The Soccer Blog: Why Sell Our Parky?

Thursday, 2 December 2010

Why Sell Our Parky?

By: Ivor | December 2nd, 2010

527317_33_preview I don’t see my Aunty Rae that much. She’s getting ancient now and spends most of her time commuting back and forth between her homes in Rochdale and Naples, Florida, putting in shifts with a huge crew of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A right old character she is. The first home match after the Munich air disaster, she plonked me in her lap and used my little four-year old body as a sort of combination handkerchief and pillow as she wept for her beloved Eddie Colman and Duncan Edwards. The back of my neck was so wet from her tears that my neck got chapped.

Anyway, I’ve got a thousand stories about Auntie Rae that I’ll tell some other time. In the here and now, however, she’s been calling me lot. She’s definitely convinced that the campaign I began with some other bloggers–later joined by journos like Martin Samuel–to get the club to step in and buy Nobby Stiles’ career souvenirs worked. More to the point, her gossipy friendship with the wife of one of the club’s greatest players leads her to believe that David Gill really does read the United blogs daily and that he passes on what’s worthwhile to the Gaffer. Seems that on Monday she read the headline–”Park ji-sung linked with Sevilla move!”–and so, naturally, with her knickers in a twist, she called me.”

“They can’t flog our Parky!” she said. “I love me diddy dynamo.”

“They shouldn’t,” I said.

So, a word of warning to Gilly and the Gaffer. It’s not far from Naples to Tampa. If you cross my Aunty Rae, she’ll be at the Glazers manor in no time, giving the Old Leprechaun, Joel Glazer and the rest of them a right nasty bollocking.

Sell Parky: Really? I’m surprised. According to what I’ve been reading, Sevilla really are plotting an audacious bid to sign him. According to the Daily Mirror, Sevilla’s Director of Football, Ramon Rodriguez has had scouts watching our 29-year-old midfielder regularly and will make a strong bid for his services during the January transfer window. This is not surprising as Park has been playing the best club football of his career after getting the rest he needed following a slow start to the season as a result of a tiring World Cup. Indeed, interest in the South Korean national team captain ought to be expected. However, a number of other sources beyond the ever hysterical Mirror rag claim that the Spanish club’s technical director, Victor Orta, flew in to England last week to meet and negotiate with Park’s representatives.

170px-Park_Ji-Sung Sevilla’s interest in the midfielder is certainly going to test United’s bottle and give us a sense of just how much Sir Alex Ferguson values him. More to the point, as Sevilla are a club well known and respected for their general thriftiness and a street survivor mentality of buy low/sell high typified by the Dani Alves saga, I would bet that other clubs like Bayern Munich and A.C. Milan will be having a sniff around, too.

Park was signed from PSV Eindhoven for £4 million in 2005 and has played in more than 100 games for United, scoring 15 goals. A defensive midfielder with the Kyoto Purple Kings of the J-League, he was converted into an attacking midfielder and winger by the South Korean national team’s wily coach, Guus Hiddinck, who was then instrumental in his move to the Netherlands.

Always underrated, Park was cynically written off as being bought “to sell shirts” by Piers Morgan and a lot of other hack football journos. Even Guus Hiddiinck worried that he’d be a bench-warmer at Old Trafford. Well, Parky has been with United for five years now and has proven a splendid investment. To be sure, he is not a great tackler or technician and his passing choices while under pressure often make me wince. What he does do brilliantly, however, is wear opponents down. Watch enough games and you’ll see how the same player he marks at the beginning of the game goes from shoulder-charging and jostling him off the ball early, to a state of utter exhausted dejection later. Never a regular, he has always been a purpose player, especially against teams which tend to operate using a narrow midfield like Chelsea. My favorite Park ji-Sung performance was in the 2008-09 season on September 21 against Chelsea when he did his Super lungs act on Frank Lampard and their enforcer Mikel Jon Obi and scored. In a congested midfield the lad is in his element.

The biggest rap on him has always been that he’s too passive, always laying off the ball for others. Depending upon your point of view, because of this perceived passivity, he’s often written off as too cowardly to try to score. Without getting into stereotypes about passivity and obedience, I will say that Park has been prone to sublimate himself into being a team-man and a content water carrier, perhaps because of the more pluralistic culture he comes from. Nevertheless, the rest he took after the first few games of the season seem to have been an amazing tonic. During this break he got married and I’m going to guess it did him good because he has never played as aggressively around the box before. Often left unmarked while opponents concentrate on Wazza, Berbatov and Nani, Park has suddenly unleashed a new capacity for positioning and scoring he has never shown before. He particularly impressed with his match-winning performance in United’s 2-1 win over Wolves last month, where he scored both of the goals, including a particularly crowd-stirring injury-time winner.

“He’s a real players’ player. Up there with best in world for movement and so intelligent and direct with runs off the ball. His work-rate is unreal; he adds a dimension no other player brings to the team. He’s underrated a real top player.”If he’s good enough for Rio Ferdinand, he’s good enough for me.

t1larg.park So should the Gaffer be tempted to cash in on him, given his age and the need to raise cash to bring in a world-class midfielder such as Bayern Munich’s Bastian Schweinsteiger or Daniele Di Rossi? No way! He’s just coming into his prime. If players like Johnny Evans, Darron Gibson and Wes Brown are not getting it done, I can see the club letting them go. As I sit here with my teeth chattering, wondering if they’ll have to cancel the Blackpool match, I can’t help wondering if perhaps Parky himself wants to go play in the sun. All I can say is what my Aunty Rae would probably say: “Tha’s nae going to bugger off away from them ‘oo adore thee, are tha’?” />

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