The English Football Thread

[Vesper 29,231]

2 minutes ago, Laylabelle said:

Oh good it ended!!! Bit of a harsh penalty but my god that was dull!

Fraudgateball in full effect

[Vesper 29,231]

Michael Owen finally has two fellow presenters that make him look sorta tall

2 five foot two girls

[milka 3,362]

So we start at Godison - default loss there anyway 

 we will host first to all of top 6  + Leicester ,West Ham and Wolves   and then away  - First two games Everton and Spursy ,

2 January Citeh (home )

21 January Liverpool (away)

20 May Citeh (away)

28 May Newcastle (home)
 

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by milka

[nyikolajevics 2,603]

Strange to see only two games in December.. Still maybe we will gain more points than last year.

[Strike 7,303]

2 hours ago, milka said:

Only four games during the cursed November - December !

[Laylabelle 9,411]

24 minutes ago, Strike said:

Only four games during the cursed November - December !

I'm sure we'll lose them all..or make up for missing games that month lol

[MoroccanBlue 5,320]

Watch us lineup the same team that lost to Everton in May. 

Just Sarr for Rudiger. 😑

[Vesper 29,231]

On 16/06/2022 at 15:15, MoroccanBlue said:

Watch us lineup the same team that lost to Everton in May. 

Just Sarr for Rudiger. 😑

I will go bonkers if Sarr is still here

he is the Drinkwater/Bakayoko of defensive backs

[Vesper 29,231]

On 16/06/2022 at 13:44, Laylabelle said:

I'm sure we'll lose them all..or make up for missing games that month lol

look at the teams, we have no right losing ANY of those games

NUFC away will be the hardest I wager (barring some monster adds for Arse)

we owe Arse some serious thrashing

[Laylabelle 9,411]

49 minutes ago, Vesper said:

look at the teams, we have no right losing ANY of those games

NUFC away will be the hardest I wager (barring some monster adds for Arse)

we owe Arse some serious thrashing

Hmmm after this season we are capeable of anything lol...

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[Laylabelle 9,411]

Salah signed a new contract 

[Blue Armour 4,336]

6 hours ago, Laylabelle said:

Salah signed a new contract 

Massive contract too.

Wonder what the after effects will be across the league. 

Start of many more big bucks contracts?

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Apparently Partey is the main suspect.

[KEVINAA 110]

Chelsea WINS 4 - 2

 

Video title: N'GOLO KANTE Plays For Chelsea vs Non-League Borehamwood!

YouTube channel name: THE FOOTBALL STADIUM SHOW

Video length : 8:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX7CMuTu7A0

 

 

https://youtu.be/zX7CMuTu7A0

 

[Vesper 29,231]

Golden Games: No 12, Paulo Wanchope for Derby v Manchester United

https://theathletic.com/3415475/2022/07/22/paulo-wanchope-derby-manchester-united/

To celebrate 30 years of the Premier League, The Athletic is paying tribute to the 50 greatest individual performances in its history, as voted for by our writers. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to our Golden Games series (and the selection rules) here – as well as the full list of all the articles as they unfold.

Picking 50 from 309,949 options is an impossible task. You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order. They didn’t. It’s not intended as a definitive list. It’s a bit of fun, but hopefully a bit of fun you’ll enjoy between now and August.

---

Paulo Wanchope felt like giving up. During a three-week trial at Queens Park Rangers, he thought he had done everything right, scoring six goals for their reserve team — only to be cut loose, deemed inadequate for the rigours of English football.

Along with his international team-mate Mauricio Solis, he flew back to Costa Rica in low spirits. If he couldn’t make the grade at second-tier club QPR, how on earth could he hope to fulfil his dream of playing in the Premier League or La Liga?

The 20-year-old had made a spectacular first-team breakthrough at CS Herediano, but maybe he would be better off putting his football ambitions to one side, prioritising his education and going to university in the United States. And if he did, he could get back to playing basketball rather than football.

Encouragement came from an unlikely source: former Arsenal player Bob McNab, who was living in California and had offered his services as an agent-cum-mentor for Wanchope since watching him making his full debut for Costa Rica a few months earlier. It was McNab who had arranged the ill-fated trial at QPR and it was McNab who came back a few weeks later to tell Wanchope and Solis he had set up another trial for them at Derby County, where his friend Jim Smith was manager.

“I was very disappointed after what happened at QPR,” Wanchope tells The Athletic via Zoom from his home in Costa Rica. “When Bob told me about a trial at Derby, people said to me, ‘Don’t waste your time’. I had been to QPR, done well and nothing had happened, so my friends and everyone said, ‘But how can you make it at a Premier League club? What are you doing?’. I said, ‘I want to play there. I just want to give it a try’.”

It must have been a daunting experience. This was 1997, when European integration had seen an easing of restrictions on signing overseas players, but, despite the number of players arriving in the Premier League from all over Europe, there was still a certain suspicion, particularly about those from somewhere as remote as Costa Rica.

Wanchope remembers players at QPR and Derby regarding him with curiosity, asking him not only whether they play football in Costa Rica but whether they have houses. At times, it was hard to tell what was a joke and what wasn’t.

