Football personalities you admire.

[ohhh_yeah 2767]

 

[Monkeys Fist 38757]

Dr. Socrates.

[Craig 6306]

Schmeichel is a good shout. Absolutely awesome goalkeeper, you couldn't help but admire him.

 

Even more so for carrying that Galatasaray fan all the way to the side of the pitch at OT - didn't he get death threats for that one?

[angrysteve 0]

I respect Avram Grant.

 

Twice he's been placed in tough positions (this time around, VERY tough), and both times he seems to have handled the situation with dignity.

Is that including his 'dignified' trip to the brothel??

[Asprilla 96]

I quite like Wayne Rooney.

Me too. He seems like a decent guy for all the madness that surrounds him.

 

 

Have to say SAF simply because what he's achieved is unreal. Roy Hodgson for doing an amazing job at Fulham and being one of the old school.

 

I also think Graham Taylor comes across well these days.

[Howmanheyman 26824]

Hodgeson seems a vewy nice chap.

 

Ferguson can be a twat but I like him at times.

 

Giggs has been a great pro and never really shouted the odds like Scholes too.

 

I liked Stuart Pierce even before he came to NUFC.

 

Jimmy Bullard seems a laugh.

 

As a kid I thought the Brazil side of '82 sounded fucking class, Socrates, Zico, Falcao, etc.

 

I remember Steve Sutton being bowled over by our support in our 1-4 defeat at the Baseball ground, which was decent of him.

 

There'll be others I can't think of off the top of my head.

[luckyluke 1]

I respect Avram Grant.

 

Twice he's been placed in tough positions (this time around, VERY tough), and both times he seems to have handled the situation with dignity.

Is that including his 'dignified' trip to the brothel??

 

He did leave a tip tbf.

 

 

 

I quite like Rooney too - particularly recently attributing his improved heading to his receding hairline.

[Billy Castell 0]

. Alan Shearer (I still respect him when other some Rovers fans don't)

 

Very gracious of you.

 

Best striker England have had in years. He is from Newcastle, supports Newcastle as a kid, so I do not blame him for moving there. There are stories of him dictating who he will play with when Harford was manager, but he won us the league. It was absolutely gutting when he left, especiaslly since he was eventually replaced by Kevin Davies, but it was some time ago. Does annoy me that the media forget about his entire pre-Newcastle career though.

[Guest alex]

I respect Avram Grant.

 

Twice he's been placed in tough positions (this time around, VERY tough), and both times he seems to have handled the situation with dignity.

Is that including his 'dignified' trip to the brothel??

Implicit by the 'tough positions' comment.

[James Westfall 0]

Zvonimir Boban

Luis Enrique

Josep Guardiola

[Guest alex]

Nice list.

[PaddockLad 14585]

Zvonimir Boban

Luis Enrique

Josep Guardiola

The first two were held in very high regard by Sir Bob

 

Boban however divides opinion, depending on what side you were on in the Balkan wars of the nineties....theres a school of thought he started them with this kick

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waz11ihnY8w...feature=related

 

Political Football: Zvonimir Boban

By Channel 4 News

Updated on 19 December 2007

.For his Political Football series, Simon Kuper asks: did Zvonimir Boban kick off the Balkans conflict?

 

Here's a scene from 1999: the car park at Milanello, AC Milan's training complex, on a foggy autumn's day. Zvonimir Boban, dressed in an outfit worth about as much as a Tranmere Rovers player, is getting into his people carrier for his commute home through the Lombardian countryside. The great midfielder looks every inch the materialist modern footballer.

 

He was, but he was also more than that. The Croatian nationalist may be the only footballer ever credited with kicking off a civil war. He was in at the beginning of the division of Yugoslavia in 1990. As we enter the last phase of that division, with Kosovo saying it will claim independence from Serbia within days, it's time to pick Boban for our political footballers' XI. He joins Neil Lennon, Diego Maradona and Walter Tull in midfield.

 

Romantic nationalist

Boban was born in the small Croatian town of Imotski, very near the Bosnian border, in the famously nationalist south of Croatia. He grew up in communist Yugoslavia, but as he reached adulthood the state was crumbling. With communism heading for the dustbin of history, many politicians turned to nationalism instead.

 

 

 

On a videotape of the match between Dynamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade, Boban is heard muttering: 'Where is the police? Where is the bloody police?'Boban was a receptive customer, a romantic nationalist straight out of the nineteenth century, steeped in the Croat version of history. In fact he is an obsessive reader, who says he "grew up" on Chekhov and Dostoevsky, and before one Croatia-Italy game confessed to the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport that if the match were between Croatian and Italian literary classics instead of footballers, Italy would win hands down. "Dante, Petrach, Leopardi.... It wouldn't be a contest," he said.

 

His chance to enter Croatian myth came in Zagreb on 13 May, 1990. Yugoslavia was then still uneasily holding its various nationalities together. Boban's team Dynamo Zagreb, from the capital of Croatia, were playing the Serb team Red Star Belgrade in a league match that degenerated into hooliganism.

 

Then Boban spots a policeman beating up a Dynamo fan who has tripped. The player runs up and karate-kicks the policeman in the face (see video below).

 

Visiting Serb fans began tearing down the stadium, while Yugoslav police stood and watched. To Croats, the scene seemed an allegory of how Serbs had been privileged and they themselves disadvantaged in Yugoslavia. On a videotape of that day, Boban, Dynamo's captain, paces the athletics track, steaming. He mutters, "Where is the police? Where is the bloody police?"

