SPEEDY GONZALEZ Paul Rowan, Sunday Times 21 May 2006 They don't yet call him Speedy Gonzalez, but give it 10 minutes at Lansdowne Road on Wednesday and the moniker will have been applied by at least a dozen terrace wags. Scousers would surely have already matched the 21-year-old Chilean winger with the cartoon character had Mark Gonzalez actually played for Liverpool since joining them a year ago, but, for now, all they have to go on is the word of Rafa Benitez. "Mark has pace, quality and can score and he works very hard for the team," Benitez says. "All qualities that will help him settle in well over here." The presence of Gonzalez's girlfriend, the model and Chilean television presenter Gisela Molinero, will also have helped in that regard, but despite his club manager's confidence in him, Gonzalez still has more reason than anybody to show off his talents on Wednesday night, as Chile's fortunes have some bearing on whether his Anfield career gets off the ground. Take-off has been delayed, first by a serious knee injury and, then, the refusal of Her Majesty's government to grant him a work permit, a decision based partly on the Chilean national team's lowly status. The South Americans currently stand at 64 in the Fifa rankings. Last Thursday, as Gonzalez prepared to leave Liverpool for a weekend in Paris with Miss Molinero before coming to Dublin, he was frank enough to acknowledge that his career prospects were tied up with Chile's efforts to improve its international standing. "The most important thing right now, is that my national team stay in the top 70," Gonzalez said. "In the three games coming up, it would be nice if we can get good results so that we can keep going up and that can help me get the work permit, which is what I'm waiting for right now." Liverpool and Gonzalez's plans, laid at considerable expense to the club when he was signed from the Spanish side Albacete for £3.9m last year, were thrown into disarray when the bureaucrats refused to grant him a work permit on the basis that, despite his international experience, he was not a proven top-flight player. Benitez and Gonzalez were both shocked by the decision of the Department of Employment, but the player refused to wallow in his disappointment. "I have a winning mentality and this is what has brought me a lot of good things and got me to where I am," he says. "I think all footballers have to have it and that is the simple reason why we are where we are." In January, after Gonzalez's work permit was refused, he was sent back to La Liga, on loan to Real Sociedad, where he emerged as one of the most influential players in the country. Sociedad were bottom of the division when he joined but finished the season avoiding relegation, thanks in large part to Gonzalez's five goals in 13 games. The Chilean was the best player on the pitch and scored the goal that earned Sociedad a draw against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu last month. He then banged in a brilliant 20-yard volley that sank Racing Santander. Spanish football is clearly to his liking and a host of La Liga's top clubs, including Deportivo La Coruna and Real Zaragoza, tried to make him stay, but at the end of the season he landed back at Liverpool. "Spain is a very good league, but I wanted to play here," he says. "Liverpool offered me a long-term deal, which was a gamble on their part as there are lots of players who don't recover from that type of injury. A big club doesn't do that for anybody and I hope I'll be playing here soon to show those people that they weren't wrong when they took a risk on me." With two years logged in Spain, he is waiting to hear about his application for Spanish citizenship, and has applied again for a work permit in England, though given his experience he will take nothing for granted from the bureaucrats. "The club have tried their hardest, but it's out of our hands," he says. "The good season I had in Spain should help but these people who don't understand football: maybe they will still say 'no'. Hopefully I can convince those who didn't believe in me that I can play here no problem." The broken English comes courtesy of a childhood spent in Durban in the early 1980s, where his father, Raul, had a spell as a professional footballer. At the age of 10, his family returned to Chile and Gonzalez began his professional career at the Universidad Catholica in Santiago, the aristocrats of Chilean football. He was an international at the age of 19 before he moved to Albacete. Here he came under the wing of the coach, Paco Herrera, who recommended him to Benitez. In Chile he has long been regarded as a player with the potential to step into the boots of El Matador, Marcelo Salas, but when he suffered a serious knee ligament injury scoring a headed goal for Albacete against Levante, that promise seemed threatened. The injury ruled him out of the disastrous closing stages of Chile's qualifying campaign for Germany 2006, when they missed out on a playoff against Australia by drawing at home to Ecuador. He admits to dreaming from time to time about playing back in South Africa with Chile in 2010. The country has reconciled itself to the early international retirement of the Internazionale midfielder David Pizarro, at the age of 26, but Gonzalez and the Fiorentina midfielder, Luis Jimenez, have already raised expectations again that the dream can become a reality. "I like that kind of pressure," Gonzalez says, "but Chile have a lot of other promising players at the moment; besides myself and Jimenez - who nobody outside the country has heard about yet. Good, technical players who like to have the ball at their feet." Gonzalez admits that one major area of weakness for Chile is the paucity of strikers able to feed off his flying runs down the wing. As for him, the dogs in the street can now see that the talent is there, so the civil servants shouldn't stay blinded for too much longer. ere I think Finnan is playing so should be a good contest LW v RFB Is it on the tellybox?
