The Shocking Rebirth of Dušan Tadić

You can tell a lot about a man by the way he moves on a football pitch. So much of the “personality” we ascribe to high profile players – people we will never meet, who live lives utterly divorced from our own – is based on their gait. Body language is something that tends to define a player’s destiny, too – the world isn’t especially full, for example, of languid wing backs. It’s very rare that you find a playmaker who drags himself across the turf like a skip full of bricks because he’s 6 ft 6 and roughly as wide, and there are no “tricky” centre halves. Physiology doesn’t wield as much deterministic power as it does in rugby – especially as most elite players, goalkeepers included, gradually morph into the same basic template of “intelligent athlete who can pass and carry well” – but it’s still a huge factor in how we interpret the game and those who play it.

This week’s European fixtures were a glistening, MSG-drenched, all-you-can-eat feast of gait. The dance-mat fury of Vinícius Júnior. The jet-engine surge of Kylian Mbappé. The diarrhoea waddle of Shkodran Mustafi. Most instructive of all were the on-field shapes cut by a player who in the space of a year seems to have vaulted from one extreme of performance to the other, his fortunes transformed in a way that felt almost shocking to witness as the Champions League sashayed intriguingly into its earliest knock-out stage. Once the risk-taking darling of his Premier League club’s fanbase, this diminutive, all-action attacking midfielder is basically unrecognisable from the version of him that was sauntering around looking very alone and a little lost just 12 months ago.

But shut that piano lid. Lock the retrievers in their punishment crates. The world has enough columns about Alexis Sánchez, the forlorn outcast currently labouring through what must surely be the final sour stage of his deeply unsatisfying fling with Manchester United. For all the noise that built up last January around the Sánchez-Mkhitaryan swap deal – a deal that seemed perhaps more than any other ever has to escalate into its own thriving mini-industry of tittle-tattle, fan-anxiety, leaks, memes, schadenfreude and ridiculous pomp – the two players involved have returned the paltry sum of 19 league goals and assists combined. What a waste of energy.

Let’s focus instead on a rare footballing feel-good story, and on a man who’s currently enjoying a wonderful personal renaissance as the seasoned leader of a thrilling new generation of talent at one of Europe’s grand old footballing institutions. Step forward Dušan Tadić, possessor of a wantonly magnificent gait, inheritor of the fabled Ajax #10 shirt, smouldering Serbian conductor of a graduate flying squad of marauding youth academy products who will soon be worth more than Britain on the open market. This time last year, Tadić was slap bang in the middle of a three-month spell in which he didn’t register a single goal or assist for a dismal Southampton side who won just once as they were dragged into a relegation battle they barely survived. Twelve months on, he was both captain and best player on the pitch as his thrillingly liquid Ajax side battered the European champions as much as any team can without emerging with the three points.

As far as rapid transformations go, it is an astonishing one – a fact not lost on those Southampton fans watching at home on Wednesday night, thoroughly perplexed, wondering precisely when the man they sold for just £9million to muted fanfare last summer “turned into Messi”.

"I did good in the Premier League,” Tadić told journalists when he first pitched up in Amsterdam. “In four years, I was for three [of them] in the top five best assisters in the Premier League and probably in the top ten of creating chances. I'm very proud because Southampton is not the biggest club in the Premier League and the Premier League is the toughest league in the world.”

You can’t blame Tadić for trying to endear himself to the locals but frankly, he was talking total bollocks; in 2015/16 he was indeed in the top five Premier League assisters, his tally of 12 impressively bettered only by Riyad Mahrez, Christian Eriksen and Mesut Özil. But the year before that he created seven goals and was in the division’s top 25 assisters. A year after, he created five and was in the top 43. Last season, he created just three goals, placing him in the top 99. In two of those seasons, he registered fewer assists than Matt Phillips, a man with undoubted gifts but also the playing style of a horse jumping from a massive crane into a bucket of water. Last season, Tadić set up fewer goals than Collin Quaner, who was last seen shuffling in the vague direction of Championship deadweights Ipswich with a small urn and an understated floral wreath.

For all that, Tadić never felt anything less than gifted, the kind of well-poised operator you only need to watch for five minutes to know that at some point he’s been purringly ratified as a “proper player” at a Redknapp family roast. Since joining Ajax, though, his body language seems to have undergone a profound shift. He’s never looked less peripheral than he did on Wednesday night as, during the biggest club game of his career to date, he exhibited the controlled, revelling rhythms of a navigator relishing responsibility, a veteran expertly guiding his machine through the Champions League turbulence.

Perhaps we should forgive him, too, for his selective recall of those Premier League years on the south coast – after all, at least a third of the joy of watching this exhilarating young Ajax team whistle and groove about the pitch are the memories of their mid-90s forebears that will always lurk at the periphery whenever the famous red and white shirts are on-screen. Let your eyes go soft and wet as the nostalgia stirs strange feelings in your chest.

Football is a game in which the present moment is always fighting to exorcise the ghosts of the past. That’s how its future arrives. At 30, Tadić might not be the future of Ajax Amsterdam, but it is worth pausing to applaud a man who may well have played the game of his life on Wednesday night. At the very least, it will be fun finding out just how long Tadić is capable of stretching out this moment of his when he returns to the spotlights at the Bernabéu in spring.

@hydallcodeen