 

A nation is born

According to one serious Croatian historian, that kick was "the symbol of the uprising against the 70-year Serb domination in Yugoslavia." Many Croats feel that with that kick their nation was born. Erik Brouwer, a Dutch writer who has written beautifully on the match, notes that when the victim of the kick was dredged up in 2005, he turned out to be not a Serb at all, but a Bosnian Muslim. The man said he "totally understood" Boban's act.

 

 

 

Soon after the kick Boban went off to the Serie A, but many Croat and Serb men of his age went to war. Football hooligans in particular volunteered for the armies of both sides. The psychopath Arkan, who had led Red Star's hooligans at the match in Zagreb, and became a brutal Serb paramilitary leader in the war, subsequently recalled: "After that game we immediately began to organize ourselves."

 

 

Simon Kuper is in the process of nominating his Political Football First XI - 11 footballers whose lives have acquired a dimension outside the sport they play.

 

But we want to know who you would include. It doesn't have to be an entire team (although that would be fascinating) - just a player for whom life has meant more than a mansion in Belgravia and a fleet of 4x4s.

 

 

Myth kick

Later a statue of a group of soldiers was erected in front of Dynamo's ground, with a text beneath them saying: "To the fans of this club, who started the war with Serbia at this ground on May 13, 1990."

 

The claim is false. Politicians, not Boban, started the war. His kick - and the melee at the match - merely conveyed to many Yugoslav TV viewers that it was all up with their country, that the tensions between Serbia and Croatia would lead to war.

 

Football hardly ever changes anything, but it can act as an allegory for a society. Still, in time to come people will no doubt believe the plaque's message. Zarko Puhovski, a philosophy professor who showed it to me in Zagreb, grumbled: "You don't need a century for this to become myth."

 

 

 

Football hardly ever changes anything - but it can act as an allegory for a society.After the wars, Boban starred in a Croatian side that came third at the World Cup of 1998. It was a team dredged in romantic nationalist rhetoric. Its coach, Miroslav Blazevic, told me: "On every occasion before a match I speak to the players of Croatia's problems, the suffering of all our patriots. Because in football, motivation is very important."

 

Boban bought it all. "Croatia is the reason I live," he declared in the documentary film The Last Yugoslavian Football Team. "I love my country as I love myself. I would die for Croatia." Of course he avoided doing so during the war, preferring Milanello instead.

 

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/spor...r+boban/1205847

[tinofbeans 86]

was going to say Boban. very good player, very well liked as well by most that played with him.

 

big fan of robert prosinecki. what a wonderful technical player. 40 a day dulled him physically, but you'd struggle to get the ball off him even now!

[Toonraider 0]

Always admired Zola, a really decent person all round I rekon...and what a player he was.

 

Then theres Bullard. Cottee. Rodney Jack (Ex Torquay) Leroy Rosenior. Have to mention Nobby as he is/was the ultimate pro. (Him and Zola being THE best imports)

Dont care who shoots me down but I like Bellars, always have. Great fight and spirit.

 

Loads more i cant even think of right now.

 

Course, Shearer is my very very favourite but we cant mention NUFC connections can we?

[Holden McGroin 4855]

Always admired Zola, a really decent person all round I rekon...and what a player he was.

 

Then theres Bullard. Cottee. Rodney Jack (Ex Torquay) Leroy Rosenior. Have to mention Nobby as he is/was the ultimate pro. (Him and Zola being THE best imports)

Dont care who shoots me down but I like Bellars, always have. Great fight and spirit.

 

Loads more i cant even think of right now.

 

Course, Shearer is my very very favourite but we cant mention NUFC connections can we?

 

You mentioned Nobby and Bellamy so you might as well

[Toonraider 0]

Always admired Zola, a really decent person all round I rekon...and what a player he was.

 

Then theres Bullard. Cottee. Rodney Jack (Ex Torquay) Leroy Rosenior. Have to mention Nobby as he is/was the ultimate pro. (Him and Zola being THE best imports)

Dont care who shoots me down but I like Bellars, always have. Great fight and spirit.

 

Loads more i cant even think of right now.

 

Course, Shearer is my very very favourite but we cant mention NUFC connections can we?

 

You mentioned Nobby and Bellamy so you might as well

 

Busted!!

[James Westfall 0]

Zvonimir Boban

Luis Enrique

Josep Guardiola

 

Forgot to mention Fernando Redondo. Whether his refusal to cut his hair for Passarella are true or myth I don't know, but refusing to take a wage at AC Milan while injured makes me think how much differently I would feel about Owen if he had done that at this club.

 

Plus Redondo was a hell of a player. None of this break up the play and pass the ball to somebody 2 yards away style DM stuff, Redondo was creative and destructive.

[Guest alex]

Redondo is another one I nearly mentioned myself. Speaking of Boban, one match that really sticks in my mind was a fairly low-key league match between Milan and Parma. Zaccherone (sp?) was manager of Milan and he played Boban in the 'hole' in a 3-4-1-2 variation of his favoured 3-4-3 system. Parma lined up similarly with Ortega playing just off the strikers for them. Every time Ortega got the ball he would beat a man or two but there was no end product from him and he slowed down Parma's attacks if anything. By contrast, Boban did everything with the utmost efficiency, never taking two or three touches when one or two would do the job better and, as a result, he was so much more effective. This was when he was a little bit past his best due to persistent back injuries but he was certainly enjoying an Indian summer all the same. I think Milan won the league that year with him playing a big part.