St Juninho: A Heretic Confesses

LET the hysteria begin. Juninho has fluttered his eye-lashes, offered a sentimental step-over for old times sake and said he wants to come home and an army of usually emotionally armour-plated macho former steelworkers and dockers have gone wobbly-kneed in mushy anticipation of a tear-jerking reunion.
Cynics may suggest that it is just an unemployed ex-player looking for one last pay-day, that millionaire mercenaries have no feeling for the club and that had he cared that much for Boro he could have returned of his own volition at any stage over the last few years during one of his injuries to take the plaudits or even just to draw the half-time raffle – but they should be wary of doing so. With Juninho the normal rules do not apply. The Little Fella is beyond criticism and can not be judged by any of the normal jaundiced criteria.

Whole layers of Boro fans are wary of signing foreigners, are hostile to the club for signing players with poor injury records, are adamant that there should be no more fading golden oldies living on past glories… yet would set aside those acid tests in a heart-beat for Juninho. Some of the most hard-nosed and normally rational of supporters go all misty-eyed at the thought of Juninho and seriously harbour dreams that he could still do a job, that he could bring the spark of creativity the team craves. It is a form of madness.
The real sad cases, the faithful of the First Church of Saint Juninho have dreams one step closer to madness and would willingly hand the badgeless Brazilian a place in the dug-out tomorrow – some extreme cases even as the manager – in the bizarre belief that his very presence could imbue Boro’s current batch of lifeless midfielders with samba skills by some mystical process of osmosis.
I have always found the almost religious one-eyed obsession with Juninho deeply disturbing and corrosive. The zealotry and voluntary myopia that comes with totally uncritical support of an individual is totally at odds with the collective concept of a team. When ten other players “are not on the same wavelength” it should ring alarm bells and raise question-marks about the signal being transmitted.
I will put my hand up to the heresy of doubting the infallibility of Juninho. And I know that immediately opens me to public vilification. I’ve been there before: the intense six pages letters in green ink with salient points underlined in red, the vicious accusations of treachery and vile Satanic Lambism, having to look under the car in the morning with a little mirror on a long stick. I’ve got nothing against the bloke either personally or as a player, I just believe he is mortal and should be measured as other men. I have no time for deification or the cult of personality.
He was undoubtedly a great player – to deny his sublime skills would be churlish – but he was by no means the best player and he was certainly not a team player. Beating three men may leave the crowd in raptures but if you try to beat a fourth and lose the ball or fail to deliver the cross then it is ultimately an empty exercise in pointless art. In three spells of Boro he probably only performed anywhere near the imagined levels of sustained brilliance in one six month spell. For much of the rest he was injured, recovering, out of position or out of synch.
He is not the best player ever to wear a Boro shirt (look at the legends poll for a list of alternative candidates), not even the best in the modern age (Southgate and Ince for me) and in fact he is not even the best Brazilian because if you want to measure it over an arbitrary short spell then awesome Emerson in his first three months was by a far a better, more effective and inspirational figure. And as far as one player galvanising a team and leaving magic in his wake is concerned Juninho wasn’t as mesmerisingly successful as Paul Merson was – and he has a lynch mob on his tail. Boro have signed bigger names that had a greater impact on the team and have contributed more in the long term to the club but they have still been given a hard time and measured harshly against St Juninho .
Putting aside his skills and where exactly he stands in the pecking order (which is entirely subjective anyway) the thing that has always disturbed me is the collective public adoration and the resulting blindness to his faults and his mortality. There is a cult like mentality at work.
It has always amazed me that Juninho has largely escaped censure for actions that would be regarded as unequivocal sins had they been committed by other players: the failure to show for the open-top parade after Wembley would be considered a stain for generations to come had it been the actions of a mere mortal while the decision to leave after relegation is quite clearly a ‘rats leaving sinking ship’ in any other conceivable individual situation but in his case the mitigation of ‘just thinking about his international ambitions’ was accepted without question. If Stewart Downing or David Wheater was to leave citing the the same reason would it be so sympathetically received? I don’t think so.
It strikes me that Juninho has never been judged by the same criteria as any other player. He transcends any objective scale of assessment because he is not just any other player, he is a cypher, a personification of those few brief months when big spending Boro were reshaping the dreamscape of possibilities, when anything was achievable and the sky was the limit.
Juninho crystalised a moment when Boro were shattering the club record with every transfer, were in a plush new stadium and the shackles of a barren Ayresome history had been shattered. Boro were liberated from a humdrum and fruitless past, supporters had – temporarily at least – cast aside that inherited armour of cynicism and were emotionally open to a new age of possibility. Juninho is a symbol of all that powerful, passionate moment of rebirth and new hope when it seemed that dreams could come true.
To judge Juninho harshly would be plunge a knife into our own dreams and threaten the viability of our own possibility. The recurring notion of Juninho’s return is like the Arthurian legend of a super-natural saviour who will come in our hour of need, a psychological symbol linked to our own prospects of rising again.
Boro should have done with it and sign him up as a £30 grand a week mascot. Having him doing tricks before the game would have the crowd in a frenzy and may spark the crowd back into life.