general soccer lighthearted bullshit topic: where chums can chit-chat

Discussion in 'Soccer Board' started by Taques, Jul 4, 2010.

  1. El_Pato

    El_Pato Nunca Caminaras Solo
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    This seems like an excessive amount of clubs

     
  2. mc415

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    He was a boss in Mexico like 15-20 years ago
     
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  3. Det. Frank Bullitt

    Det. Frank Bullitt God Bless Texas
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  4. DirtBall

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    He’s so damn old that he was getting first team minutes when Nebraska was winning National Championships. My goodness. Ancient history.
     
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  5. SugarShaun

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  6. PeterGriffin

    PeterGriffin Iced and/or sweet tea is for dirty rednecks.
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  7. El_Pato

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  8. Owsley

    Owsley My friends call me Bear
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  9. SugarShaun

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  10. Det. Frank Bullitt

    Det. Frank Bullitt God Bless Texas
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    Tune into FS2 in 15 minutes for African CL (and Egyptian league) winners to have a go at at the best team in the world

    upload_2021-2-8_11-48-50.png
     
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  11. mc415

    mc415 Well-Known Member
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    Game already over
     
  12. Tobias

    Tobias dan “the man qb1” jones fan account
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    bill connelly attempted to figure out who are the most clutch players and i am glad that even the stat nerds have given balo some love. has him #5 behind messi, ronaldo, lukaku and cavani

    full article for those interested

    If you've spent more than 15 minutes on the internet in your lifetime, you've probably come across an age-old sporting argument about "clutch." Who is "clutch," and who is a "choker?" Does "clutch" exist, or is it just randomness that we forcibly burden with a pleasing narrative?

    My personal opinions were well-enunciated by Peter Keating back in ESPN the Magazine's 2014 analytics issue: "Athletes aren't clutch because they raise their level of play in important situations; that's not a real, sustainable skill. Instead, these athletes are clutch because they don't choke as much relative to their peers." That point makes sense to me: some people panic under pressure, and some don't.


    I also know that determining who is officially clutch is a fool's errand because of the aforementioned randomness and generally small sample. That said, coming up big in key moments is something to be celebrated, whether it's sustainable or not. Again, take it from Keating: "Respect clutch achievement, even if it's not predictable. Don't be killjoys." So whether they're clutch, or whether they've just made timely contributions, let's celebrate some soccer players who have done great things in key moments.

    Which soccer players have seen the most clutch play/timely production over the years? To begin to answer that question, let's lay out who has been the most productive, period.

    I created a starting sample of players by looking at the past 10 years of play in Europe's Big Five leagues (English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, French Ligue 1) and UEFA's club competitions, the Champions League and Europa League. It's not perfect. Guys who were great right before Feb. 2011 (when the sample begins), but began aging out pretty quickly aren't going to have much of a track record. Nor will players who did great things in another league before joining the big leagues. I've left out the forever-small sample of international play as well, but this data will still tell us a story.

    In this 10-year sample, 127 players have produced at least 100 overall goals and assists, from Dele Alli and James Milner (exactly 100 each) to Luis Suarez (367), Robert Lewandowski (393), Cristiano Ronaldo (554) and Leo Messi (593).

    Messi, Ronaldo, Lewandowski and most of the other big-name scorers: clutch
    Among these 127 players, 12 have also produced at least 15 goals and assists in what I'll define as "close-and-late" situations: moments in the 80th minute or later in which either (A) the game is tied or (B) their team is behind in what eventually becomes a draw or win.

    The 12 players in question:

    Note: clubs listed are the players' clubs as of 2021

    1. Lionel Messi, Barcelona: 25 (16 goals, 9 assists)
    2. Cristiano Ronaldo, Juventus: 24 (22, 2)
    3. Romelu Lukaku, Inter Milan: 21 (17, 4)
    4. Edinson Cavani, Man United: 20 (18, 2)
    5. Mario Balotelli, Monza: 18 (17, 1)
    6. Ciro Immobile, Lazio: 17 (15, 2)
    7. Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich: 16 (15, 1)
    8. Luis Suarez, Atletico Madrid: 16 (12, 4)
    9. Olivier Giroud, Chelsea: 16 (13, 3)
    10. Sergio Aguero, Manchester City: 15 (13, 2)
    11. Harry Kane, Tottenham: 15 (11, 4)
    12. Edin Dzeko, AS Roma: 15 (10, 5)

