James Lawton: San Siro provides the perfect stage for inconsistent Fabregas to come of age

You can go only so far with promise. You reach a point where potential slides away

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Even at the relatively tender age of 20, there is probably not a lot you can teach Cesc Fabregas about football. Or, some still suspect, the optimum trajectory for a piece of pizza aimed at the most vaunted and ferocious manager in English football. Fabregas is smart, precociously talented and endlessly sassy, as he reminded us with a fighting speech after Arsenal's latest stumble at the weekend.

But then, is he really something more? If he is to prove himself so, perhaps a short history lesson would not be out of place. It would concern those occasions when young players crossed the dividing line between high potential and hard achievement in the most critical circumstances. We don't need a thousand case studies – Pele, Alan Ball and George Best will do.

The one serious problem with a Fabregas speech that was full of gritty competitive maturity was that it was so at odds with his performance. He is currently so far away from the seam of form that was so dazzling before Christmas, it seems that San Siro tonight has to be seen as the wrong place for him at the wrong time. Well, maybe, maybe not.

Maybe not, because two weeks ago in the first leg against Milan Fabregas was, albeit briefly and inconclusively, Fabregas. No challenge of skill or improvisation seemed beyond him. He looked as he had in Arsenal's sensational start to the season, someone coming to his time and growing hugely in the knowledge that indeed it was so.

The worry – and it is one also provoked by Cristiano Ronaldo at Manchester United – is that still, for all his huge talent, Fabregas lacks a defining performance. Yes, of course there is a rich body of work, a whole series of announcements that here is a talent to consign among the very best. Maybe he came closest to it against his old team-mate Patrick Vieira's new club Juventus on the way to 2006 Champions League final. At times there was bite, a subtle touch and breath-taking confidence.

Can it all be resurrected at San Siro? You wouldn't have thought so against Aston Villa last Saturday.

You would have said he needed a rest rather more than a supreme challenge of his brief but astoundingly promising career. However, you can go only so far with promise. You reach a point where potential slides away into the rest of your life. Like Ronaldo, Fabregas has surely produced enough evidence of exceptional ability to soothe fears about that last possibility, yet the big performances – against the biggest opposition – still belong in the future.

Much is made of Fabregas's age but in a little more than two months time he will be 21 – Ball's age when he was the star of the greatest day in English football history. Ball was staggering against West Germany in the World Cup final.

He was running as hard at the finish as he was at the start and at one point admonished, of all people, Nobby Stiles, saying, "Run you bastard, run."

Pele was a mere 17 when he illuminated world football in the Stockholm final eight years earlier, and he had been producing extraordinary deeds in the Brazilian top flight for at least a year. An old friend recalls that Pele was so riveting against Sweden – even on the flickering small TV screen of a cafe in Paris – that he quite forgot for a little while that between the great teenager's first and second goals he was told by the love of his life that their affair was over.

Forty-two years after the 19-year-old Best ravaged Benfica and their European Player of the Year Eusebio – the presentation was made before the game – Denis Law and Bobby Charlton agreed that in all their days United had never hit such a peak of achievement. In the Estadio da Luz they were a team inspired by the brilliance of one player.

All this may seem rather as though the bar is being set unrealistically high for Fabregas in San Siro tonight but he is really in no position to complain. It is, after all, the ground he has staked out for himself. He passed the fledgling stage some time ago. He has appeared nearly 200 times for Arsenal and in the process persuaded Liam Brady, one of the most skilful players ever to wear the shirt, that he could just be a throwback of the football ages – one of the greatest midfield players of all time.

Others have compared him to Michel Platini, the Frenchman who Charlton argues might well have been the best pure passer of the ball in the history of the game. Arsène Wenger says that he is constantly astounded by the maturity of his protegé.

When you add it all up a defining performance in San Siro is maybe not asking too much. There is no doubt Arsenal have rarely been in need of such an effort. Nor, if he is to lighten the burden of his credentials, has Cesc Fabregas.

Newcastle move beyond Keegan's emotional rescue

It is haunting to watch the agony of Kevin Keegan. You can't help remembering how it was when his name was synonymous with the kind of jaunty conviction that so often separates the winners and losers.

Very few outstanding footballers ever touched his level of self-belief. With it he gathered up a relatively modest level of talent – at least when you compared it to that of such a contemporary as George Best – and stretched out to the stars. He also knew his value, leaving a whole generation of British footballers cursing their own lack of nerve when he walked away from Liverpool to join Hamburg and become both a wealthy man and a two-time European footballer of the year. Now he is trapped.

Whatever took him back to Newcastle in a desperate attempt to recreate the extraordinary momentum he produced in his first days as a manager – and the pervasive suggestion is that he was lured by the wages that would soften the impact of heavy losses in his Football Circus business – it was surely not that old unshakeable instinct that he would find a way to win.

Newcastle, plainly and sadly, are beyond the help of any kind of emotional impetus. Rather than try to recreate old days, which never really yielded anything more than irrational expectation, they need to shape new ones built on proven methods and values. It was going to take a Keegan miracle to drag the club out of the vortex of their own making. In its absence, owner Mike Ashley should examine not only his manager's performance but that of all those who have presumed to give him advice.

If he is wise he will conclude that any such examination demands not only a fresh approach for the future. Also required: a hose to flush away the past.

The balancing act of a sporting life

Jonny Wilkinson has been baring his soul again. At such times when you wish for him nothing so much as a fig leaf.

Certainly it is hard to believe that the surface of consistently great achievement can hide such pain. Of course we all have to take the best and live with the rest but in Wilkinson's case this has been nothing so much as an invitation to inhabit purgatory.

English rugby has been a huge beneficiary, no doubt, but at what cost? At 28 he confesses that he finally chose to enjoy an amiable lunch in Paris rather than rushing back off to the gym the day after he played honourably in a losing World Cup final.

Meanwhile, Steve Harmison, who given his talent could have been to English cricket at least something of what Wilkinson has been to rugby, tells us that he wouldn't have missed the birth of his son, Charlie, for the world – and still less the chance for more thorough preparation for his latest attempt to deliver at least some of his potentially awesome ability in the Test series in New Zealand. Harmison has always been the reluctant traveller, always vulnerable to the problem of homesickness.

It has meant that between Wilkinson and Harmison there has been a desert of uncommon ground. We can only hope that there is a little time left for some of it be covered.

Indians enjoy the last laugh

Harbhajan Singh's latest brush with controversy has been resolved to his satisfaction – and that of the rupee-laden Indian board – with the ruling that there is no convincing evidence that he made "monkey gestures" to the Sydney Cricket Ground crowd at the weekend.

However, less easily dispelled is the disquiet created by the suspicion that getting a judicial decision against the all-powerful Indians is now roughly akin to winning an easy laugh at the Glasgow Empire.