Angel of Abidjan

From the heart: his country really matters to Didier Drogba

MOST of us have a poor view of Premiership footballers. Overpaid, certainly, with egos to match the size of their wallets. Surly on the pitch, a danger to women and bartenders off it.

So what about Didier Drogba? Is there a player who goes down more frequently, and with more style, under the merest of contact, anywhere near the penalty box? Didier the diver.

This isn’t the man that Africans know, particularly in his home country of the Ivory Coast. Here, as The Telegraph‘s Alex Hayes found in 2007: “Almost every street corner housed a giant billboard on which the Chelsea striker advertised everything from chocolate to mobile phones.” The man is more than a national hero. He is their saviour.”

And with some reason. In 2005, he had just captained his country to the World Cup finals for the first time ever. A microphone was shoved under Didier’s nose as he and his team mates celebrated in the changing rooms. Drogba seized the moment. Falling to his knees, he pleaded with the belligerents in his country’s three-year-old civil war to call a ceasefire and begin working for peace.

Incredibly, and in a perhaps-unprecedented demonstration of how football can move beyond being just a mere sport, the guns of the warring factions – the loyalists, the Young Patriots (and its mercenaries), the Lima Militia and Forces Nouvelles fell silent within a week and the two-year march to peace, which exists until this day, had begun.

Drogba had helped, again, by convincing his team, known as the White Elephants, to play an African Nations Cup qualifier against Madagascar in Bouake, which had been a rebel redoubt, further cementing an end to hostilities.

This in itself was enough to qualify Drogba for posterity and have Time magazine name him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. But he didn’t stop there. Last year, after he had been in place as a United Nations Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador for two years, Didier announced that he would be donating his £3 million fee for endorsing Pepsi to the construction of a hospital in his home city of Abidjan. His club Chelsea followed suit, donating what it received from the drinks giant to the Didier Drogba Foundation, founded in 2007.

Drogba had been prompted to make the donation after visiting hospitals in Abidjan. He said at the time: “I decided the Foundation’s first project should be to build and fund a hospital giving people basic health care and a chance just to stay alive.”

He is being modest. Drogba clearly works tirelessly, not only funding his charitable work out of his own pocket (the foundation had all the profits from his biography and the not-so-modestly-titled The Incredible Destiny of Didier Drogba DVD, as well as hundreds of thousands of pounds from a charity ball he staged in the Dorchester Hotel in London late last year), but also clearly making many trips back to his homeland to visit sick children and clothe them in the blue of the club that allows him to live in a way he is clearly happy to share with others.

In the future, his foundation plans to move into providing schools in Côte d’Ivoire, and spread its work beyond the country’s borders. There is speculation that he may one day lead his country, or perhaps assume a similar role for all of the African continent. But it sounds as though he will take some convincing. He told Hayes he could happily give up his money, and believes that no trophy could compare with the peace that came to the Ivory Coast. Such a settlement clearly was worth taking a dive for.

- Ivory Coast kicks off its World Cup campaign against Group G rivals Portugal at 4pm today. Live coverage on ITV