Carlos Tevez: The New Red Devil

Yet it never fails to arouse a deep sense of awe in even the most adamant of stoics. The rise of the scar-marked Carlos Tevez through knee-deep poverty in the corners of Buenos Aires and his flight through the troublesome zone of West Ham United to the 'Theatre of Dreams' has every symptom of that clichéd term "rags-to-riches"; it all started in the crime-riddled "Fuerte Apache" in the Argentine capital where football transcended from a mere way to wave off the crippling reality of poverty to the one single hope of survival, both spiritually and economically. The arc traveled across the borders to nearby Brazil and then got shipped off to the east of England. Now the trajectory has arrived to Manchester and Old Trafford. And if anyone is wondering whether Tevez is older than the age his birth certificate declares, let him rest assured that Tevez is indeed still 23.

It all had an air of inevitability. No, not the progress of Carlos Tevez from nobody to Somebody, since we all know that for every Carlos Tevez there is one unnamed individual still reeling under the disaster of having failed to cut the grades in professional football, but the transfer of the Argentine international striker from West Ham to Manchester United. Rarely in the football market where the widening gulf between the rich and the poor clubs is always picking up momentum does a so-called minnow get the nod ahead of the bigger fish and in this case, West Ham had to step down from their original stance thanks largely to a compensation of $4.07 million.

There were few who had a doubt that Tevez and his Argentine international team mate Javier Mascherano were only going to perceive Upton Park as a stopgap in their settling into European football when they were put on the flight from Corinthians in the eleventh hour of the European summer transfer period at the beginning of last season and as the season drove on, those doubters gradually began to grow fewer in number. Two managers, both highly rated Brits, failed to incorporate the Argentine duo into the team, and at times into the squad would you believe! when both were successful in their own rights in the World Cup in Germany. While the most likely successor to Claude Makelele as the world's best anchoring midfielder, Javier Mascherano, was dug out of the hole by Liverpool in the January transfer window, Tevez was redundant most of the time and was employed at other times in warming the West Ham bench. The two times South American Player of the Year, Tevez was bemused to find himself completely ignored first by Alan Pardew and then by his successor Alan Curbishley. He was often quoted in the over histrionic and overemphasizing British press as being immensely frustrated and eager to leave the club as soon as he could, quotes that Tevez invariably denied but those that made the already sagging relationship between the player and the club even more difficult and often tempestous. Tevez was once reported to have been forced to don on the Brazilian national shirt as a punishment for lousy comments made to the press about his position at the club and anyone who is Argentine would tell you that that's the worst thing that could happen to him!