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 […]
IN the days when any team from behind Communist Europe was treated with a great sense of curiosity, any player resembling a larger-than-life figure contradicted all preconceived ideas about football in countries such as Bulgaria, Czechoslavakia and Romania. Eastern European Communists were meant to be dour and mechanical and prioritised function over artistry. That was […]
HE WOULD be the first to admit that he was not the most sophisticated player or that he never expected to win the honours that came his way, but Jack Charlton was every bit a “football man”, from his club career at Leeds to his time as a manager that gave Ireland its finest moments […]
ONE DAY in January 1993, my telephone rang at work. “Hello, mate, it’s Peter Osgood here.” I hesitated, gasped and was a little nervous with my reply. “I used to have a poster of you on my bedroom wall,” I uttered. “I hope you still haven’t got it up,” he quipped. Here was my boyhood […]
ANYONE who has attended a “sportsman’s evening” featuring footballers from the 1970s will be familiar with the script: laddish banter, tales of drink, women and gambling, blue jokes and so on and so forth. Sometimes, it’s not worth meeting your heroes, men you might have only seen on Match of the Day or in the […]
