Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i FourFourTwo UK

WEIRD WORLD OF FOOTBALL 1 “RAY PARLOUR, IS THAT YOU?” When Middlesbrough hosted Newcastle United in a Tyne-Tees derby clash in December 1998, two of the crowd had a secret plan. Newly promoted Boro had signed Paul Gascoigne from Rangers that summer and lost just two of their opening 15 Premier League matches, in an odd start to the campaign which yielded 10 draws in their first 18 games in all competitions. Relentless stalemates didn’t keep the crowds away: among the 34,000 at the Newcastle fixture were stripper Rachel Sadler and pal Vanessa Richards, who both invaded the pitch, charging towards Gazza “in an attempt to cheer him up”. With Sadler wearing nothing but a G-string, and Richards sporting an increasingly revealing Santa costume [above], the plan sort of worked…

“He chose Newcastle? If so, he is an ass.” Montpellier may seem like an unlikely club to hold a long-running grudge against the Magpies, but Louis Nicollin held that grudge nevertheless. First he was irritated by Newcastle luring away defender Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa (they probably shouldn’t have bothered), then he was angered when they wooed Remy Cabella (they definitely shouldn’t have bothered). “He’ll be bored s**tless in Newcastle,” was Loulou’s considered assessment. It was nothing new for Nicollin, French football’s most outspoken figure for more than 40 years until his death in 2017. The waste disposal magnate became La Paillade chairman in the amateur leagues in 1974, taking them into the top tier, then to the Ligue 1 title in 2012. “Montpellier, champions of France?” he said. “If I were Marseille,…

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A little before 7am in a park beside the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, a group of Latino men are stringing a banner over a palm tree lined walkway. Its letters, gold on a black background, spell Siempre a tu lado: ‘Always by your side’. It’s the first Saturday in November and Major League Soccer’s Cup Final is not the biggest sporting event taking place in the United States of America today. It’s not even the biggest sporting event taking place in LA. Right across the street, 65,000 football fans – the other football – will rock up to watch a college game involving USC Trojans and Cal Bears, relegating the MLS Cup Final between LAFC and Philadelphia Union to the day’s second-biggest fixture in the 90037 zip code.…

JIMMY HILL’S UNINTENDED IMPLICATION THAT SAUDI ARABIA WAS FLY-INFESTED DISPLEASED HIS PATRONS Bob Paisley. Bobby Robson. Brian Clough. That was the shortlist to manage Saudi Arabia’s national team in 1977. Paisley had just won the first of three European Cups with Liverpool; Robson’s stylish Ipswich Town had finished third in the league; and Old Big ’Ead had returned Nottingham Forest to the top flight. With riches to match their ambition, the Saudis had already paid Jimmy Hill – broadcaster, Coventry City chairman, ex-player and self-styled football visionary – a princely £25 million to work his magic. Saudi Arabia’s quest for overnight football success in the 1970s was even more quixotic than their 2020s pursuit of Newcastle United. The kingdom had banned football until 1951 and introduced a domestic league only…

A loan spell at Nuneaton Borough might not seem the obvious setting for an epiphany, but for former striker Drewe Broughton, a 2000 stint with the non-league outfit was key to convincing him to take on a whole new persona. Without it, he would never have become ‘The Fear Coach’. The future Peterborough and Rotherham hitman made more than 500 appearances across a 16-year professional career and has now reinvented himself as a psychological guru, working with top players and coaches to help them negotiate the mental anguish of the game. Clients have included Wales’ Euro 2016 hero Hal-Robson Kanu. Broughton experienced every high and low possible at 22 different clubs, and now channels those experiences into the advice he offers athletes. Looking back, he pinpoints his loan from Peterborough…

Now you’re back at Gremio, you’ve played for just three different clubs in a 16-year career. Is loyalty important to you? Actually, I never planned that! I didn’t think I’d stay 10 years at Liverpool or five at Lazio. When I first arrived from Brazil, I thought I’d play maybe 12 years in Europe before going home and retiring at 35. But I’m 36 now and feeling pretty good. Perhaps the secret is that wherever I’ve been, I’ve created roots with both the club and the fans. I spent almost five years at Gremio, including time in the academy at the start of my journey. Then at Liverpool, despite a tough start, I always felt I was able to contribute, so I stayed and stayed. I eventually lost my place…

