A Sticker's Worth 500 Words

Today Mat Jolin-Beech brings us the story of a Marmite player and pundit who it’s hard not to respect even if it’s easy not to like him. Back in his youth today’s subject scored a century for Greenmount Cricket Club alongside future Australian behemoth Matthew Hayden although the chat is his brother was the more promising stroke maker. He may not have released his own cookbook or led England’s women’s team to mediocrity but he definitely made his mark. Over to Mat. Football is full of stereotypes. The tireless worker . The flamboyant continental player . The no nonsense defensive hardman . The pretty boy . And then there is the one that everyone but their own fans love to hate because of the pure shithousery . The inspiration for this piece came from a YouTube wormhole. After going through various fan channels pulling apart the end of Solskjaer’s Manchester United reign, it ticked over to a video entitled epic shithousery. That in itself is pure gold for us here at A Sticker’s Worth...

It’s been over seventeen years since my GCSE English Literature exam and I have to confess I have little to no memory of it. I do remember the weighty poetry anthology that accompanied me into my school’s fairly knackered sports hall and several lessons spent trying to find parallels between the miserable dirges of Simon Armitage and the established epics of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley. Somehow this didn’t convince me to pick something else for my A Levels but there we go. Today’s students don’t have the luxury of bringing their anthologies in with them and thus miss out on the attempted annotations and classmates’ penis drawings when faced with questions like this: Write about both poems and their effect on you. Show how they are similar and how they are different. Sadly the likelihood of coming across the work of Ian McMillan in a GCSE exam is fairly low but, for the sake of it, let’s consider one of his poems’ effect on us: Lars Leese, tall as trees that grown in Wombwell Wood...

Merry Christmas! We hope you’re having a wonderful day whatever you might be doing. A few weeks ago when we were having a chat about upcoming posts in our WhatsApp group and I informed the lads that the coming weeks would feature Lee Dixon , David Bentley , Dennis Bergkamp , Marcus Hahnemann and Paul McGrath to which Rich replied this would be “a bloody excellent five-a-side team”. After a bit of back and forth about Bentley having a free role due to all bases being covered by his teammates we came to the decision to chuck together a collaborative effort for the most wonderful time of the year. Underneath you can see our attempts to put together great five-a-side teams from the various luminaries we have covered on these pages since March 2020. Not only will you get to revisit some of our posts but you’ll also get to enjoy some awful puns . I bet you really wish it could be Christmas everyday now. Thanks to Panini’s questionable choice of team photos for their Euro 2020 album we even...

With Christmas around the corner we bring tidings of great joy to all fans of obscure football nostalgia. Thanks to Bill Fernley for this suggestion which he freely admits to picking in part for its obscurity but also due to the fact the second player on show today somehow flies under the radar despite being nominated as the Oceania Football Confederation’s ‘Footballer of the Century’. In the spirit of the season, and partly because we struggled to find any other stickers, we’ll throw in some stuff about his New Zealand team mate for good measure. Hope you enjoy Bill. When you think of New Zealand there are a range of things that spring to mind. Perhaps first is their exceptional rugby teams who have thrilled and dominated the sport for years and produced some it the greatest players in both the men’s and women’s games. You might think of their cricketing stars who won the inaugural ICC World Test Championship in 2021 and have reached the finals of the last two major men’s limited over...

Richard Allinson takes a look today at one of the strangest pieces of transfer market chicanery to light up the 1990s. It probably isn’t a huge shock that Harry Redknapp was at least a little bit involved but this time it wasn’t a squad number that proved the sticking point but the proximity of a certain city on the banks of the Mersey. Over to Rich for the details. In football, there are some transfers that make perfect sense. Everton signing Emeritus Ballon d’Or winner Ibrahima Bakayoko , Newcastle United signing local hero Alan Shearer , and Harry Redknapp signing Niko Kranjcar for the 11,000th time are just such examples. Sometimes there are those that make less sense. Manchester United’s capture of Bebé, David Bellion, Fred, Eric Djemba-Djemba , Massimo Taibi , Kleberson , Morgan Schneiderlin and Harry Redknapp signing Niko Kranjcar for the 11,001st time are just such examples. And then there is Aston Villa signing David Unsworth.  Unsworth had started his career with Everton...

