Cesc Fabregas Fans

He is a boy doing a man’s job, but Liverpool will underestimate Cesc Fabregas at their peril when they take on Arsenal at Highbury this afternoon.

He is as confident and canny as a 30-year-old. Being challenged is no problem. His control is impeccable and he has a natural sense of when to be forward, when to go on the defensive. This Francesc “Cesc” Fabregas, advanced beyond his years, is hard to beat one on one. Joyously for Arsenal, he’s also quite good at football.

In an interview, Fabregas is as precocious as he is on a football pitch. For our session, only the Spaniard’s second with a British newspaper, he is chaperoned by Arsenal’s director of communications. She has come in on her day off, but after seeing her mannish boy charm his way through an hour of questions she departs happily. “I could have stayed at home,” she says.

It is obvious Fabregas devoured the intensive three-times-weekly English lessons the club arranged for him when he arrived from Barcelona 20 months ago, and his stomach for learning is such that he has since moved on to French. His sharpness and the ease with which he communicates are gifts you cannot teach. Only rarely are you reminded of his age. He giggles shyly when I inquire, given that he now looks taller than his official height of 5ft 9in, whether he might have grown.

It was Fabregas’s 18th birthday last Wednesday. He is now old enough to apply for a mortgage or buy a drink in this country, and when he goes back to Spain for his holidays he will be entitled to drive — “and go to the discotheque!” Yet the landmark passed without wild celebrations. His family flew over to surprise him. When he got home they were at his door singing Happy Birthday. “It was fantastic, ” he says. “We didn’t do anything big because at the weekend we’ve an important game.”

He was talking about today’s clash with Liverpool. The signs are that, with Arsenal eager for three more points to remain on course for second place, Arsène Wenger will once again send out his boy to do a man’s job. The Catalan kid up against three of Europe’s top midfielders in Xabi Alonso, Dietmar Hamann and Steven Gerrard: the mismatch will be familiar.

Fabregas beams when asked what it is like, as a puny adolescent, being crunched by a full-grown juggernaut such as Gerrard. “I love it!” he says. “I love it because it means he doesn’t care about my age. Even if the opponent’s Roy Keane, and I’ve been watching him on television since I was 14, and I know he’s got a bad tackle, I want that. I want to play against him and see if I can win the ball and do my best. I’m never scared. If you are, you can’t play this game.”

Arsenal discovered Fabregas wasn’t scared in his first training session. It was October 2003 and he was 16, scrawnier and with his teenage mullet haircut accentuating his youthfulness. Wenger, wondering if the lad could possibly be as good as the scouting reports suggested, pitched him straight in with the first team. “I never trained with the first team at Barcelona but I’ve spoken to (Lionel) Messi (Barca ’s 17-year-old Argentine prodigy) and he trains with them. He says if you do something wrong, everyone says, ‘He’s young, it’s okay’. It’s not like that here,” Fabregas says. “Here you’re treated like all the other players. In my first session Kolo Toure kicked me. It was a terrible tackle. He knew I was 16 but it was, bang! Welcome to England. He didn’t say sorry and nobody said a word, so I had to get up and play. I knew from that moment it was going to be very difficult and I’d have to work hard.”

Just what he wanted, in fact.

Fabregas loved — still loves, will always love — FC Barcelona. Raised on the Catalan coast in the pretty port of Arenys de Mar, he watched his first game at the Nou Camp when he was nine months old, in the arms of his grandfather. He even lived at Barça’s ground, leaving home at 14 to move to the dormitory inside the stadium complex that houses youth academy players. And yet, soon as he could, he left.

“It was great to play for Barcelona,” he says, “but when we played it was 30-0. What’s the point? I need to have competition. From when I was in the under-13s we started winning by 15 goals and I was thinking about leaving. If the coaches can see you’re better than the opposition, why don’t they let you play against a higher age group? I almost went to Espanyol but the president said, ‘Let’s try and find a solution’. I stayed but then Arsenal came and I knew it was the chance of a lifetime. The first time I came to London I saw the facilities. I talked to the boss, they treated me as if I was an adult, a big player. I had the feeling something special could happen for me here.”

Fabregas had been placed on Wenger’s radar by his man in Iberia, former Arsenal youth player Francis Cagigao, and tracked closely after a starring performance for Spain versus England Under-16s in 2002. Steve Rowley, Arsenal’s chief scout, put in the groundwork with Fabregas and his family. By summer 003, rival talent spotters at the World Under-17 Championships in Finland were disconsolate to learn the top scorer and player of the tournament was already bound for Highbury.

Arsenal acquired Fabregas by exploiting a loophole whereby Spanish clubs, under their country’s law, cannot sign players professionally until they are 18, while English teams, under EU and Fifa regulations, can sign them at 16. Some reports suggested Arsenal bent the rules by giving Fabregas’s father, also called Francesc, and a former player, a house and a job in London but that is untrue. The player moved to England alone and went straight into digs with Philippe Senderos and the only necessity was that, before bringing him over, Arsenal waited until he finished school.

Manchester United did something similar with Fabregas’s Barcelona colleague, Gerard Pique, and both cases caused an outcry in Spain. Johan Cruyff accused Arsenal of being “underhand” and English clubs of “turning cheating into an art form”, but Fabregas believes it is not England that has the problem. “Here you’re better at giving young players a chance than in Spain,” he says. “I don ’t want to say one country is better, because each has good and bad things, but that’s one part of the game where Spain could learn something.