FourFourTwo is walking through London with Martin O’Neill, trying to remember the name of John Cleese’s third wife. “It wasn’t Connie Booth, the one he co-wrote Fawlty Towers with – I think he’s on good terms with her,” O’Neill muses. This wasn’t the conversation we expected with a double European Cup winner, but he seems happy to talk about pretty much anything. The former Nottingham Forest player and Celtic manager had suggested meeting FFT outside Sloane Square tube station before wandering to a café – a pleasing throwback in itself, as few interviews in this modern era start so informally. Now 70, he has been living in central London since just before the pandemic. “We got here, then everyone started moving out,” the Northern Irishman rues. Since normal life returned,…

“I SAW THE DUTCH LOSE 4-1 TO ENGLAND AS A FAN AT EURO 96. TWO YEARS LATER, I WAS PLAYING” V. Setubal 2-2 Boavista May 4, 1997 Primeira Divisao “My first match is for Boavista against Vitoria Setubal – you didn’t expect me to choose this one, did you?! [Laughs] The Leeds manager George Graham was in the stadium – he saw me for the first time, he was scouting me. I scored, and from that moment he liked me, and a deal to join Leeds started to get going with my agent. I scored 20 league goals for Boavista that season. I couldn’t stop scoring, we had a really good year, with me and Nuno Gomes up front – we played a lot of games together. Back in the…

HAALAND 57 BLACKPOOL 0 Erling Haaland stands over the twitching corpse of Chris Maxwell, after maiming the Blackpool goalkeeper with a Mitre Delta. He’s just bagged his 57th goal of this FA Cup tie, with seven minutes still to play. It’s rumoured that the Norwegian spent the World Cup rigged up to a giant placenta beneath Stonehenge for a deep, regenerative sleep, finally re-emerging with an extra yard of pace and an even drier sense of humour, something nobody thought possible. Maxwell’s eyeballs hang out of their sockets, his colon collapsed. “If he dies, he dies,” mutters Haaland. There’s no way to tell if he’s joking. LIZ TRUSS DOES A LEEDS Having declared she would “channel the spirit of Don Revie” when she took over as Prime Minister, Yorkshire-raised Truss…

When Pep Guardiola’s name appears on your phone, you take the call. You stop what you are doing. He demands nothing less than your sole focus. It’s as if he’s put the rest of the world on mute for the duration he has your attention. Mikel Arteta first met this hypnotic man many years earlier. He had grown up idolising this magician who could bend space, time and football to his will, long before the Catalan coaching sensei learned to choreograph whole teams to do the same. A 16-year-old Arteta would make his Barcelona B debut as a substitute for Guardiola, then-club captain and 11 years his protégé’s senior. The former never made a senior Barcelona appearance but, with the pair both schooled by Johan Cruyff principles and with a…

Rod Stewart is in the East Lothian village of Ormiston, with his Young Hoops Under-12s team about to kick off against Hibernian’s boys at the club’s training ground. Maggie May blasts out of the dressing room on an autumnal Saturday morning. Rod is in his element, informing one parent, “This is the land of my father”. He shakes hands with another in a hand-knitted Rangers bobble hat. It’s a plucky 1-1 draw but the contest is not without incident. An ambulance is called for Aidan Stewart, Rod’s 11-year-old son, who is wrapped in a large foil blanket. A second ambulance is sent for when it emerges another lad has concussion. While the boys recover, our interview is understandably rescheduled for three weeks later at the more stately surroundings of Celtic…

Beth Mead hated herself. She despised the thoughts that had crossed her mind, but felt powerless to stop them. England’s would-be Euro 2022 hero had been left out of Great Britain’s squad for the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics and it had sent her into a spiral like nothing she had experienced before. Stuck at home as Team GB travelled to Japan to take part in 2021’s rearranged Games, Mead found herself locked in a paradox. She wanted the side to do well in the tournament but, at the same time, she hoped they would fall short in their quest for a medal, so that manager Hege Riise would regret overlooking her. “I found it very hard, because I hated the thoughts I was having while the Olympics were being played,”…

