FRANK RIBERY-PART 2

The pundits are saying that Ribery is the next French Sensation. I think the oke has the potential and drive to get there. I just hope not during the World Cup Final. When i was watching with the okes we were debating what happened to him on his face. Was he in a shootout! Was he ............There were many options. Two Sugars, Thanks for the answer and another insight into Ribery

While Zinedine Zidane has hogged all the headlines for France, the truth is that Franck Ribery is the most amazing case in Raymond Domenech's team.When watching this excellent footballer tackle Portugal tonight in the World Cup's second semi-final in Munich, it will be hard to appreciate the pain and obscurity from which Ribery has just emerged.Seven weeks ago, he hadn't played for France. Two years ago, he was playing for Stade Brest in the French second division, one of many unfulfilled outcasts of French football.Yet today, Lyon and Manchester United are just two of the clubs jousting for Ribery's signature and, if he moves again, it will be to his fifth club in two years.The Marseille player has already packed more than a lifetime's experience into his 23 years. "La merveille Ribery" is what they are now calling him in France, though this wasn't the case as recently as January 2005 when he was being punted by one unsung French club after another.Amid it all, Ribery is also the survivor of a horrendous car crash in 2002, in which he was thrown through a windscreen and left with his facial scarring. For good measure, he is also a convert to Islam, although that is a saga in itself.The French media have had to take care with Ribery. He is awkward, painfully shy and, by his own admission, extremely poorly educated. He is also regarded as a sensitive and emotionally fragile lad, who is sometimes even prone to panic when asked to step in front of the media.Last week there was a comical, though quite touching moment, involving Ribery and his desire to avoid being interviewed. As he walked through the dreaded "mixed zone" – where the players, following matches, have to walk a corridor in which journalists can interview them – Ribery pretended to be on his mobile phone in order to avoid being intercepted by a reporter. Except, he was holding his phone upside down, and clearly wasn't talking to anyone.In a painful press conference on Monday, Ribery said: "This has all happened to me so quickly but I feel, at last, that I am living my life. There is so much time for me in the future to build my career but I won't forget this World Cup. I'm playing with players like Zidane, who I had only watched before on TV."He is such an exciting, skilful and combative footballer who, together with Zidane, put Spain to the sword in Hanover. So how come Ribery's emergence has been so delayed and so sudden? The answer isn't known, except to say football is strewn with unfulfilled players, with young talents trapped by circumstances beyond their control.Ribery comes from Boulogne, cruelly known in France as "the worst town in the whole country", and, thus, was deemed to be disadvantaged from the start. At 16, he had ability but was so poor academically that he had to leave Lille's centre de formation where, as at most French clubs, young players have to maintain not just footballing but also academic standards.Ribery's journey has been unbelievable for such a good player: from Boulogne, to Ales, to Brest and then to Metz in a series of stop-offs where no French coach could properly harness his talent.In January 2005, frightened and fed-up over his inability to find stability in his own country, Ribery completed an unlikely transfer to Galatasaray in Turkey, before Marseille signed him last summer and he produced the most exciting form of his life in 2005-06.Amid it all, influenced by his wife, Ribery joined a trend in young French society by converting to Islam. Jacques Faty and Julien Faubert, two other prominent young French footballers, have done the same."We see more and more of this in French society and football," said one French sportswriter yesterday. "Players like Ribery turn to Islam because, in a strange way, they need the authority. Where there is no authority in the home, or the school, or in football, they find it in Islam, and they need it, because it gives them discipline."It isn't the strictest form of Islam but it still says to them, 'no girls, no alcohol,' and they obey it because they need that authority."

http://www.theherald.co.uk/sport/65352.html