Ronaldinho Phenomenon

It was hard to suppress a smile when David Pleat suggested, late in the Champions League semi-final at the San Siro, that Milan would have to abandon their principles, get people into the penalty area and put some balls into the mixer.

Fat chance. Of Italian teams abandoning their principles, that is, not of taking a leaf out of old Wimbledon coaching manuals. How did Carlo Ancelotti respond when Milan went a goal down in the home leg of their semi-final? He sent on a full-back. And how old is Paolo Maldini? The grand old man of Italian football will be 38 in a couple of months. And when this substitution failed to alter the course of the game what did Ancelotti do next? He threw on another geriatric full-back of course, this time the 35-year-old Cafu in place of the 33-year-old Jaap Stam.

Like Italian football, Maldini and Cafu have been great in their time, but this is a young man's game and, to misquote Alan Hansen, you don't win anything with reputations. Italy currently resembles a waxwork museum dedicated to the preservation of old defensive ideas, not to mention old players and coaches, except you would probably see more movement and the occasional new face at Madame Tussauds. Small wonder Serie A now attracts fewer customers through the turnstiles than the Championship, England's second-tier competition. Bear that in mind next time someone mentions Ancelotti or Fabio Capello for England. What about Steve Coppell or Neil Warnock instead?

How it must irk Milan fans that one of their former favourites, Frank Rijkaard, is now in charge of such an imaginative and adventurous side as Barcelona. It might irk them even more to discover that, horror of horrors, the away coach spent the interval telling his team to get farther forward. English television viewers know this thanks to an inspired piece of broadcasting by the ITV team, whose touchline reporter was busy informing us that Rijkaard had been urging Ludovic Giuly to take up more attacking positions when the France forward duly popped up in the penalty area on the end of Ronaldinho's wonderful pass and won the game for Barcelona. If this column is going to moan about biased and bland television coverage, it ought to be prepared to recognise moments of quality, too.

Ronaldinho is a wonderful player to watch, rarely capable of doing anything ordinary even when having a quiet game, and, in addition to winning the Fifa world player of the year award twice in succession since joining Barcelona in 2003, he has just been named the most commercially valuable player in the world by a German marketing company. That must have made unpleasant reading for Real Madrid, who thought they owned that commodity in David Beckham, but, according to the BBDO consultancy, Ronaldinho's comparative youth and recent achievements with Barcelona make him a far more attractive marketing prospect.

So not only did Real miss out on a brilliant player by going for Beckham's looks in the summer after the 2002 World Cup - when an unnamed director was famously quoted as saying: 'The whole of Asia wants to shag us because of Beckham' and 'Ronaldinho's so ugly that he'd sink you as a brand' - it appears they might lose the marketing battle as well. Beckham has certainly helped Real to become the world's biggest-grossing club, but all eyes are on Barcelona at the moment and Ronaldinho looks the real deal. A World Cup winner at the age of 22, he stands to be as peerless as Pele should he repeat the magic in Germany, and for all his fame Pele never operated in the age of truly global television and marketing.

The Ronaldinho phenomenon, in short, could easily be bigger than anything the world has yet seen and no one will begrudge him his fame or his income because he is so obviously worth it. The term marketing usually implies some sort of exaggeration of a product's quality - Beckham did not get where he is solely because of footballing ability, for example - yet no exaggeration is necessary with Ronaldinho. He just looks a lot like the best player in the world and if he chooses this season's Champions League and this summer's World Cup to prove it, Arsenal and England might be the ones to suffer. He has done it before; just ask David Seaman.

It seems bizarre now that only three years ago, while playing for Paris Saint-Germain, Ronaldinho had the reputation of a talented but uncommitted playboy. He was just playing in the wrong city. No matter what was achieved on the pitch, he has since complained, the Parisian public remained indifferent. That would not have been the case in Manchester and United did enter negotiations in 2003, although perhaps the player was never as keen on a move to England as the club hoped and merely used the interest to up the ante with Barcelona.

When you see how the move has worked out you can hardly blame him, even if Ronaldinho has been the catalyst for Barcelona's revival and why they have been able to attract players of the quality of Deco and Lionel Messi. Sexy football is now synonymous with Rijkaard, not Ruud Gullit, and it is all down to the player Asia did not want to shag.

All Ronaldinho wanted, like any great performer, was an audience. He has that now and for the foreseeable future and while stadiums are emptying as caution rules in Italy and Real are busy buying up Brazilians Robinho and Julio Baptisto regardless of looks, the only cloud on the Ronaldinho horizon is whether he will be deemed too ugly to advertise Viagra in his retirement.

He already has an answer for that. Last November, when even Madridistas gave him a standing ovation for two memorable goals in a 3-0 demolition of Real at the Bernabeu, he saved his best smiling assassin performance for the press conference. 'I may be ugly,' he said, 'but I think I have charm.'

Chance for second string to overturn recent history

John Lyall was different from modern football managers, most of his obituarists noted, being polite, fair and probably too self-effacing to sulk on Sky or lay down the law in a dressing room full of millionaires.

But the game he knew was utterly different, too. He was in charge of West Ham finishing in what would now be a Champions League-qualifying position and of Trevor Brooking scoring the winning goal in an FA Cup final with his head. That 1980 success, against Arsenal, was the last time a Second Division club lifted the trophy. The achievement did not seem all that remarkable at the time yet in the quarter-century since only three more second-tier teams have reached the final (QPR, Sunderland, Millwall) and all finished on the losing side.

The challenge for West Ham or Middlesbrough, whichever of the two win this afternoon's FA Cup semi-final, is to break the big-six monopoly on the trophy, if that is not too much of a compliment to modern-day Everton. For since the past two great FA Cup final upsets of the 1980s - Coventry in 1987 and Wimbledon in 1988 - success has been shared between just six teams. And Everton and Spurs have only one win each, which leaves Manchester United (five), Arsenal (five), Liverpool (three) and Chelsea (two) responsible for 15 of the past 17 laps of honour.

Fact, fiction and fantasy of the Shearer era

Jimmy Armfield has just described Alan Shearer as the last of a dying breed, an old-fashioned centre-forward and a real Boy's Own hero. Coming from someone familiar with the Boy's Own Paper, rather than just the oft-misused expression, this is an almost perfect description.

Only almost perfect because Shearer more obviously resembles Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track, and he was in The Rover and Victor. And he was a runner, given to beating the world's finest on a diet of fish and chips then sprinting straight back to the welding shop, not a footballer who would have us believe he celebrated his only championship win by creosoting the back fence.

There has always been something improbable about Shearer, something suggestive of the fictitious. Why does he keep reminding us his dad is a sheet-metal worker? Think of the Newcastle directors branding him 'Mary Poppins', or that spooky picture as a boy with his hero Kevin Keegan.

The Times writer who swore he used to have an Alan Shearer cigarette card when he was a boy conjured up exactly the right image. Those stern-faced icons with brilliantined centre partings most likely also caused mayhem in their time, football being a rougher, tougher sport then than it is now, but they are not remembered for stray boots, sharp elbows or their ability to dominate referees.

The Shearer story might be clouded by that sort of detail now, but it will soon resolve itself. England captain. Sixty-three caps. More than 100 Premiership goals for two clubs. Hat-trick on professional debut. Topped Jackie Milburn with 206 Newcastle goals. Top player, great career, massive loss to Premiership football. And that's not make-believe.