Things I Miss About Football....

Part 1...Fat Footballers

If I was to ask you to name the fattest footballer currently plying their trade in the Premiership then what would your answer be? A difficult question to answer isn't it. Perhaps Yakubu? And even then he is hardly a Rik Waller lookalike. Fat Frank? Lets be honest here, this is really just a moniker and probably arose because over 10 yards he is slower than most people's grannies, rather then anything to do with his actual physique.

Anyway, the point is that most of the Premiership's footballers are now lean, mean ,footballing machines. Perhaps influenced by the influx of foreign managers,most teams these days have a pretty strict dietary regime with stringent regulations on what they can consume.

I personally find all this rather boring and long for the days when nearly every teams would have a fat footballer within their ranks, and more often than not,the fat playmaker/goal poacher. People who fit into this category include players such as Jan Molby, Mick Quinn, John Barnes, Fat Le Tissier (I mean Matt). One could even argue that the greatest player of all time was perhaps a little bit on the portly side, the special Maradona.

Why do I miss the involvement of these players? Perhaps because a lot of these players were actually pretty talented. The fact that they were so fat and still got regular playing action through their skills alone. Let's take a look at modern footballer, someone like Theo Walcott for an example. A very quick athlete but with all the footballing nouse of a dead pigeon. Then take for example, Matt Le Tissier, a player who could stand around on his fat arse for 89 minutes and then promptly waltz past 5 players and slam one into the top corner. I think I know which one I would rather see

These players are also take me back to a time when they fans believed that the footballers on the same level as they were and were playing for "us". What more could you want then to see Mick Quinn bury a 6 yard finish and then see him down the pub after the game putting away 5 pints of lager? These days the first thing footballers probably do is take sh*t after the game and get Gillian McKeith to inspect it.

Returning to Mick Quinn , the legendary Geordie got paid to put the ball in the back of the onion bag, which he did on a regular basis. It is often said that a good striker will always “finish his dinner”. However, Quinn perhaps took this a bit too literally, as after finishing his dinner, he would then proceed to finish everyone else’s for them.

Midfielders such as Molby and Gazza often had to use their excellent vision and ability to spray a long pass to make up for the fact that if they ran with the ball for more than 20m they would run of out of breath. But did this take away any enjoyment from watching them play? Not a jot in my opinion. In fact, players like this probably had more skill in their little toe then a lot of modern Premiership footballers have in their whole body.

So overall, what I would say is this. A lot of footballers these days appear to be athletes as opposed to footballers. Whereas the beauty really comes when players are the other way round. In other words..... BRING BACK THE FATTIES!!

Sunil