This was also just a few months after Senegalese forward Ali Dia rocked up at Southampton on the purported recommendation of the 1995 FIFA World Player of the Year, George Weah. Dia muddled his way through a trial and somehow convinced Graeme Souness to send him on as a substitute in a game against Leeds United, only to be hauled off again after 53 largely excruciating minutes as his fleeing Premier League career was swiftly brought to an ignominious conclusion.

For a trialist like Wanchope, arriving from relative obscurity a few weeks after being rejected by QPR, there was a lot of scepticism to overcome. 

“The funny thing is, I played two or three reserve games at Derby and I didn’t score any goals and I was a little bit worried,” Wanchope says. “But Jim Smith said to me he wanted me to stay and he offered me a contract. And the rest is history.”

Derby agreed to pay Herediano a fee in the region of £600,000 to sign Wanchope and Solis, subject to a successful work permit application. For Solis, with 33 caps for Costa Rica, that was relatively straightforward. For Wanchope, who had only made his full international debut five months earlier, there was a nervous wait before he learned his application had been successful.

“The project at the start was that Mauricio Solis was going to play more games than me,” he says. “They said to me that I needed more time — more physical work, more technical and tactical work, taking it slowly before I got into the team. But I was very focused and I’m very competitive. I like to challenge myself. I wasn’t going to accept to go slow.

“And maybe they saw that I was working hard and developing well because they gave me the chance to make my debut. Against Manchester United.”

To set the scene, this was a United team en route to their fourth Premier League title in five seasons as they asserted their dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson. They were also gearing up for a Champions League semi-final against Borussia Dortmund four days later. They had Peter Schmeichel, Roy Keane, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Eric Cantona in their starting line-up. They had lost just five Premier League matches at home in four and a half years. 

And up against the dominant force in English football was Wanchope, whose first-team experience amounted to just over a year in Costa Rica’s Primera Division. Between the ages of 16 and 18, when he was studying at Vincent Memorial High School in Calexico, California, he hadn’t played football, with basketball his main leisure pursuit. Barely two years on, he was about to take on the mighty Manchester United at Old Trafford.

“I was really nervous,” he says. “But I remember on the way to the stadium Jim Smith said to me, ‘What kind of music do you like?’. I said, ‘I like salsa music’. And he said, ‘Well, let’s put it on’. So we put on some salsa music and it was a really good thing for him to do because it helped me relax but also all the other players who were there enjoyed the music and dancing and everything. That was a really special touch from the manager.”

John Motson introduced viewers of the BBC’s Match of the Day to two new Derby players who faced what he called “a baptism of fire” at Old Trafford. The first was Estonian goalkeeper Mart Poom, who had been at Portsmouth. The second was the unknown Wanchope. 

Incidentally, Motson referred to Derby’s new signing as “WAN-chop”. Most other commentators around that time went for the more Anglo-friendly “ONE-chop”. Either way, the correct pronunciation, “Wan-CHOP-ay”, never stood a chance. 

“I don’t know if you remember, but I didn’t play as a centre-forward in this game,” Wanchope says. “We had Ashley Ward up front and Dean Sturridge more to the left and Jim Smith said to me, ‘Can you play on the right side?’. I told him I would even play goalkeeper if he wanted me to play there. It wasn’t a problem. All I knew was that, against Manchester United, with Phil Neville and Ryan Giggs on that side, I was going to have to run and run and run.

“Before the game, in the warm-up, I was watching Cantona and all the players from the other side. Bob McNab always used to tell me it’s important to get a touch early in the game to build your confidence. But I don’t know if I even touched the ball in the first 10 minutes.   

“From the first minute, everything was so quick. I would go here and the ball would go the other side. Then I would go there and the ball would go over here. The first 10 minutes, everything was going crazy in my head.”

Smith might have had cause to reconsider his selection gamble as United dominated the early stages. Keane, Cantona and Giggs threatened with headed opportunities before Derby began to stabilise in midfield, looking to Wanchope and Sturridge to carry their threat on the counter-attack.

After 29 minutes, though, Wanchope played a significant part in the game’s opening goal. Paul Trollope played a high ball towards the right-hand side of the penalty area and Wanchope used his 6ft 4in (193cm) frame to get above Phil Neville and head it into the danger area. Ward’s shot took a deflection off Keane and looped over Schmeichel into the net to give Derby the lead — “and the Costa Rican played a part in the goal!” shrieked the ever-excitable Motson.

“We worked a lot on that,” Wanchope says. “I used to play basketball so I was good at timing the jump. We worked the crosses and I would always go to the back post to try to set up or score a goal. And with this one, the angle was just right for Ashley Ward to score.”

Six minutes later came the moment that came to define Wanchope’s seven years in England. A heavy touch in midfield from Nicky Butt was seized upon by Darryl Powell, who immediately knocked the ball to his new team-mate, in space, seven yards short of the halfway line.

Wanchope took one touch to control the ball and off he went. With Ward offering an option to the left and Sturridge making a diagonal run to the right, Wanchope dribbled into the heart of the United defence towards Gary Pallister and Ronny Johnsen. No coaching manual would encourage players to go it alone in that situation. But Wanchope was never the type to do things by the book.

