Klaus wrote:
I think it just appears that way because he's missed a couple high-profile penalties. On the other hand casual viewers fail to notice that he scored a brace for Juve in the same Milan fixture last season, or that he scored the winner away against Napoli, or singlehandedly dismantled Inter last season in the game that won Juventus the title. He turned the last-16 tie against Tottenham around for Juve with a goal and an assist within three minutes when it looked like they were crashing out of the competition. He has an insanely good record against every top side in Serie A.
Higuain's reputation is an effect of people tuning into a select few games more than anything. He has bottled some important penalties and it's funny when he steps up yet again and misses, but every striker out there will screw up from time to time. The big difference is that they don't call Henry a bottler for botching the Champions League final, or Messi for looking just as bad as Higuain for Argentina, because they've seen these guys regularly.
You could tell that Higuain was desperate to prove himself against Juventus, that he wanted to show them how wrong they were to send him away just so they could cope financially with Ronaldo's astronomical wages. People talk about the missed penalty, but not that he won it in the first place. They blame him for costing Milan points, but they say nothing about Donnarumma who released a rebound straight into the path of Ronaldo to lose Milan the game. It's all a bit meh now, but I think there are certain narratives in football that write themselves for the lazy, and after a certain point it doesn't really matter whether they're true or not because people keep repeating them.
Great post Klaus.
Henry used to be called a big game bottler quite often back in the day and accused of not being able to perform on the day. They always seem to mention that he never scored in big games and used to use his record in finals to back that up.
Thing is, although he may never have scored in a final, he was France's top scorer at the Euro 2000 and the WC98 (the latter of which he was only 21), or that he would have scored to win us the 2001 FA Cup final if not for handballs not being given, or that he single handedly took us to the CL final amongst other FA Cup finals.
That's without saying how many goals he's scored for us to win us the title or the numerous goals he's scored against United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Inter, Real, Valencia, Deportivo, Juve, Roma, Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen and probably others I have missed.
But that did not stop the haters who even tried to claim van Nistelrooy was the better player and big game player.
