2/1/2024 0 Comments Manor matters enigma![]() He hired an analytics company called SciSports to find him a club that matched his specifications: a quick attacking style, the freedom to roam without too many defensive duties, and a vacancy at left-wing. Adrift, alone, stripped not just of his professional dignity but his simple enjoyment of the game, Depay left United in early 2017, resolving to choose his next move with utmost care. In England, meanwhile, Depay is still best remembered as the “United reject”, a misfiring winger who encapsulated the wasteful anaemia of the Louis van Gaal years. In France they know him as Lyon’s captain and talisman, dragging a maladjusted club to their first Champions League quarter-final in a decade. In the Netherlands they know him as the brazen tearaway whose talent may finally be catching up with his prodigious ego. This is the enigma of Depay, a man who through his many complexities and contradictions, his heartfelt no-filter delivery, almost dares you to misunderstand him. He’d come to apologise.” The reader is left to speculate whether their rapprochement was sealed with a handshake. “Although I wasn’t actually finished, I quickly wiped my bum, ran out of the bathroom, opened the door, and sure enough: Robin. ![]() “I was sitting on the loo,” Depay remembers in his autobiography, Heart of a Lion (yes: he’s written a book, and a compulsively honest one at that, despite its vaguely Partridge-esque tone). Later that day, Depay is sitting in his hotel room, distraught and despondent, when there’s a knock on the door. “Who do you think you are?” a furious van Persie screams at the young winger. There’s a story from one of his early outings with the Dutch national team, when he humiliates Robin van Persie with a flamboyant stepover during a training game. You can see it everywhere: from the flair and risk in his game to the brassy social media persona, from his rhymes (sample lyric: “Catch a vibe in Paris, young king living lavish, back in Lyon going savage, they be waiting for hat-tricks”) to his deadly finishing. ![]() But this is a distinction that is harder to make for Depay, a man whose feats and foibles seem to spring from the same howling instinct: an urge to express himself. Often we like to compartmentalise the actions of footballers into the “on-field” and the “off-field”: the essential and the extraneous, the part that matters, and the part that doesn’t. ![]()
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