Fulham fans will be hoping that Facunda Sava has brought a supply of masks for today's FA Cup third-round tie against Birmingham City. Another defeat and Jean Tigana and his men may have a better use for them than their fun-loving Argentine team-mate should they need to slip quietly away from Loftus Road.
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Fulham masked striker Facunda Sava |
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The truth is Fulham have never needed Sava to slip on his Zorro mask more badly than they do now. It has not been a particularly happy time for them on or off the pitch.
The fact that he was signed by Fulham's unpopular director of football, Franco Baresi, could not have made Sava an instant hit with Tigana when he joined the club from Gimnasia de Jujuy for £2 million last May, even if a last-minute equaliser in only his second league game, as a substitute, did earn the team a valuable point at Middlesbrough.
It took him a while to settle and he has still to enjoy an extended run in the side. "I needed to get to know the club, my team-mates, the banter, the country," he explained.
Five goals in seven starts, though, is hardly the ratio of a misfit striker, even if there was the small matter of an own goal against Hertha Berlin, which effectively knocked the club out of the UEFA Cup. He certainly wished he could have worn a mask that day.
But if he continues to show the same determination on the field as he did when being interviewed, and dispensing, whenever possible, with the need for an interpreter, he should have a bright future in England. "I read the newspapers to learn English," he said. "I read the newspapers for politics, sport, everything. It's interesting for me to know a different country, a different situation."
When he is not playing with his daughter or reading he visits London museums, the Science and Natural History being his favourite. "I'm interested in the time of the Industrial Revolution," he said.
Sava, as one might gather, is not your regular footballer. With a degree in social psychology, the 28-year-old should be well placed to analyse any problems Fulham might encounter off the pitch and was once quoted as saying he found the dressing-room a practical lesson in what he was studying. Wisely, he neatly sidestepped any inquiries along that line. "I know the situation," he said, "but I am a player now not a social psychologist."
Like most of his team-mates, he believes the club are pulling together and a change of luck was all that was needed. He started wearing the masks at the suggestion of a team-mate in Argentina when he scored in the last-minute of a derby game for Boca Juniors. At the next game 6,000 fans turned up wearing masks. Many would send him their disguises and at one time he had 250. When he moved to Gimnasia - known as the Wolves - he began donning a rubber wolf mask handed to him by a ball-boy whenever he scored. The Brummies would not take kindly today to a reprise of that one, not if it is in Old Gold.
Actually, Sava left them all behind when he came to England and had to send his wife to Camden Town market to buy one for his first game for Fulham. Now fans are sending him enough to start a stall of his own. Since the mask of Zorro he has given us the Teddy Bear mask and a replica in club black. He revealed he had had a special one made for the Cup but he is keeping it a secret. Fulham will hope it does not remain so.