On elegance

By Roger Cohen /IHT
There are lots of footballing qualities: skill, acceleration,control, vision, focus, power and flair come to mind. But I have a soft spot for one attribute that is among the most rare and distinctive on the field: elegance.
What makes a footballer elegant?
It's the gift of composure, which is linked of course to confidence, and allows the elegant player to give the apparently effortless impression of having more time than everyone else. More time to think, more time to create, more time to take apart the opponent, more time to dictate the pattern of the game.
Watching an elegant player, you think: Why is everyone else scurrying around to so little effect when it's really this easy?
Franz Beckenbauer, the imperious German defender and sweeper, was elegant. He never seemed to break a sweat as he alternately marshaled his defense and swept upfield. Bobby Moore, England's captain in its 1966 World Cup triumph, was also elegant. He read the game so well he was always one step ahead.
Socrates - or more completely Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de SouzaVieira de Oliveira - of Brazil was elegant, a towering figure, as befit his name. Marco van Basten, the Dutch striker and now the Dutch coach, was all elegant class as he took defenses apart.
Italy, as you would expect in the land of Ferragamo and Zegna, has produced a host of elegant players: Marco Tardelli and Paolo Rossi in the World Cup winning team of 1982, and more recently Paolo Maldini. Argentina had Daniel Passarrella, a sweeper almost the equal of Beckenbauer in the elegance stakes.
And France has had two great midfielders with the gift of elegance, Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane. Their star striker, Thierry Henry of Arsenal, is a supremely elegant player. A poll is here by opened on the most elegant player of the 2006 World Cup.