Football fans are often creative souls and this is most evident in the terrace songs which provide the soundtrack to the beautiful game. Fans of Crystal Palace, Reading and Leyton Orient all helped swell the coffers of KC and the Sunshine Band by fitting wing wizard Jobi McAnuff ’s name to one of their biggest hits. Up at Newcastle United there was similar genius on show with the Toon Army mixing a Senegalese defender with a classic TV show theme to create “Sunday, Monday…Habib Beye!” Not content with this a fansite popped up shortly afterwards with the exceptional name ‘Beyewatch’. Once the singing’s done though there’s always time for a great nickname. After a few too many high profile mistakes back in the 90s, understandably considering the Tomb Raider induced-insomnia he was suffering, Liverpool goalkeeper David James became known as Calamity James. Former Palace and Wigan Athletic defender Fitz Hall picked up the exceptional sobriquet ‘One Size’ simply by having a name that worke...

Today Richard Allinson takes a look at a man who won major trophies and overcame adversity but perhaps doesn’t get the credit he deserves. In a career full of highlights it’s arguable his best performance came on a rank sand-based AstroTurf pitch where, with his team trailing 3-0 at half time, his second half hat-trick and Brazilian ball skills in an unorthodox central midfield role secured one of the greatest comeback victories in football history. Ok, this might have been in an episode of 1990s CBBC classic ‘The Queen’s Nose’ but this surely was enough to shortlist him for the Aston Villa job last month. Over to Rich for more of his heroics. Gary Mabbutt had a great football career, of that there can be little doubt. Between 1979 and 1998 he played 131 games for Bristol Rovers and 619 for Tottenham Hotspur scoring 37 times in the process. He earned 16 international caps in an era of excellent English centre backs, won the UEFA Cup, the FA Cup, shared a Charity Shield and was awarded ...

One of the many joys of writing this blog is that whenever you feel like you might be running out of ideas someone or something reminds you of yet another great footballer or moment in the beautiful game that deserves revisiting. Thanks to the ever-friendly landlord at the Football Tavern for the suggestion for today’s post. We hope this does the trick. The passing of Jack Charlton in July 2020 was met with great sadness both within and beyond the world of football. As a player he was integral to the highly successful Leeds United and England sides of the 1960s. As a manager he had decent spells with Middlesbrough, Sheffield Wednesday and Newcastle United before taking over the Republic of Ireland’s national team in December 1985. With his uncomplicated approach, and a willingness to see a little bit of Irish in a whole host of players, the Boys in Green qualified for the 1988 European Championships and both Italia ’90 and USA ’94. Sadly Charlton was diagnosed with dementia in 2016...

Today Emlyn Jones takes a look at a real American who very much fought for the right of every man (to get three points away at Manchester City) during an admirable career on both sides of the Atlantic. He also very much took Jurgen Klopp’s love of “ heavy metal football ” to new levels and has celebrated his retirement by growing a truly exceptional moustache. Whatcha gonna do when Hahnemannia runs wild on you? Over to Emlyn to fill us in. "When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside You gotta take a stand, it don't help to hide If you hurt my friends, then you hurt my pride I gotta be a man, I can't let it slide". Wise words for any goalkeeper to live by... brother. Today's post covers another Real American, a key part of the 2005/06 Reading side this blog has mentioned on one or two occasions. Marcus Hahnemann was born in Kent, Washington in 1972. In his final year of high school, he planned to join the Marines as a pilot; a year too young to enlist, he in...

Much earlier in the year one of our readers, Peter van Garderen , gave us a list of suggestions for future posts. Today we take a look at someone who ticks so many 90s football boxes it’s practically indecent. A student of the Ajax school who came to Serie A before lighting up the Premier League who even managed to score a fantastic last minute goal in a World Cup knockout game which ultimately led to his nation falling short in the semi-finals. We hope this does the job Peter. You would be forgiven for thinking that the greatest travesty in English football in the 1990s was that Carlton Palmer gained more international caps than Matt Le Tissier but I’m inclined to disagree. Quite how the exceptional talents of Football Italia’s James Richardson weren’t snapped up by any of the major sporting broadcasters when the iconic programme departed from Channel 4’s screens beggars belief. The linen suits, extravagant coffees and stack of newspapers were impressive enough but the man’s pres...