After more than 600 Football League games and almost 200 goals across a 17-year career, Brett Pitman could have been forgiven for wanting to put his feet up and enjoy a well-deserved retirement. Instead this summer, the 34-year-old striker made a drastic drop, from newly promoted League One club Bristol Rovers to ninth-tier Portchester. The former EFL stalwart experienced a blistering start to life at the Wessex League Premier Division club, scoring 28 goals in his first 18 starts including a hat-trick and last-minute winner in a vital 3-2 win away at Portland in November. A week later, he struck four in an 8-1 drubbing of Alresford. This form has helped to make the Royals early promotion contenders. “I expected to score goals, as I do whatever level I play…

1 MURDER MYSTERY Interviews in matchday programmes can be pretty dull. Not at Newcastle, who came up with ‘Tombola’, whereby players would draw numbers out of a hat featuring 50 “fresh and far reaching” posers to let chaos reign. Asked how he’d dispose of a dead body in an hour, Florian Lejeune embraced the format almost too well, Clive. “I’d put it in the boot of my car, drive out to sea, put it on a boat and throw it into the sea with weights on it,” he explained, rather worryingly. 2 PEAK OF KNOWLEDGE Oldham’s former right back Connor Brown probably would struggle to dispose of a body – he was still struggling with what day of the week it was. Taking on the club’s assistant groundsman in a…

THE TRIGGER After the Dutch finish joint-second with the Republic of Ireland in their Italia 90 group, lots have to be drawn. The Irish win, so face (and beat) Romania in the last 16; the Netherlands lose, so run into bitter rivals (and eventual winners) West Germany. Only two years earlier, Ronald Koeman had mimed wiping his backside with a German shirt in their semi-final tie en route to Euro 88 glory, and when the sides met in World Cup qualifying, a Rotterdam flag compared Lothar Matthaus to Adolf Hitler. Sure. THE FEUD Playing at San Siro just a month after scoring the European Cup final winner for Milan, Rijkaard is carded for hacking down Voller midway through the first half. More than verbals are exchanged: Voller, also booked, tells…

Not even Andrea Pirlo listens to Andrea Pirlo. “I wouldn’t bet a single cent on me becoming a manager,” the Italian wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Penso Quindi Gioco (‘I Think Therefore I Play’). “It is not a job I’m attracted to. There are too many worries and the lifestyle is far too close to that of a player. I’ve done my bit and, in the future, I would like to get back even a semblance of a private life.” Pirlo was his generation’s coolest operator, an effortless midfielder of such insouciant grace for Milan, Juventus and Italy, among others, that you almost felt as if football was a means to an end to fund his true passion: the winery he opened in 2007. Yet, seven years after making his…

XI BEST: Mart Poom, Jacob Laursen, Igor Stimac, Shaun Barker, Chris Powell, Will Hughes, Aljosa Asanovic, Seth Johnson, Stefano Eranio, Francesco Baiano, Paolo Wanchope. WORST: Kelle Roos, Con Blatsis, Claude Davis, Bjorn Otto Bragstad, Andy Griffin, Benny Feilhaber, Andy Todd, Eddie Lewis, Bob Malcolm, Dean Holdsworth, Stern John. PLAYER B: Stimac [right] raised the bar after Jim Smith signed him from Hajduk Split for the princely sum of £1.57 million. Smith changed the Rams’ system to a back three to suit Igor. The result was an epic unbeaten spree, promotion and a fine spell in the Premier League. W: Davis, an ungainly centre-back, cost £3m and was nicknamed ‘Bambi on Ice’ for his gaffes in a short, nightmarish spell with us. MOMENT B: A 3-0 win over Arsenal at Pride…

There are shock signings, and then there are those that feel like something from a teenager’s Football Manager save. The latter was certainly the case when Edgar Davids, a Champions League winner with Ajax and alumnus of clubs including Juventus, Milan, Barcelona and Inter, rocked up at League Two minnows Barnet in October 2012. The dreadlocked, goggle-sporting Dutchman, nicknamed ‘Pitbull’ due to his tenacious displays, was already living in north London following a late-career stint with Tottenham, and had previously been snapped at Barnet’s 6,500-capacity Hive Stadium enjoying fourth-tier matches as a fan. Now, an icon of the game, and a member of France 98’s Team of the Tournament, was announcing his ambition to help the stuttering Bees stay in the Football League. Nobody was expecting Camp Nou performances from…