He's not going to win the Premier League, but Bojan's rebirth at Stoke is one of the stories of the season.
Football is filled with sensible plans that don't seem to work out, so it's always a delight when one of the stranger ideas seem to come off. On paper, where no football happens, the marriage of (on the one hand) a delicate child of La Masia who's flattered to deceive at several continental superpowers, with (on the other) the Premier League's most gristly club and most vinegary manager looked troublesome. For the club, a gamble that could be easily shrugged off; for the player, a last desperate swipe at a top-level career. A long shot, in other words.
On the pitch, however, where the football actually happens, Bojan has scored five, set up another, and been generally delightful to watch for both Stoke fan and neutral (another unlikely marriage). Monday night against Rochdale he slapped home a gorgeous volley to open the scoring, tried to pick a fight with an opponent half his size, then limped off to everybody's general displeasure. Not least of all Mark Hughes, who spent the rest of the game simmering with ill-concealed fury. Ultimately, perhaps we should have seen this coming. There's just something so right about a pottery-based romance between a craggy-faced beefcake and an elfin beauty.
Mark Hughes and Bojan, probably.
Some of you are probably wondering if this whole piece exists simply to allow that joke. Some of you have at least half a point. But the Bojanification of Stoke (and perhaps, given the hitherto unsuspected scrappiness he demonstrated against Rochdale, the Stokification of Bojan) is a thoroughly pleasing story, one that -- unusually for the Premier League -- can be enjoyed without barely a trace of cynicism. It's got everything.
Redemption: ever since Bojan emerged into the Barcelona first-team, carrying with him a ludicrous scoring record at youth level and the burden of supplanting Lionel Messi as the club's youngest debutant, he's been fascinating to watch, but rarely in a good way. Evidently gifted yet strangely brittle; forever looking confused at how quickly the game had gone from effortless to overwhelming. Peripheral in Italy, and unwanted at Ajax, it was starting to look as though the story of his first call-up to the Spanish national side -- set to break another record, instead sent home with a stomach complaint -- might become emblematic.
Nostalgia: in Bojan at Stoke, there are echoes of an earlier time in English football, of those days of the Premier League before the money-men realised exactly what it was that they managed to gouge out of the game. When Middlesbrough, or Manchester City, or Southampton were Stoke; when Bojan was Juninho, or Georgi Kinkladze, or the daddy of all them all, Matt le Tissier. When a few teams took that Bill Shankly saw about football teams resembling pianos -- "You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing" -- to its logical extreme and built teams consisting of one flautist and ten navvies.
Perhaps you could, if you wanted, trace this echo even further, back into the 1970s. There's a scene in the film of The Damned United when Brian Clough turns to his truculent Leeds squad and rejects their request for some detailed analysis on their upcoming opponents, Queens Park Rangers. "Stop Stan Bowles," he snaps. They don't; he scores; they lose 1-0.
There's something highly appealing about teams like this, constructed around one designated playmaker and his hulking guardians. Obviously there's a huge amount of exaggeration and elision involved -- to return to Stoke, it's not as though Marko Arnautovic and Stephen Ireland are Bebop and Rocksteady -- but still, the image is a powerful one. Here is Mowgli, and here are the wolves, and they are a family.
Longevity: perhaps, though, the most enjoyable thing about Bojan's burgeoning Stoke career is that it feels like he might be around a while. That cult hero status is achievable here. It's rare that anybody plays well in the Premier League and is allowed to stay where they are long enough to earn it, particularly anybody attacking or exciting. Now that the talent all tumbles towards the top, now that the bigger teams can afford to pick up players on the offchance, careers get broken up.
But Bojan's been burned before; has found the air around the pinnacle of the sport a bit thin. As such, you wonder if he might decide, if things keep going well, that what's comfortable and pleasurable is better than what's biggest. We wait and see. And we also to see what, exactly, he did to his knee last night against Rochdale; early reports suggest that he may have ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, which would be a hideous shame.
His joyous face has been totally infectious. He's even managed to provoke brief spasms of something vaguely smile-shaped onto the face of Mark Hughes, and that's no easy task.
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