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RISING STARS READY TO SHINE IN 2009


1
 
Alexandre Pato, the world's most coveted teenager last year, could just as easily be expected to fulfill expectation this year. He has delivered AC Milan 15 goals in 35 appearances, an early return, you might say, on the $22 million the Italian team paid his first club, Internacional of Porto Allegre in Brazil.
 
Pato has to be patient because Milan likes to fill its shirts with players whose established reputations sell the club's brand.
 
Others, like Manchester United, Arsenal and Barcelona, give youth a faster path. At United right now, another Brazilian, Rafael da Silva, a galvanic, adventurous 18-year-old right back, thrills the manager, Alex Ferguson, so much that he keeps the club captain, Gary Neville, and his understudy, Wes Brown, an England international, in reserve.

"This boy has come in from Brazil, doesn't even speak the language that well, but understands the football very well," Ferguson said during United's trip to win the Club World Cup in Japan last month.

"Gary and Wes Brown are England's best right backs," Ferguson continued, "but they have a little problem because the boy, da Silva, has just taken off."

Rafael has a twin, Fabio, who appeared the brighter talent when he led Brazil to the Under-17 World Cup title in 2007.

Long before then, United had spotted the twins. It made a deal with their club, Fluminense, after a youth tournament in Hong Kong in 2005.

European legislation kept the boys from playing professionally for United until last July, when they reached 18. But Rafael's progress was immediate when he got a chance after Neville and Brown were injured. Fabio, who is also naturally right-footed but has adapted to the left flank, must wait because United's defender there, Patrice Evra, is in the prime of his life.

The twins are not the sum of United's Brazilian contingent. Anderson is a powerful challenger to the veteran Paul Scholes in midfield. Rodrigo Possebon, half a year older than the da Silva twins, is another maturing midfield prospect.

Ferguson has built winning teams around youth before in his 22 seasons in Manchester. He gave youngsters like Neville, Scholes, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham their chance at the start of the 1990s. The first three of those remain core players almost two decades on.

Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager-coach, puts even more trust in youth. Wenger finds embryonic talents in Africa, Europe and Latin America and nurtures them in his idealistic concept of how Arsenal should play the game.

He gave Thierry Henry a full decade of soccer fame. He gave Cesc Fàbregas, now his captain, a regular first team place from 16½. He bought Theo Walcott, the fastest English prospect, at 16. Now he is ushering a Welsh boy, Aron Ramsey, and an English talent, Jack Wilshere, toward his team.

Wilshere, born on Jan 1, 1992 a half-hour ride from Arsenal's training ground, has been schooled by the club since the age of 9. He has played in the Champions League and already shown his ability to cut in from the wing and deliver a perceptive pass or curl a shot into the top corner of the net.

Like Messi of Barcelona, Wilshere is left-footed but attacks from the right flank. His eye for a pass, though, is reminiscent of Dennis Bergkamp, around whom Wenger built Arsenal's forward line over the past decade.

Wenger will be master of how swiftly Wilshere follows the fast track of Fàbregas.

"At the start there is a lot of enthusiasm around players," Wenger said of Wilshere in October. "To survive at the top level is not easy, but I am confident we can surround Jack well enough to deal with it. I am convinced he will develop tremendous penetrative power and will end up a central midfielder, just off the striker in the Bergkamp role."

Only the player, and the coach who monitors him daily, can decide when that will be.

It is a work in progress, an amalgam of experienced trainers with budding talents. Each nation has its prospects: In Germany it might be Bayern Munich's teenage midfield creator, Toni Kroos; in Brazil the next export could be São Paulo's 19-year-old prodigy, Sergio Mota.

Eden Hazard, a 17-year-old, has played for the Belgian national team. Italy expects goals in the future from Giuseppe Rossi who was born in New Jersey. The United States believes Jozy Altidore - currently playing alongside Rossi for Villarreal - will be the real thing.

Hope is eternal, youth an industry. If one young man seems born to succeed, maybe it is Bojan Krkic Pérez.

His father, also Bojan Krkic, was a Serbian national team player, his mother is Catalan. His club, Barcelona, has schooled him in the same way that it developed Messi, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta from their schooldays.

Bojan has what nobody can coach. He moves in a spontaneous way, letting the ball run until the moment to strike. What is nature or nurture is probably beyond analyzing, but what counts is that Bojan has scored a thousand goals at junior levels and notched his first goal for Barcelona's full side in Cairo against Al-Ahly in April 2007.

He was sweet 16 and utterly undaunted alongside Messi, Samuel Eto'o, Theirry Henry. He is both apprentice and opponent to their place in the team, and became the youngest player in the Champions League at 17 years and 22 days.

Bojan, who turned 18 in August, stands just 5-foot-7, or 1.70 meters, but is already a proven pickpocket in the goal mouth. His coach is Pep Guardiola, himself once a Barcelona youth product and a player in the 1990s, who tutored Bojan in the youth teams and took charge of the senior side this season.

At a recent postgame conference, Guardiola said: "I have to give Bojan whatever he needs to grow as a footballer, and I will do that."

Fitting the boy into an attack of world-class strikers sometimes means playing Bojan out of position on the wings.

"He finds it a bit harder," the coach admitted, "but he's always making a contribution, and you have to keep pushing him so that he can do his very best."

The best of Bojan might be the best there is anywhere. Not only Barcelona, but the Spanish national coach, Vicente del Bosque, have to conjure with the right time to bring him in.

"Youth itself is a talent," the American philosopher Eric Hoffer observed, "a perishable talent."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  BY: Rob Hughes SOURCE:International Herald Tribune

"Youth is the Lord of Life," Oscar Wilde said. "Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile."
 
So who are the princes of soccer ready to impress in 2009? Many of the youths who lead the way are already in exile at leading European clubs, because that is where the money is and where the scouting networks lure them in adolescence, if not sooner.
 
There were those in Rosario, Argentina, who knew 16 years ago, when Leo Messi was 5, that he was genius in the making. Messi, now 21, and fellow Argentine Sergio Agüero, 20, are already proven articles at Barcelona and Atlético Madrid. Who are the youngsters who will follow their comet trails in 2009?