Brief 7: Paul Scholes, Leonard Cohen and other forced analogies

 You may know me as a man who holds, in total, two strong opinions, one on Bob Dylan, one on Ryan Giggs, but you’ll be delighted to hear that after years of trying, I’ve finally been able to condense those two opinions down to one opinion – here it is. - Thinking Paul Scholes is greater than Ryan Giggs is the same as thinking Leonard Cohen is greater than Bob Dylan.

As soon as I’d had this marvellous thought, I tried to push the analogy a little further. Look I could pair Cantona with The Beatles, Thierry Henry with Joni Mitchell, David Beckham with Stevie Wonder, Frank Lampard with Bruce Springsteen, Roy Keane with The Who, Alan Shearer with Cliff Richard etc … but where’s the fun in that, apart from a lot of fun?

I’ll leave that for another time. Back to Scholes and Cohen; this growing new orthodoxy that seems like it makes perfect sense … oh Scholes was the key, Scholes was the best, Cohen was the great artist/poet, the one who touched perfection. (I believe, in the latter case, I have invented what is known as a straw man, but don't get me started on David Bowie ...)

I wrote far too much about Giggs here, and that covers most of the ground. But, here’s the main thing, Dylan came before and after Scholes, Giggs could do everything Cohen did, Scholes could not do everything Giggs did. Scholes operated, at his best, in a small zone of perfection, but was lost when he tried to stray outside that, Dylan began as one thing, became another, then another, went back to being the same thing, learnt and changed, went on and on, produced close to his best time after time late on in his career.

There were a couple of “Greatest Champions League XIs” this week curated by different media outlets  – Scholes was the only British player in either (his inclusion met by considerable protest). Giggs was not even mentioned as a possibility. This led me to a revelation, a bit like hearing ‘Series of Dreams’, ‘Dark Eyes’ or ‘Red River Shore’ for the first time, and just going “what there’s more, hiding in plain sight?”

This is what I found out - Giggs has more assists in the Champions League than any other player … Messi, Zidane, Ronaldo, anyone … he’s  3^rd on the official UEFA list, behind Ronaldo and Messi, but when it comes to Assists, the UEFA list only goes back to the start of Opta Stats in 2002 – his rate of assists per game since that point (considering he retired 7 years ago) is higher than anyone else, and, then, if you look at the TransferMarkt unofficial stats, you can see that, if you total all his assists (pre and post Opta), they’re higher than anyone else’s. I’ve checked that against any potential pre-Opta rivals – Seedorf, Zidane, Beckham, Pirlo etc.

Bearing in mind that he is 3^rd on the UEFA list, when that list only takes into account the 2^nd half of his career, a time some have described him as a utility player somewhere past his best, this really puts him in proper context, considering the Champions League is the consistently highest quality of football that exists, as a world class player alongside the very best, not just a parochial perennial.

Look, 500 words, you know I could write (and indeed have written) 500,000 words on all this, but still – Scholes/Cohen, Giggs/Dylan, the great unifying theory you've been waiting for.