“In the national team I’ve played with some amazing young players but they’re still playing for the B sides of their clubs. When I go back to Barcelona the fans are nice. They don’t say bad things. They know if I was still at Barcelona I’d be playing for the under-19s.” He looks at the platform he has been given by Wenger. Three weeks after coming here he became, at 16 years and 177 days, the youngest player to appear for Arsenal, against Rotherham in the League Cup and 35 days later was the club’s youngest scorer, versus Wolves in the same competition.

Last August he began life as a first-team regular following a commanding performance against Manchester United in the Community Shield and confident league debut at Everton. “I played four games at the beginning of the season and said to myself, ‘Okay, that’s great’. To get any more seemed too much to hope for. But then the manager kept me in the team and I said, ‘This is not possible!’ I ’ve never seen this before. It’s like, in England, you’re dreaming as a young player. In Barcelona, even if you’re playing well, they sign someone older.”

Despite Fabregas’s gratitude, Wenger has not been picking him through some altruistic apprenticeship programme. Fabregas is good enough, ergo Fabregas plays. Players who get to first-team level so young almost always do so because of gifts connected with their youth. They have either the pace and vigour of a fresh athlete, or the fearlessness of an unencumbered personality.

They tend to be strikers, full-backs and wingers, the dynamic or individualistic positions. But Fabregas is a thinking midfielder, whose game is somewhere between what Spaniards call the No 4 (Claude Makelele) position, for which he was groomed in the Barça junior ranks, and the No 10 (Zinedine Zidane) role, where he operates at youth level for Spain. He has an adult understanding of the game that only Wayne Rooney shares among current players of similar age. Rooney vies with Keane as the opposition footballer Fabregas most admires. “He’s the best young player in the country. He has great feet, he’s strong, quick and he scores lots of goals.”

Fabregas’s real Premiership heroes are Arsenal ones, though. He loved watching English football on satellite TV, and liked Keane, Paul Scholes, Patrick Vieira “and of course Thierry (Henry)”. His favourite back then? “Patrick, because he plays my position. I can learn a lot from him. For me, he’s the best in the world.”

But there is only one true idol for Fabregas. He is another articulate, intelligent midfielder, somebody who has spoken up for the Catalan cause and seems to be an icon for all Barça supporters and home-grown players. “(Pep) Guardiola,” says Fabregas, relishing the name. “He won the Champions League when he was 21 and stayed most of his career with Barcelona. He is a pure footballer. Sometimes you have to risk a bit and he was never afraid to do that.”

Guardiola was the No 4 Barça youth coaches told Fabregas to model himself upon. Two years ago he lived out a fantasy when he played alongside the maestro — now seeing out his career in Qatar — for a Catalan XI versus Brazil. “He never lost the ball and, sometimes, he even passed it to me!” Fabregas marvels. “It was my dream.”

They called Guardiola “Quarterback”, for the way he would lie deep and launch game-winning balls, and Fabregas is a connoisseur of passing. Most schoolboys dream of goals. Fabregas, hugging his Barça teddy, would drop off with pictures in his mind of splitting a defence. “It’s always been my game, passing, I’ve always wanted to play for the team. If I can do something for myself, it’s great, but the first thing is the team. It’s normal young players often want to demonstrate their presence, by beating players or scoring goals, but I love to make the last pass.

“The one I did against Tottenham (when he rolled a perfect ball through for Jose Reyes to win the game), I love that sort of thing. It’s maybe even better, the assist, than scoring a goal.” Fabregas is interrupted by a call on his mobile from Senderos, and there is some boyish gabbling. “One of the best things about football is you’re always making friends,” he grins. Though his career is progressing quicker than the rest, he still feels very much one of the group among Arsenal’s multi-national clutch of young players. It has helped, in terms of adapting to England, that there are others encountering the same new experiences and it is striking how much better he has settled here than Reyes.

Whereas Reyes, four years his senior, moved his family to London, Fabregas has lived with a landlady from day one. His girlfriend is still in Spain and his parents can only visit “once, maybe twice a month”, but he says, “I’ve never felt lonely.” The team man is highly independent. He travels on the Tube (though it is getting harder because he increasingly gets recognised) and describes London as “a great city. Though I still like my sunny weather.” He is taking driving lessons and beginning to imagine owning a house. “When you don’t have the protection of your family it’s good for your mentality,” he says. “You grow up quicker.” There is only one thing that bugs Arsenal’s senior pros about the pipsqueak in the corner of the dressing room. An example: the team went bowling just before Christmas. Who won? “Cesc won my group, ” sighs Lauren. “He wins everything.”

It comes back to that love of competition. “I do love to win,” Fabregas says. “Nobody can beat me at the PlayStation — well, sometimes, Thierry.” His goals are simple. “I know I shouldn’t play too many games at my age, but I always want to play. I’ve played 42 times this season and the manager told me I should have only played 15-20, so all I can say is ‘Thank you very much and I hope it’ll be the same next season’.” And what does he want to achieve, long term? “Everything. If you have everything you’ll be the best and I want to be the best. So I’ll have to win everything. I’d also like to pass my driving test.”

Source: The Times
Published: 8 May 2005

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