Sol Bamba on Brexit, UK citizenship and lost keys!

[jon1959]

You've got to love Sol!

https://www.express.co.uk/sport/foot...cio-Pochettino

SOL BAMBA says his Cardiff boss Neil Warnock is just plain wrong when it comes to his views on Brexit.

But the Paris-born Ivory Coast international who speaks five languages is not about to let political differences get in the way of Cardiff’s bid to beat the odds and avoid the drop this season.

The 34-year-old is facing the stress of helping to keep the Welsh side up at the same time as studying furiously for his UK citizenship test.

He feels he needs to apply for a British passport to safeguard his future in this country with his English wife Chloe and three young children if Britain does leave the EU.

So he was bound to raise eyebrows when Warnock last week said the country should just “get on with Brexit” and “to hell with the rest of the world”.

“I have not spoken to the gaffer about it directly but I saw his comment and I disagree with him,” Bamba said.

“We know the gaffer is the gaffer. It’s not just politics, he says these things about anything and we take them on the chin and just move on. I will put it down to being in the heat of the moment.

“It is politics and everybody has got a different view. We have got enough to deal with at the moment.”

More, actually, than even Warnock realises.

Bamba let slip that instead of resting up ahead of today’s vital clash against Newcastle, he spent six hours on the motorway on Wednesday heading back to his family home in Leeds after his wife rang him to say she had forgotten her keys.

“Oh my goodness, it was ridiculous!” he said, a beaming grin spitting his face. “I don’t know how, but Chloe managed to lock herself out, and so I had to drive back to let her in. I had a cup of tea and then headed back.

“I always tell her she is supposed to be there to make my life easier – and 364 days of the year she is brilliant. She looks after the kids and the house and she is the person I turn to when I am down.

“Unfortunately, this happened in a week we are preparing for arguably the biggest game of the season. I was furious!

“At least the gaffer did not know – otherwise he would have killed me!”

Not that Chloe is the typical WAG, however. She was the principal at a school in London after gaining a pure maths degree and the pair met when she was on secondment in Edinburgh and Bamba was doing a school visit while playing for Hibs.

They now have three children and after a career that has taken them from Scotland to Wales via England, Turkey and Italy, they are looking to settle down.

“I am doing all the paperwork to get a British passport,” he said. “I qualify for one but now I have to pass the citizenship test. I have the textbook in the car.

“It is all crazy questions about kings and queens and dates and castles. My wife cannot even do the tests and she is English.”

Thankfully, his football education has been easier. Growing up in Paris, dad Bakary insisted his son should still learn his local dialect and with mum Sira keen that he should represent Ivory Coast, his international destiny was set.

During international breaks, he found the perfect mentor in Kolo Toure – the pair remain in regular contact – and to a lesser degree Yaya.

On top of that, a certain striker that he faced regularly in training really helped Bamba to grow up fast.

“Didier Drogba was our captain and he was the best striker I ever came up against,” he said. “What a player, strong with both feet, good in the air and on his day I quickly learned you cannot mark him. It was good experience trying, though!”

But the best education to be had in the dark arts of defending came from Mauricio Pochettino, the senior centre-back at Paris St Germain when Bamba was coming through the ranks.

“Mauricio was the captain and a leader and you could tell he was clever,” he said “Very nice publicly, but nasty as a defender.

“He kept telling me I was too nice. ‘You have to be dirty, but in a clever way,’ he’d say. He was the one who taught me how to get a full handful of a striker’s shirt without the referee seeing.”

It was Warnock himself who provided an unlikely finishing school when he finally signed Bamba at Cardiff after he had previously failed to land him at Leeds, QPR and Crystal Palace.

“The gaffer is everything to me,” Bamba said. “We have a great relationship and we sit and talk about everything.

“He just said to me, ‘I know you want to show how good you are and you have got that in your locker, but you have to be more simple’.”

Warnock himself puts it more succinctly. “I told him to stop thinking he was Franz Beckenbauer.”

Bamba and Warnock are very much football’s odd couple but an hour spent in intelligent, genial and graciously deferential conversation with the former gives a clue as to why Warnock likes him so much.

However, the defender has not always got on so well with his managers and his laudable love of languages has a less-than-pure origin.

“When I was at Trabzonspor I had an argument with the manager and it had to be through an interpreter,” Bamba recalled. “But I could tell he was not doing justice to just how angry I was – he wasn’t translating it properly.

“So I thought, ‘I am going to have to learn the language because I want to tell the manager exactly what I think of him!’”

Brexit or no Brexit, that is one thing he is unlikely ever to chance with Warnock.

[Swiss Peter]

Really interesting piece. Bamba seems an engaging character. Thanks for posting.