The Greatest… In Spain At Least

Peo­ple are rav­ing about His Ruud­ness, Becks and the band of char­ac­ters that are on the edge of bring­ing a Euro­pean giant back to glory. But lost in the mix is the one man that has been a con­stant bea­con through­out these times of darkness.

I con­stantly hear about Cris­tiano Rolando and Kaká for FIFA Player of the Year. Do they deserve, hell yes!!! But there should be one player that needs to be con­sid­ered or at least be put in that list come the end of the year.

His per­for­mances since he came in for an injured César Sánchez in that mem­o­rable 2002 Cham­pi­ons League final has made him arguably the great­est Merengue of the past decade. Yes, he knocked off the untouch­able Raúl from his pedestal and the Madrid faith­ful must accept that and give him that type of appre­ci­a­tion as with­out him the team would have crashed to com­plete obliv­ion– some­thing that not even their beloved num­ber seven could have avoided. San Iker deserves a statue next to play­ers like Di Ste­fano, Puskas, Juanito, Butragueño, Michel, Sánchez, Ill­gner, Arconada, among many, many, many oth­ers. His sta­tus as idol should be secured not for the titles that he has won (yes he has on titles) and for what he did dur­ing the good times. His sta­tus should be secure based on what he did when he was sur­rounded by the great­est fan­tasy foot­ball squad that this gen­er­a­tion could have assem­bled. As much as Madrid´s Galác­tico pol­icy is part of ancient his­tory, but it did see the emer­gence of arguably the great­est goal­keeper of the past 10 years.

Iker Casil­las has kept Madrid afloat in these four years of dark­ness. His super­hu­man efforts and leg­endary per­fo­mances allowed he madridis­tas to actu­ally dream and be frus­trated at the lack of silverware.

The recent talk about how Beck­ham and Roberto Car­los ris­ing from the ashes, Ruud Van Nis­tel­rooy tak­ing up the slack up front, and a dif­fer­ent hero show­ing up every week­end dur­ing this mag­i­cal run got Iker lost in the shuf­fle. Remem­ber when Iker was the guy that kept them in games in which they had no busi­ness being in? Yeah, those days when Madrid were lit­er­ally crap and any men­tion of per­for­mances like the lat­est ones would lead to insin­u­a­tions of heavy drug use.

Look, I am not a pro­po­nent of hav­ing a goal­keeper be your best player;but the real­ity is that kept him in La Liga. Any player that can carry a team for three-quarters of a sea­son while he waits for the cav­alry to wake up is wor­thy of at least some type of men­tion for awards inter­na­tion­ally. Besides that, Casil­las should start to be men­tioned in the same breath as the Schu­mach­ers, Schme­ichels, Chilaverts, Fil­lols, Maiers, and Shiltons of the world. Yeah as a player that rede­fined his posi­tion and was able to help his team back to great­ness. This is why if he does not end up in the Top 5 in both Span­ish and World Player of the Year, trav­esty would be putting it lightly.