“I was a new player,” he laughs. “They didn’t know about my qualities or anything. When I received the ball, I was on my own and there wasn’t a big challenge on me. So I started running, dribbling, and making a diagonal run with the ball. Then I saw a good run from Dean Sturridge, which was a good distraction.”

By that stage, Wanchope had got away from Butt, evaded the challenge of Phil Neville and breezed past Pallister as if he wasn’t there. Johnsen was too preoccupied with Sturridge to do anything about the man with the ball, but as Wanchope bore down on the United penalty area, the ball seemingly on an invisible string, Phil Neville, who had kept running, looked ready to make the tackle.

And then came the moment within the moment. Just as this lolloping, unconventional dribble seemed to be running out of steam, Wanchope deftly rolled the sole of his right boot over the ball and took it from an awkward position, under his feet, into a more inviting space beyond Phil Neville’s reach. All it needed now was the finishing touch.

“It comes back to basketball,” Wanchope says. “When you play basketball, you need to be aware of everything that’s around you. I started running and I knew where my team-mates were. I could see Phil Neville coming against me, so I was trying to protect the ball and keep it away from him. It’s hard to explain, but you have to be able to know what’s around you, so that last touch was to drag the ball a little bit away from him and then to shoot the ball unexpectedly because when you are close to the goal, you don’t want to give the goalkeeper the time to react.”

Overall, it took 11 touches for Wanchope to carry the ball into the United penalty area — right foot, left foot, right, right, right, right, right, left, left, right, right — and a glorious 12th, stroked with his right foot just when he appeared to be in danger of losing his balance, to send it just beyond Schmeichel’s reach and into the net at the Stretford End.

“And he’s scored! Oh, what a fantastic goal by the Costa Rican!” shrieked Motson in the commentary box. “Would you believe that? On his debut! That is a staggering moment of individual expertise by the long-legged 20-year-old in the English game for the first time. What an impact by a fella who wasn’t heard of until he was on trial at Queens Park Rangers, then on trial at Derby. Well, he’s not on trial anymore, Paulo Wanchope.”

How does it feel to do something like that, as an unknown, making his Premier League debut on one of the biggest stages in world football? “You can see my face!” Wanchope says. “It was a total surprise. I couldn’t believe I scored a goal at Old Trafford.

“Whenever I used to score in the park or in the street back home, I would celebrate like I’m on the biggest stage — like you’re in the World Cup or playing against one of the big teams in Europe. And that was the feeling because I really had scored at that level.”

It could have been even more dramatic. In the space of five seconds just before half-time, Ward struck two shots straight at Schmeichel and a third against the post. United were all over the place, as if the unpredictable Wanchope had thrown their defence into confusion. But as they left the pitch to boos at the interval, a second-half backlash seemed inevitable.

Sure enough, it came, with substitute Ole Gunnar Solskjaer setting up Cantona for a superbly taken goal two minutes into the second half. (Nobody could have imagined at the time, but it was the last he would score at Old Trafford.) And if Wanchope felt the first half was hard work, constantly having to track back, the second half was even tougher, this time within earshot of Smith and his assistant Steve McClaren on the touchline.

“It was all about running back to defend and then trying to defend the set pieces,” Wanchope says. “That was a very big experience, something different in English football. All the teams were very strong on set-pieces and I had the task to mark Gary Pallister, which was difficult. To be in there in the middle with those guys, everyone pushing and jumping. It was so different to football back in Costa Rica.

“It was my first game in English football and it was the one where I left the pitch with cramp. Not just because of how hard it was physically but because of all the tension and everything, my first game, playing away against Manchester United. Maybe in the second half, it was all too much for me. I was done.”

But Wanchope had already played his part. He had started that game as a relative unknown. By the end of the afternoon, with Sturridge scoring the final goal in an improbable 3-2 win for Derby, Wanchope was a hero whose achievements were even filtering through to his family in Costa Rica.

“It’s very different these days,” he says. “With the media, social media, television, all the information comes immediately. In those days, there wasn’t much English football on TV in Costa Rica. I didn’t get to speak to my family until I was back to the hotel and I rang them. They had seen some images, I don’t know how many hours later, but it was great to be able to tell them everything that had happened.”

Wanchope was the first Costa Rican to play in the Premier League and, in his very first game, he had scored a goal that Derby’s supporters still reminisce about more than a quarter of a century later. He went on to play for West Ham United and Manchester City, an unorthodox, unpredictable centre-forward who could, when the mood or the occasion took him, appear unplayable.

It is a story from a more innocent time — a time when the mere thought of a Costa Rican playing in England seemed almost unfathomable until one Saturday afternoon, a salsa-loving, basketball-playing youngster turned up at Old Trafford and danced his way right through the Manchester United defence.

[Nero 1,852]

Ake starts for City against Liverpool. 

Hopefully means he stays...

Edited July 30, 2022 by Nero

[MoroccanBlue 5,320]

19 minutes ago, Nero said:

Ake starts for City against Liverpool. 

Hopefully means he stays...

Also having a mare.