As Jordan Henderson lolloped about White Hart Lane on Sunday, 6ft 1 ins of muscle that somehow retained a 91 per cent pass-completion rate while hurtling into space at ferocious speeds, it was hard to compute that this was the same player as anxious figure that joined Liverpool in summer 2011.
As Joe Allen flitted with purpose, pressing and distributing, it was hard to square his neatness and purposefulness with the player written off as a sideways-passing neurotic of last season.
And looking at Andre-Villas Boas, static and ashen on the touchline, it was hard to remember that in 2011, he had held news conferences in Dublin rapt as he led a Porto side playing attractive football to the Europa League.
Football is very quick to judge. It has become the greatest drama in the world, a 24-hour juggernaut of froth that grips a staggeringly large proportion of the world’s population. For the most part, the presentation treats that drama as soap opera. There is a need for easy characters and easy plot-lines: heroes and villains, purple patches and crises.
That a 21 year old moving away from his hometown to a new environment may take time to settle is acknowledged but tends to be ignored. Henderson was the £20 million (Dh119m) flop.
Now the arc of his narrative is turning to redemption, perhaps even to a call-up to England’s World Cup squad.
Allen’s performances in the last three games – in which Liverpool have rattled in 14 goals – have perhaps set him on a similar path from the wilderness. Both may soon find themselves as part of a bigger story: that of Brendan Rodgers as some sort of player-whisperer, able to coax greatness out of the apparently ordinary.
Rodgers deserves great credit for the way individual players and Liverpool as a whole have improved over the past year – an example of the increasingly rare phenomenon of a manager’s work on the training ground bearing obvious fruit – but there is also a much more basic point here: young players take time to develop. Players have bad patches.
The endless swirl of the transfer market obscures an even more basic fact: the vast majority of players are not that different in standard. What makes them play well or badly is in part their tactical deployment, in part physical fitness and in part confidence.
It is that last factor that seems particularly relevant to the modern era of instant judgement.
And in part it is luck. You can prepare as hard as you like, try as hard as you like, and sometimes things just do not work. The better the player, the fewer bad days or bad months there are, but even the very best can have an off season.
That is the danger of dismissing Villas-Boas. What he achieved at Porto, winning the treble while dropping only four points all season, was extraordinary. His problem was he was almost too successful: he never dealt with poor results or the chaos of seven new signings.
Only recently has he begun to learn how to cope in the bad times. Maybe he would have been bright enough and determined enough to pull through and work the magic again, but in football’s modern world, he was not given the chance.
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