Larsson really can make you happy when skies are grey


When you call a taxi in the Great Divided Football City, opinions are never
going to be woolly. "Celtic Park? Henrik Larsson? Aw, what a lovely man,"
says the female cab controller. "But I'm a Rangers supporter, so you better
tell him I wisnae asking for him."

The cabbie, though, is from the Other Side. On the trip to the stadium, he
says he still can't quite believe that money, ambition and a desire to
improve his nutmeg technique against defenders other than Bert Kontermann
haven't taken his Henrick away. "We're very lucky. A lot of great players
are aye looking around for the next move. But he seems to like it here."

Larsson's late. The media room at Celtic Park is a small, low-ceilinged
space that John Hughes and Johannes Edvaldsson would have had trouble
negotiating if it had been about in their time. Then he appears: all in
black, he's taller than he looks on the pitch, and his tight tee-shirt shows
off his upper-body strength.

Once, footballers were only recognisable by their legs. (In the classic
telly comedy Abigail's Party, the hostess-from-hell played by Alison
Steadman flashes hunky Tone from next door a lascivious look and says: "I
knew you played football - it's your thighs.") Not any more. There's a lot
more to players, and to football.

Larsson, newly turned 30, has been at a "team meeting". It's unlikely Yogi
or Shuggie were required to attend them. But Martin O'Neill, according to
Larsson, is an expert communicator. In the great goalgetter's new book, A
Season In Paradise, he remarks: "Someone once said: 'Football is a simple
game made complicated by idiots.'" But of O'Neill and his coaching team, he
enthuses: "They've been brilliant at making it plain what they expect from
us." Except to Larsson it's "Mr O'Neill".

The Swedish star's book is not fantastically revelatory but it does contain
a smorgasbord of new detail about the man. It tells us that in the team
hotel Larsson rooms alone.

He doesn't like hospitals (there's a long passage about how, during his
leg-break treatment, he was offered a bedpan, refused to use it, and
screamed at the nurses to help him to the loo).

Other morsels...before matches, he always eats spaghetti bolognese. He
sleeps a lot. When he apologised to his team-mates for setting up a Chic
Charnley winner for Hibs on his debut, he didn't know what they meant when
they said: "Nae bother."

Now, happily settled in Scotland with his wife, son, dog, horses and those
all-important Swedish-style wooden floors, he says "wee" instead of "small".


He hates missing chances. (Ho-hum). He is a fan of gangsta rapper Notorious
B.I.G., the drug-dealer-turned-hip-hop star killed in a drive-by shooting
(This is more like it: Footballer In Non-Phil-Collins-Endorsement Shock!).
He makes two pairs of boots last a whole season. (Tony Adams has admitted he
changes his every few games, but then he doesn't strike the ball anything
like as sweetly as Celtic's No7).

You might be surprised at this, though: Larsson is not super-confident.
Early on in the treble-winning season, he knocked on O'Neill's door and more
or less apologised for his less than devastating form thus far. Later, well
on the way to a record 53-goal haul, the Golden Shoe and two
player-of-the-year awards, he still needed his team-mates to tell him he was
doing all right after yet another crucial strike.

"The cheers of the crowd were muffled by them jumping on top of me," he
writes. "Moments like that are priceless. You want to pinch yourself just to
make sure it's all true. Even after all these years of being a professional
footballer, one of my first thoughts is a sense of relief that I'm doing my
job, proving that I'm good enough to be in this team."

Really? "Of course," he says. "It's normal to have doubts. So much of this
game is about confidence and sometimes you need reassurance. You need a lot
of luck and you cannot take anything for granted. Look at when I broke my
leg. No-one knows what the future holds."

Larsson is a fairly serious chap, but not that serious. "Well, I don't like
Bergman," he says when asked about his favourite movies. Still, the attacker
can be defensive, in the way that footballers often are.

He almost apologies for the nutmeg on Kontermann en route to the first of
his two goals in the 6-2 rout of Rangers last season.

"I had to get past him, and from the angle I was running at, that was about
the only thing I could do," he writes.

You have to wait to Page 55 before he describes the feeling of scoring and
even then he can only manage a "pretty good". He's sorry, he says, but he's
never known the words to best sum it up, not even in Swedish. He has one
more go: "The only thing I can liken it to is your birthday when you're a
kid and all your friends are at your party and you're about to open your
presents."

What's his first memory, of anything? "I was six when I signed myself in at
my first club. Every other boy in the queue was taller than me." He laughs.
"They were all big yins. I was the wee man."

Growing up the son of an immigrant sailor from the Cape Verde Islands off
West Africa and a Swedish mother, he suffered racist taunts. "At that time
there weren't many foreigners in Sweden. You can react to that kind of stuff
in different ways, and I fought the boys who called me names. When you are
good at something, the colour of your skin gets forgotten about. But I don't
understand why one man can hate another because of that."

Kenny Dalglish - another who swore by lots of kip - was a hero for the young
Larsson, who was thrilled by great dribblers as a boy but is knocked out by
the skills of the modern player. "Did you see what Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the
young Swede who plays for Ajax, did against Liverpool in that pre-season
tournament? He went one way then...whoosh. I can't do that, no chance."

But he can do a few other things, to the delight of the green and white
hordes and Mr O'Neill. For how much longer? He's signed up for three more
years, and fully intends to see out his contract. But still the doubts
remain: hence the fans' song You Are My Larsson. Doesn't he lie awake
wondering how he might fare in a better league?

Firstly, he never has sleepless nights. Secondly, he's fed up hearing
criticism of the standard of the SPL. He believes there are good home-based
strikers, such as Stevie Crawford of Dunfermiline and Hibs' Tom McManus; and
good defenders too, though he declines to name those wisest to his wiles.

If he needs a challenge - and he does - then there's the Champions League.
"I don't have to go anywhere else," he says, before heading for home for an
afternoon nap. Henrik Larsson isn't tired of Celtic and Scotland yet and,
predictably, the woman in charge of the fast blacks doesn't take this news
at all well.

A Season In Paradise is published by BBC Worldwide