Friday, February 10

Who is the mystery man?

David James had a good piece on captaincy in last weekend's Observer and mentioned a troublesome individual at West Ham in 2002-03. He wrote:
"At West Ham we had a player who managed to alienate everyone in the first team. It was the year that we were fighting relegation and endless stories were being leaked to the press causing further upset in the dressing room. When we finally discovered the culprit, the entire team united against him. As a result he was left off the team sheet, a sensible decision taken by the manager. By Christmas, however, and ravaged by injuries, we desperately needed reinforcements. Trevor Brooking, our manager by then, called a team meeting to say: "We're struggling for numbers, we're going to have to use our pal in the next game." The consensus was that we did not want him anywhere near the first team but the logic was that, if the guy could help us win a game, then we were not in a position to hold grudges. Avoiding relegation was our priority over everything. We did not manage to dodge the drop but we did go down with a record number of points after a superb final run-in."
James has his dates slightly wrong as Brooking did not step in until Glenn Roeder's collapse in April. But there's only one individual I can think of who was dropped and came back into the side for the final run in...

5 comments:

Sean Whetstone said...

We all know it is Paolo DiCanio

Anonymous said...

It was Paolo, but he was trying to get the team to turn against Roeder, because as we all know he was out of his depth and couldnt manage his pocket money the cunt.

James Hunt said...

It'll be interesting to see Paolo's reaction now he's a manager if one of his players starts acting up in the same way.

Pete May said...

Maybe someone should organise a reunion dinner for that side... now that would be interesting!

James Hunt said...

I heard that Roeder invited all the old squad for a drink in a brewery not so long back, when they turned up there was no booze available............