276: Ledley King, Tottenham Hotspur, Topps Match Attax Trading Card Game, Barclays Premier League 2010/11 Collector Binder

Today Mat Jolin-Beech takes a look at a man who offered so much but was denied a fair amount of it by his unreliable body. If you’re thinking this sounds familiar to earlier posts you are probably right but this one also features the added bonuses of World Cup heartache, two idiots on their first package holiday and a thirty-minute turtle. Over to Mat.

Many footballers we have looked at A Sticker’s Worth 500 Words have had careers blighted by injury. Many have fought to overcome them in novel ways. Michael Owen’s dossier. Owen Hargreaves’ YouTube vlogs. Eduardo and his Ryvita legs. But those guys all had pretty full careers despite their physical foibles. However, there is one Englishman’s career, not Darren Anderton, who you can say did have what could have been a world class career ruined by injury. Enter stage left Ledley “one working knee” King.

Tottenham Hotspur fans will wax lyrical about him and while a lot of it is Spurs’ fans being Spursy about a player who did many Spursy things some of it is true. A classy defender, blessed with a good reading of the game, decent pace – at least in his early career, and captain for Tottenham’s last trophy the 2008 League Cup. He even held the record for the fastest Premier League goal, for his first senior strike in December 2000 after just 10 seconds. This record stood for more than 18 years before Shane Long shaved 2.21 seconds off it in April 2019.

However, as you dear reader may have become accustomed to, this post is about none of these things. So, let’s roll the clock back to 2010 and the latter part of Ledley “glass ligament” King’s career. With no solution to his troublesome knee, other than to rest and not train in between games, he was nursed through the 2009/10 season. He played well enough that, for some reason, Fabio Capello decided that his brittle knee would stand up to the intense, compressed nature of tournament football.

At the same time, this writer, along with the Crystal Palace supporting cohort of the 500 Words team, had a holiday booked. To mark the occasion and that we’d be in sunny Turkey for the 2010 World Cup, we agreed to get team colours purchased and packed. Upping the ante, I decided to get the most amusing player for the squad onto the shirt. Cue a last minute pre-holiday dash to Sports Direct. One tight England shirt bought with 20 and KING on the back.

Fast forward a few days, and many vuvuzela ruined games later (even now the droning still haunts me from the South Africa World Cup), and we were suitably sunburnt. The highlight of the trip, other than a group hallucination in a bar we all decided didn’t happen, came mid-trip. Walking to the beach, came a man with one eye protruding. Googly-eyed Alex as we soon discovered he was called. “You want boat trip?” he basically shouted at us. Yes, we thought. Sun, boats, and booze. All sounds good. He obviously thought we needed more convincing, so brought out the big guns. “thirty-minute cave?,” he added. Before we could respond, he uttered what would become an infamous phrase, even to those who were never there. “thirty-minute turtle?” Deal done. Sign us up.

The boat trip was good, topped off by the thirty-minute turtle. The highlight of the trip. The same could not be said for the Round of 16 game, with the infamous Lampard ‘goal’. Nor for King, who managed a total of 45 minutes before breaking down injured. Amazingly it wasn’t his knee this time, but his groin. After the Three Lions’ early exit, the players all went away for some holiday sun. I just hope King was able to get his own thirty-minute turtle in order to cleanse his mind of an otherwise disastrous summer.