Fight for this Love Part 1

"I have had 20 years of people slagging me off, then I retire and people start to praise me"

When all the tributes were flowing in to Gary Neville last week, I felt a certain unease, in a sense just like that expressed by Gary Neville above, but also because

he's ours, he's not theirs. He's ours. Jamie Carragher paying tribute to him? Give me a break.

"I can’t stand Liverpool, I can’t stand Liverpool people, I can’t stand anything to do with them"

He's ours.

It is important to keep in mind that Gary Neville was, before anything, a great footballer. Let's not fall into the trap of the patronising, "he made the best of what he had, his desire was what made up for his lack of talent." Bullshit. He was a great player. His crossing was brilliant, his tackling great, his link up play going forward on the right was second to none.

FA Premier League (8): 1995-96, 1996-97, 1998-99, 1999-2000, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2006-07, 2008-09

UEFA Champions League (1): 1998-99

Intercontinental Cup (1): 1999

FA Cup (3): 1996, 1999, 2004

League Cup (2): 2006, 2010

Club World Cup (1): 2009

85 England Caps

That's not desire, that's being a brilliant footballer. So he deserved all the tributes, yet, still the unease, still the nagging, he's ours.

And here lies his desire. He goes beyond just being a brilliant footballer and into the realm of legend because of his desire, because of his love for the club. But desire is the wrong word. Here we turn to psychoanalysis and the idea of the drive. The drive is something beyond desire, Slavoj Zizek explains:

A drive is precisely a demand that is not caught up in the dialectic of desire... Demand almost always implies a certain dialectical mediation: we demand something, but what we are really aiming at through this demand is something else ... Along with every demand, a question neccesarily rises: "I demand this, but what do I really want by it?" Drive, on the contrary, persists in a certain demand, it is a "mechanical" insistence

that cannot be caught up in dialectical trickery: I demand something and I persist in it till the end.

Look at other players with a similar will to win, David Beckham or Ronaldo, in their desire to win for the team, wasn't there always a sense that it was actually for themselves really - "I demand victory because I want to be the best in the world, and the best win games," in Beckham's case we can see in his demand for victory a desire for celebrity, the very reason Sir Alex was prepared to see him out of the door: he didn't have the drive...When he was on the pitch Gary

Neville subsumed himself into Man Utd. Nothing else mattered. We had to win. He's ours.

And here, of course, lies the sadness. He's no longer on the pitch.

No longer one of us. Roy Keane was similar, out the door and, while still a legend, he finds other clubs to manage; Eric Cantona, still a legend, but acting takes the lead. It’s an inevitable dissipation of the aura, the red aura. It’s the moment when the legend is in the past, when the legend is no longer on the pitch week in week out, when real life intervenes and something else has to take over - the passage back from the drive to desire.

This is just the first part of some thoughts on Gary Neville, the second part, which will take us further afield, I've decided to make into a separate post so as not to detract from this tribute. I'll hopefully have a chance to get it finished by the end of the week.