Franck Ribery

              

So we can agree, Franck Ribéry is very good at football. The evidence is there, and the well-informed opinion-having secondary sources - of which there are plenty these days, thanks to the Bundesliga being a fashionable, socialist paradise of rigidly-enshrined competitiveness - back them up. And yet he never, ever, ever, ever, plays well. Not a single great game, and barely the occasional good; a litany of disappointing mediocrity and forgettable something-or-otherness.Given this pressure, it's fair to say that Ribéry's refusal to play well when I can see him is, well, kind of annoying. After all, I'm making the effort here. I'm doing my duty as a modern clued-up football fan: watching a league that I don't really care about, and watching two teams to which I'm largely indifferent, just so when the time comes I'll know how to pronounce Toni Kroos's surname. (The 'r' is silent, and the 'p' is invisible.) What am I getting back from Franck? Overhit corners and underhit through-balls. I'm not sure I've ever seen him score a goal.When I'm watching, that is.This is where you come in, dear readers, dear commenters. Let me know if you have any similar players: footballers that the world and logic and all the evidence insists are good, but you've never actually seen play well. If we can get a couple of full XIs, I'll have a word with Sepp and we'll arrange a one-off friendly. Alternatively, if this turns out to be unique to Ribéry and me, then I'll finally have proved with science that this is personal, and I can get on with plotting my revenge. Thank you in advance.There is, as you have doubtless noticed, a lot of football knocking about. While that's always been the case, the fact that we now live in the future means that it's almost all watchable, to anybody with a screen, time, and patiences. That in turn leads to certain expectations. Had Alan Shearer never really heard of Hatem Ben Arfa ten years before he made a pillock of himself on Match of the Day, nobody would have batted an eyelid. Admittedly, Ben Arfa would have been a child, but you take the point.