding only that the idea the Spaniard has suddenly happened
on a renaissance is misguided.
“He has been playing well throughout,” says Eto’o. “The fact is, as all we
strikers know, we tend to get judged just on the number of goals. It’s not
all about the figures. It’s about how you play for the team, how you help
your colleagues, how you work defensively. All that, he’s been doing very
well, and the goals come in streaks. They flow for a while, then they go
away for a bit.”
At Newcastle, Torres will probably start, thanks to his performance against
Manchester City, and given that Eto’o got the nod for the first XI in
midweek in the League Cup.
Rotation is inevitable – “no one signs a contact saying they will always
start,” he says – but the bench is not Eto’o’s natural, long-term habitat,
not unless you rewind 15 years, to his nights of teenaged frustration at
Real Madrid, when scant opportunities to jump an illustrious queue of
forwards left him miffed.
The drive that would carry him to landmark achievements after that, to a Copa
del Rey win with Real Mallorca, to two Champions League titles and three La
Ligas at Barça, and a treble at Jose Mourinho’s Inter, has its springboard
in the perception he had been undervalued at Madrid.
It also comes from a stubborn streak, which Eto’o identifies in his own
childhood, the subject of a book he has released, in a rare format for the
sporting memoir: comic strip. It is illustrated by his talented compatriot
Joëlle Esso, who he sought out because his own children grew up enjoying her
work.
There are to be nine volumes, eventually, the first having concluded when the
schoolboy Eto’o returns to Cameroon from Paris, where he had absconded from
a junior football tour but had been denied the chance to sign for a French
club because he had no residence permit. He touches down in Douala, his home
town, ready to redouble his efforts to make a career at the top of the game.
“I stick at things, will always push myself hard, and little by little I’ll
get to where I want to be,” says Eto’o. His first weeks at Chelsea
exemplified that. “It can be complicated when you join after the season has
begun, because your colleagues have already started implementing the
manager’s ideas. I had to adapt to a new country, and a new league.”
The manager, of course, was familiar, the mutual admiration between Mourinho
and Eto’o remains potent. If some senior Chelsea players, like Mourinho
himself, see a distinct version of the Portuguese from his 2004 to 2007
Chelsea stint, so does Eto’o, though for different reasons: in the heat of
several poisonous Chelsea v Barcelona matches in that period he developed an
enmity towards Mourinho.
That attitude swivelled 180 degrees when Mourinho, having tried and failed to
sign Eto’o for Chelsea in 2005, signed him for Inter. Reunited in London,
Eto’o sees the same mentor and motivator who steered Inter to the Champions
League, using him both as a prolific goalscorer and a self-sacrificing
warrior prepared to commandeer, tirelessly, the right flank. “The Jose I
know hasn’t changed at all,” says Eto’o. “I’m happy about that.”
Did he regard this Chelsea as being as well equipped as Mourinho’s Inter to
win all the prizes available? “I don’t like to compare, and I’d only make a
judgment on that at the end of the season. What I have in my head is to try
to be at the top of this league by then.”
Beyond that, there is the World Cup. In two weeks, Cameroon, with whose
administrators Eto’o has had an on-off and sometimes combative relationship
in the past three years, host the second leg of their play-off against
Tunisia, with the tie goalless. The chance of a fourth World Cup is 90
minutes away.
Eto’o gives the strong impression that, of all his career landmarks, none
would mean as much as were he to be there when an African team break through
the continent’s glass ceiling on the game’s greatest stage, and progress
beyond the quarter-final. “Why shouldn’t an African team reach the final?”
Eto’o asks.” You have to dream big to win the big things. If you only think
small, you will only achieve little things.
“Africa has been producing great players for many, many years, who have been
playing in major clubs for a long time. More than that, they have been
leaders of those big clubs, superstars in those teams. It all depends on how
you approach the challenge mentally. There is no target that can’t be
reached, no obstacle that can’t be overcome.”
- Samuel Eto’o: Birth of a Champion (Volume One) is published by Books of Africa, RRP £8.99
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