Lest we forget: Laurent Robert and his left foot

Sarah Winterburn

We take a look at players for whom we have a great deal of lingering fondness, sometimes for reasons unclear. We started with one Eyal Berkovic, moved on to Pierre van Hooijdonk and now arrive at Laurent Robert…

 

From where did he appear?
He cameth from France and more specifically from PSG. The old loveable version of PSG. In the two-year period (99-01) he was there, the team is an absolute trove of names from an appealing sweet-spot, where a good time for football met the heyday of one of the finest artefacts ever produced by humans, turn-of-the-century Champ Man.

Robert was there with Vampeta, Peter Luccin – who you’d never buy, but seemed to appear on every list of ‘Interested’ DMs you ever searched, sharing his perennially dissatisfied temperament with teammate Nicolas Anelka (who would generally give you about three games, before subbing him in the 86th minute when he’d apparently picked up a knock would have you swiftly informed by his agent that dogs are treated better than you’ve treated Nicolas and he demands a transfer). Anyone else? Oh, you know…Jay-Jay Okocha, Mikel Arteta, Mauricio Pochettino.

Not a bad lot, although of course, the big ticket was to samba and soft-shoe shuffle his way into the 16th arrondissement the summer Robert departed for Tyneside. It’s a loveable curio of those days, when players like Ronaldinho, Romario and Ronaldo would find themselves at strangely muted European clubs first, like PSG or PSV, before making the inevitable transition upwards. It’s as if they simply didn’t have the visibility for them to be guaranteed as assets, allowing lesser clubs to step in and take a punt. Now, within about half a season anywhere in the world some Bulgarian kid will have compiled your ‘Best Goals Skills and Assists’ video to the sound of thumping Eurodance and we’re much the happier as a consequence.

Anyway, amid all that, Laurent Robert seemed to do pretty well there. He didn’t win anything, but then when does he ever? Strange to see a player, especially a talented one, with literally not a single domestic honour to his name. Even Robbie Savage has won the League Cup.

 

How did it go?
It’s a mark of Newcastle’s status in 2001 that a highly regarded player who had recently broken into a really quite good France squad -and who was approaching his peak at 26 – was theirs for the taking. He wasn’t cheap, in old money – £9million, not dissimilar to what Chelsea paid for Frank Lampard in the same season – but Newcastle were going places. With a strong squad, starring *adjusts reading glasses* Shola Ameobi, Lomana Lua-Lua, Andy O’Brien and Carl Cort, they were fired by a streak of ambition not felt in the Gallowgate since you know when.

Seriously though. This was a club where, though I’m sure by then the Newcastle fans must have started to wonder, it was possible to still conceive of them as competitive in the highest climbs. The stardust and fever dreams of the Keegan era were hard to shake off as long as your Shearers, Lees and Warren Bartons were still walking out at St James’ Park.

And it was a team with as credible a manager as a Newcastle team could ever have in Bobby Robson, and some serious players – Gary Speed, Nobby Solano, Shay Given at a time when you couldn’t hope for a more consistently high-class goalkeeper – to complement Wor Al banging in 20 a season, and the high-ceiling promise of a youthful Kieron Dyer, joined in the summer of 2001 by a youthful Crag Bellamy and a youthful Jermaine Jenas. And added to all that, Laurent Robert, whose heat-seeking missile-launcher of a left foot would, you imagine, make quite a happy union with Al’s big old aggressive forehead.

I think one of the most appealing things about football is when clubs develop their own particular micro-climates surrounding a certain type of player. Arsenal fans still seem addicted to the sense that if they could just find one tall, rangy, aggressive, charismatic, gazelle-legged midfielder, this would all go away. Chelsea await the next brute-headed, granite-jawed centre-back to truly make them feel at home. At Newcastle, if you’re a tempestuous, talented, aloof French winger, they’ve got time for you. They can see how you would fit.

And if, in your third game of the season you score a goal and lay on two assists and if, in the next game – a home game against Manchester United – five minutes in, you line up a free-kick, at such a distance that presumably, given the fact that at that point you’re still an unknown quantity, it will have all right-thinking fans shuffling a bit in their seats, with that mix of apprehension, doubt and a little shiver of hope, then BANG, St James’ Park does the ear-splitting roar, and Newcastle win 4-3 and you’re up and running. These days, obviously, they’d know already from YouTube that those free-kicks were dynamite but in 2001, you had to accept the limits of your innocence and just be surprised.

