THE LEEDS UNITED team of the club’s golden era under Don Revie has lost another of its shining stars with the passing of Peter Lorimer. He was an integral part of Leeds’ classic side, a group of highly-skilled and highly-motivated internationals that probably won less than they deserved during a marvellously consistent period. Lorimer was […]
IN RECENT years, the reputation of “football’s greatest-ever player” has been somewhat tarnished, and it is now widely pre-supposed that there’s nothing he won’t lend his name to, whether that’s FIFA’s improbably diverse list of the world’s greatest living players or treatments for erectile dysfunction. David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas’ new Netflix documentary, simply titled Pelé, […]
IAN ST. JOHN became part of an exclusive band of footballers – he scored the winning goal in a Wembley FA Cup final, a crouching header that broke the hearts of Don Revie’s fledgling Leeds United and gave Liverpool their first FA Cup. But St. John’s career in football went way beyond the usual route. […]
SEVENTY-NINE years ago, in Mozambique, Eusébio da Silva Ferreira was born. It’s fashionable to liberally throw the word “legend” around, but very few footballers actually achieve that status in their lifetime, let alone when they pass from view and their legacy is grainy video footage or yellowing newspaper coverage. Eusébio was so good he inspired many […]
BETWEEN 1968 and 1971, the late Dave Sexton, Chelsea’s softly-spoken and erudite manager, received a string of letters – written with a duck-egg green Osmiroid pen – that highlighted the skills and attributes of a midfielder plying his trade with Manchester City. The young lad who wrote these testimonials was giving Sexton the benefit of […]
THE Guardian top 100 players is always an interesting end-of-year exercise and almost always reflects the shape of the past 12 months. But this year’s top 20 has a very disconcerting look about it – of the 20, seven are over 30 years of age and the first three are well into their fourth decade. […]
IF THERE is was one thing remarkable about Diego Maradona, it was the achievement of living to his 60th birthday. Sadly, he barely got beyond that landmark. There was something very inevitable about his premature demise, his lifestyle catching up on him to consign him to legend status. On November 25, 2020, football, Argentina and the […]
I’VE SAT next to two members of the 1966 World Cup winning team, and both are no longer with us. I’ve been in the same bar as two others and I saw one of the England legends snip a ribbon to open a social club. To be in the company of players who achieved something […]
IF THERE is one thing remarkable about Diego Maradona, it is the achievement of living to his 60th birthday. There was a time when you thought he was destined for an ugly and premature end, either caught up in some underworld violence or falling to a bout of self abuse. Although the recent World Cup, where […]
