Marouane Fellaini is doomed to keep saving the Red Devils, no matter how much fans take him for granted.
And so it was that in the town of Manchester at that time there lived a man from Belgium. His name was Marouane, and he was both blessed and cursed by the gods. And his blessings and his curse caused much consternation among the people of that town. And the gods saw this, and saw that it was quite funny, on balance.
Let us speak first of his blessings. He was tall, and strong, and well-formed. He was handsome. His hair was envied throughout the land, and poets sang of its lustrous bounce and curl. He was esteemed among his peers, and admired by his masters.
Greater than any of this, however, was his finest blessing. For at that time the town of Manchester, and the land of England, and indeed much of the wider world, was enamoured with the sport of football. Rich men spent fortunes cultivating football teams, and the common man spent smaller but more precious fortunes following those teams over land and sea. Grand passions were roused and great furies were spent on this simple sport, and those that excelled at the game were esteemed as kings.
And Marouane excelled. Before his thirtieth year he had joined the Red Devils of Manchester, one of the grandest and richest teams in all England. Yet despite this, he was not beloved of those who watched his team. He was mocked, and degraded, and cruel mouths would shape cruel words such as “Sake, Fellaini’s on again” and “Christ, if he’s starting, we must be desperate”.
But this was not his curse. Some footballers are beloved and some not, and some deserve this and some do not; that is the way of things. No, Marouane’s curse was a more insidious thing, and to understand it we need to consider who he was, and what his club was at this time.
To the former: Marouane was a footballer of unusual style, almost entirely lacking in grace. At times malcoordinated, at others inexplicably violent. Even his good works, of which there were more than generally admitted, were lost in a maelstrom of elbows and gangling limbs. In a game played mostly with the feet and occasionally with the head, his was the finest chest around.
And then the latter: the Red Devils of Manchester were, at the time of Marouane’s arrival, in a state of great uncertainty. He was brought to the club by his former manager, whose appointment was quickly exposed to be wholly misjudged. After this, he was kept at the club by another manager who ultimately failed, and then sustained in his place by a third, who seemed to take perverse pleasure in his deployment of Marouane as an aggravating force.
With each season that passed, the comfortable and presumed glories of the Red Devils’ past began to pass into history, and the longed-for glories of the future began to feel ever more remote.
And as the gap between expectations and achievements began to yawn wider and wider, and as more and more money and time and energy was shoveled into this void, only to disappear into nothingness, so Marouane began to seem emblematic of these miscalculations and misfortune — the living, breathing, elbowing embodiment of a club that didn’t really know what it was doing, in the most expensive and elaborate way possible.
Here lies his curse, and here can be found the truth of the misery that the gods can deliver unto men. For it would be false to claim that Marouane, as a footballer, was always bad; at times he was good, and at others important. In November of the year 2018 Anno Domini, he scored a last-minute goal against Valencia of Spain to ensure that the Red Devils would progress into the latter stages of Europe’s noblest tournament.
And yet those watching asked: What kind of club, what kind of team, needs to be rescued by one such as this? A clattering elbow-monster, bought in panic and kept out of habit. His every triumph was cast as evidence of a wider failure: to need Marouane, at least for the Red Devils, demonstrated nothing so much as the need to move beyond Marouane.
Such, perhaps, is the curse of the true hero. All are grateful to be rescued, no matter the rescuer. But most would prefer never to have been in any danger at all. By the time the knight in shining armour arrives to slay the dragon, the village has already burned to the ground.