With each goal he scored, Laurent Robert added to your sense he wasn’t going to do what, at the turn of the millennium, you thought left-footed left-wingers should. His desire to come inside towards the penalty area, then use that angle to assess his ability to absolutely leather it into the far top corner puts him, as far as I can tell, in a class with only John Arne Riise. And Riise wasn’t as good at free-kicks – Robert is level with Cristiano Ronaldo with 11 Premier League ones – or at incisive crosses, arcing in at piercing angles; nor have I ever seen Riise score a front-flip-with-twist-backheel on the edge of the six-yard box which seems to fly into the goal at precisely the opposite angle to what Robert intended.

But Laurent could conceive of such things. French is fancier. In the end, we watch football for the moments that we didn’t see coming, and if a player picking up the ball not far beyond the half-way line, taking a few touches to steady himself then walloping it about 45 yards into the far-top corner was not what you expected, you became helplessly a fan of Robert.

And it worked. He laid on a ton of assists as they came fourth in his first season and made it through qualifying to the Champions League proper the next, allowing the Toon faithful to follow them to the San Siro, the Stadio delle Alpi, the Camp Nou, places that sure feel a long way off now, and qualified for the Champions League in third at the same time, though they then fluffed it in qualifying and ended up in the UEFA Cup.

Laurent had a problem though, you can see it when you watch him. Some players just give off that vibe – think Nicklas Bendtner and later Newcastle’s briefly adored Hatem Ben Arfa – that they don’t work well with other players. That they have a goal in mind, a thing they want to do here, and never will the warmth of being in a team and doing the team’s thing truly be able to pierce through that. None of them, it goes without saying, have particularly successful careers.

I’ve read a few things from Newcastle United fans saying that, though they remember him with varying degrees of adoration for the moments he provided, you often see a certain irritation voiced that, free-kick, 45 yards out – guess Laurent is going to try to smack this one. Thing is though, you couldn’t escape the jittery sense of what could sometimes happen.

 

What was his defining moment?
To some degree, the downward spiral of Newcastle, until the glory days of Alan Pardew’s unlikely tilt at Champions League qualification, and then some more downward spiralling after that, tracks in lockstep the falling-away of Robert from Premier League greatness.

First there was the sacking of Bobby Robson, a few games into the 04/05 season. Because, by the logic of the Newcastle United board – a deep, storied source of wisdom if ever there was one – his two top-four finishes and one fifth place did not mitigate early season form of D2L2 so off he must go, leaving behind a squad with a batsh*t hue.

Ever cross your mind James Milner has played in the same team as Nicky Butt, Patrick Kluivert and Alan Shearer? And of course, a centre-back pairing that Freud might include in a chapter titled ‘Nightmares About Defenders’ – Titus Bramble and Jean-Alain Boumsong. The latter was described, in a passage from the Wikipedia entry for new manager Graeme Souness, with deathless understatement, thus: ‘When Boumsong was given a torrid time by DJ Campbell during his Newcastle debut against Yeading in the FA Cup, doubts over the wisdom of the transfer appeared.’

Here is Laurent describing his diplomatic approach to Souness in his last full season as a Magpie: “We finished last season so badly that towards the end I just laughed at him.” Can you imagine how a man who can lose it over Paul Pogba’s hair would have taken that? Like to imagine Graeme fixing him with that gimlet Caledonian stare, asking him ‘what d’you make of this, Laurent?’ And Laurent, with a philosophical shrug, replying ‘I just laugh’.

Off he went, but not before, improbably and unpleasantly, stripping down after his last game at St James’ Park to the kind of shapeless, elastic-waistband underpants you’d have as a spare for gym at school, and marching from the pitch in those.

 

And how is he now?
Still giving off a sense in interviews that he is not a people person; self-enclosed, somewhat humourless, keen to simply tell his own version. But hey – such a personality produced, for a spell, a player who’d see a ball dropping from the sky, 40 yards out and diagonally to the goal, and so decide he was going to arc it using Thor’s hammer into the far top corner, and what anyone else here thinks be damned. I miss those kind of players.

 

Toby Sprigings

Newcastle United