El Hadji Diouf

El-Hadji Diouf

Why we hate him: Well he’s a diving, spitting, club-ruining tithead. Enough?

Ah the summer of 2002, I remember it well. Me and my friends decided to follow an ancient map that led to the treasure of One-Eyed Willie, the pirate who, legend had it, buried… wait a minute, that’s the Goonies. That’s a really good summer.

No, I was watching Ireland self-implode in Saipan, followed by working for an awful magazine which meant I saw feck all of the early morning kick offs at that summer’s World Cup.

I had to miss watching England lose to Brazil; I could only get text updates of the South Korea V Italy game which turned into an epic; I was forced to listen to France va-va-voom their way out of the tournament on a radio for God’s sake… a radio! It was like the forties I tell ya.

A low time.

Perhaps one saving grace was that I didn’t see much of Senegal that year. Their opening win against France just kinda passed me by; except to comment on the wonderful irony of Paddy Vieira losing to the country he dumped for Les Bleus. So, when the tournament ended and Liverpool paid £10 million for one of Senegal’s star players El-Hadji Diouf I have to say I was intrigued and not even a bit worried.

Gerard Houllier may well have been playing poor football but he was full of promises of better days with ‘expansive football’.

But as Johnny Giles – a far wiser man than me, Houllier or God himself – said two weeks into that season: “when I hear that from a manager I always think they’re talking rubbish”. Giles was right. Of course.

When a manager says he’s going to change a team’s style before a season starts, all it really means is that he knows deep down that they were playing horrendous football the year before. He’s placating the fans for the summer before grim reality sets in. At the first sign of a deep-lying defence hoofing the ball to defend a glorious one-nil lead against Bradford, Houllier would just turn around and say, “you can’t change the mentality in a matter of weeks”.

Houllier, as his time shitting himself on the sidelines at Lyon has proved, will never change his philosophy. But it was the signing of El-Hadji Diouf that really left the sourest taste of all the Frenchman’s time. If ever there was a sure sign that Houllier was no judge of a player it was this gobshite.

Diouf started out his time at Liverpool on the cover of their official magazine telling everybody about “I am the greatest” in a headline that should feature amongst the most ill-conceived of all time. Even a sycophantic fanzine would have been able to tell from very early on that this guy was not going to be much cop.

But then, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s review his career pre-Liverpool.

Born in 1981 in Senegal he became a pro at 17 with French outfit Sochaux where he played 16 games scoring… well zero goals. But things improved during his time at Stade Rennais right? Well if you can call one goal in 28 games an improvement, then maybe.

But his move to Lens was a roaring success of course? For his it was on the back of this and not just a few lucky goals in the 2002 World Cup that warranted his move to Liverpool. Right Gerard? Well, actually he scored 18 times in 54 games. One in every three games. In France.

Giles could smell a dud, but Houllier couldn’t. He thought he could tame the man who, incidentally, has only ever scored 16 goals at international level. He’s got 41 caps and most of these are against shambolic African nations who are generally more concerned with military takeovers than football games.

His greedy attitude to play, his pathetic shows of ‘effort’ during games; his relentless diving. Everything about him was amiss; he made the fans call for Heskey in hallowed tones. He was a chump and he couldn’t have cared less.

The end of his career at Liverpool really came during his second season (having scored a massive 3 goals in his first year) when he spat at a Celtic fan during a Uefa Cup tie. Houllier at the very least took off his biggest mistake in management and didn’t play him in the second leg.

Houllier would later call him his “biggest mistake” at Liverpool (some would argue this is because he wasn’t allowed to hang around long enough to see how bad Djibril Cisse was). He would also comment that, “I spent £10 million for a footballer, not for a spitting camel! If I wanted to look after animals, I would have managed a zoo.”

In fairness this is Houllier, as always, blaming someone else for his failings. He put Diouf out on the wing and said he was doing fantasitically well, even going so far as to say that if the Senegal international was Brazilian “everyone would be talking about him”.

More accurately, the reaosn no one was speaking about him was that he couldn’t cross for shit and everyone knew he was being slowly edged out of the club. He left for Bolton on loan was soon as Rafa Benitez came in to sort out the club after the mess Houllier had left.

During his first season at the Reebok he was banned and fined for spitting in Arjan de Zeeuw's face during a 1-0 home defeat against Portsmouth in November 2004. De Zeew went on to score the winning goal of the game. Sometimes life really does work out for the best then.

To add to that incident, police would eventually charge him with disorderly conduct over allegations of spitting his drink at Middlesborough fans after being substituted at the Riverside Stadium earlier in November.

Around about that time as well he was banned from international football for four matches for a verbal assault on referee Ali Bujsaim.

In one of his more admirable moments, Diouf was then sent off after just eight minutes of an FA Cup tie against Arsenal in March 2005 for elbowing Jens Lehmann off the ball.

Fast forward to November 2006, and Diouf was arrested over allegations he hit his wife at their home in Bolton. Bizarrely, his replacement at Liverpool – whom Houllier also saddled the club with – Cisse, also had similar charges brought against him by his then-pregnant missus. Now, both men have been cleared of all charges, but we think it’s safe to say that Houllier just liked t recruit scumbags. As long as they spoke French then they were in.

Maybe this sounds like a rant at Houllier but Diouf’s aforementioned attitude was just one of the most sickening aspects of that particular era in Liverpool’s recent history. Away from Liverpool, Diouf has remained a thoroughly unlikeable midfielder-cum-striker at Bolton under Allardyce; with his manager often defending his dives because “everyone else does it”.

A striker with not a hint of decency about him has found a club that is just as ugly in its standards of football. He spits, he dives, he plays for a horrible shower of bastards and we hope he gets out of the Premiership as soon as possible. There’s supposed interest from Spain which we welcome. Just get out of our sight you little prick.

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JJ Worrall