RIATH AL SAMARRAI: What would Paul Pogba give to be where Jude Bellingham is now? Even as a World Cup winner, his career reeks of entitlement and delusion

Is there anything more uplifting in sport than the glorious explosions of a new talent? Is there anything as depressing as something that has so much to offer and grows so big, only to implode under its own weight?

They are sensations who prefer to live separately, but not this week. Not when a remarkable midfielder laid the markers of greatness with his feet and did so when an acquaintance’s predecessor discovered his had been planted in a bucket of raw sewage.

Paul Pogba was once Jude Bellingham. Jude Bellingham could be Paul Pogba, if many things go right. Because what would Bellingham, or almost anyone in his field, give for the bright side of that career? For a World Cup, four league titles and six other trophies. If the Champions League and European Championship finals had gone his way, the Frenchman would have had a full house.

So let’s tone down the discussion around Pogba and wasted talent, because he did just fine for himself.

But the point is relativity: we know he might have done better. It was better if he didn’t think he was so much better than the rest. It would be better if he made much better decisions. Better with a better brother. Better health, also better agents. And that means we can twist the earlier question: What would Pogba give to get back to where Bellingham is now? To be twenty again, to walk between those challenges, to slip clever steps through small windows, to hear the comparisons between generations that have a hint of premature but come from an exciting place.

The World Cup winner might look at the rise of Jude Bellingham with some envy years after his own explosion

As a talented 20-year-old Pogba won the Golden Boy Award in 2013, the same year as winning the Scudetto with Juventus

Pogba was that man. He was Carlos Alcaraz. He was Coco Gauff. He was Sha-carri Richardson, Ludvig Aberg, Rose Zhang, Harry Brook and Canan Moodie. The spreaders of new horizons.

But now he’s a 30-year-old man stuck in the back of a shelter and a week that could well define him. The kind of week that can devour a World Cup in one gulp.

It’s been a ride over the past seven days, starting with his lamentation of the ‘cruel’ world of football, escalating alarmingly with the revelation of a failed drugs test and on Friday he faced a court in Paris for the final stage in the investigation. a story that embroils his own brother in an £11 million plot to extort him at gunpoint.

If we were to risk being lighthearted, we’d insert a joke here about Amazon’s resurrection of the “Pogmentary” series. But that would undermine the seriousness of what happened, even if that most bizarre creation served as a staging post to color his reputation.

When it came out last year, it wasn’t much. But it did reveal more about Pogba than a wiser person would have allowed. I’m thinking particularly of his willingness to be filmed telling his agent, the late Mino Raiola, that an offer of £300,000 a week from United was ‘nothing’. Naturally, he allowed himself to be indulged in his displeasure by a man who knew the value of fighting spirit, but none of its cost.

There was no protein in the display, but the Pogmentary did provide confirmation of what we had inferred about his character for years. I never quite believed he was a ‘virus’ because it was Jose Mourinho’s judgment – I don’t believe flu has much right to judge a cold. But I often thought he was completely foolish in the way he handled himself at United. It was the anxiety that grated, the wandering eye, the reflex to follow an isolated patch of good form in the early weeks of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s reign by pushing for a move and deploying Raiola to spread his seeds. Character shows itself in good and bad moments; in both cases he often reeked of entitlement and delusion.

And yet I have always had some sympathy for Pogba. He had the misfortune of being a gifted box-to-box roamer in the age of hardened structures. He has had woefully little luck with injuries since returning to Juventus and the scenario that has brought him to court this week is nothing short of bleak. His older brother, Mathias, insists he is innocent, but at least we know this is a guy who once took to social media to claim Pogba hired a witch doctor to bewitch Kylian Mbappe. If that’s the kind of anchor that carries you through life, you have to admire his trophies even more.

But if it ends like this, with a positive test for testosterone and the possibility of a four-year ban if a violation is proven, it will be exactly the kind of final that shapes Pogba’s story, even in football. , where asterisks are written only in pencil.

The revelation of the failed test is just the beginning of a complicated story for the 30-year-old, one that takes forever to solve drug cases

Pogba has struggled with injuries throughout his career, disrupting his glorious form

At this stage we are only at the beginning of that maze; it takes forever to solve drug cases. His representatives say the only ‘certain thing is that Paul Pogba never wanted to break the rules’ and that football has been quick to support him, especially in private.

I’m told the very first message he received after the news broke was from France manager Didier Deschamps. Soon after, others came from Juventus manager Max Allegri, Olivier Giroud and Fernandinho. Former United teammates also wrote to him, including Eric Bailly, Jesse Lingard and Raphael Varane, as far as I know. Players love Pogba; they don’t think he has this in him. But that will have to be determined by the anti-doping authorities.

In time there will be an explanation from Pogba, a reason, because there is always one. Occasionally they are legitimate and often they are not, or they go to creative places, drawing attention to Olympic sprinter Dennis Mitchell, who was also found with elevated testosterone levels. He blamed it on having sex with his wife four times in one night. As he explained: ‘It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.’

He received a two-year suspension, but that is part of athletics. In football we rarely hear about doping cases and some would have us believe that this is because it is a skill-based game. Nonsense. More than ever, it’s a game about recovery and getting a tired body back into shape.

Mail Sport’s Riath Al-Samarrai writes about the undiscovered world of football doping in light of Paul Pogba’s positive test

I asked a figure in the anti-doping community if football could be as clean as some would have you believe. He has laughed at that fantasy, but it is also accepted that the entire system for detecting dopers is skewed in favor of the cheat. Once you know the details surrounding microdosing, annealing times and testing windows, it’s easy to conclude that only a fool would be caught out.

The question that defines the legacy in Paul Pogba’s tragedy is whether he ultimately fits the description, or only part of it.

It was interesting to hear John Terry deny with some candor the report that he was about to take over as manager in Saudi Arabia. He also took a small swipe at the press. Frankly, this came as a surprise to a source who had been next to the horse’s mouth and heard a completely different set of sounds.

The great thing about sport is that it can touch the soul. Adding to that genre is the role cricket plays in bringing a smile back to Andrew Flintoff’s face after all the horrors he has endured over the past nine months.