    Now, a lot of these players simply replicated their typical production rates in key moments. Messi, Ronaldo, Lewandowski, Suarez & Co. topped this list just like they top the overall production lists, though clutch production represents only about 4% of their total G+As. They mostly produced similar shot-per-minute and xG-per-shot averages, though if you're looking for standouts, Lewandowski's and Cavani's xG-per-shot averages jump from 0.20 overall to 0.24 in these close-and-late situations. It's a slight, but noticeable, difference.

    Balotelli and Lukaku: extra clutch
    Someone like Balotelli is particularly interesting in our study. Long regarded as one of the better penalty-takers in the world, he went 9-for-9 on pens in these close-and-late situations; if we're looking for the most directly clutch situations in this sport, taking a penalty late in a game, with points on the line, ranks really high. Not only that, but 15% of his overall production -- 18 of his 119 goals and assists -- came in these situations, including his only assist of the 2011-12 season, and one of the most famous assists of all time.


    Balotelli's quirks (shall we say) have contributed to him having a bit of a journeyman's career: in the past decade, he has played for Manchester City, AC Milan, Liverpool, Milan again, Nice, Marseille, Brescia and, most recently, Monza in Serie B (Italy's second division). But if you needed a late magic act, he was one of the players most likely to deliver; after all, while he scored only four goals for Liverpool, three broke ties after the 80th minute.

    Lukaku stands out as well. Of the most productive players in the sample -- the 27 with at least 200 combined goals and assists -- his close-and-late production represents the highest percentage of overall production: 9.3%.

    Granted, while the top overall scorers have consistently played for elite teams -- Messi with Barca, Ronaldo with Real Madrid and Juventus, Lewandowski mostly with Bayern -- Lukaku mainly has been on merely very good teams (Manchester United, Inter Milan) and therefore has played in a higher percentage of close games. But he has made the most of it.

    Nils Petersen: underrated clutch
    Who else has seen a particularly healthy percentage of their production in close-and-late situations?

    Highest percentage of production coming in clutch situations:

    Note: clubs listed are the players' clubs as of 2021

    1. Mario Balotelli, Monza (15.7% of all goals and assists)
    2. Nils Petersen, SC Freiburg: 13.7% (14 of 102)
    3. Dani Parejo, Villarreal CF: 9.6% (11 of 115)
    4. Robin van Persie (retired): 9.5% (12 of 126)
    5. Roberto Soldado, Granada CF: 9.4% (13 of 138)
    6. Jimmy Briand, Bordeaux: 9.4% (11 of 117)
    7. Romelu Lukaku, Inter Milan: 9.3% (21 of 225)
    8. Willian, Arsenal: 9.2% (10 of 109)
    9. Iago Aspas, Celta Vigo: 9.0% (14 of 156)
    10. Alvaro Morata, Juventus: 8.5% (12 of 141)

    Petersen, 32, briefly signed with Bayern Munich in 2011, but he has spent most of this 10-year sample playing with Werder Bremen and SC Freiburg; he has had plenty of "trailing late and team is desperate" experience, but no one can say he hasn't come through, often via headers.

    Alvaro Morata: ultraclutch super sub

    If you watched the two-episode second season of Amazon's "Take Us Home: Leeds United" series, which provides a brief run-through of their long-awaited promotion push in 2019-20, you quickly understand the sentimental value of a "super sub," the guy you send to save the day or provide a jolt of energy when things aren't going quite right. (Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Man United's manager, made his name as a player by being this "super sub.")

    In the home stretch of last season, Pablo Hernandez hopped off the bench and scored in back-to-back matches -- he first had a goal and an assist in an easy win over Stoke, then scored the vital go-ahead goal in the 89th minute of a scoreless tie against Swansea. He has 74 goals and assists with the club, but the Swansea goal assured the 35-year old former Valencia star legendary status in Leeds yore.

    So looking more broadly, which subs have been the most super through the years? One guy in the sample towers over the others.

    Goals and assists for subs after the 80th minute, last 10 years:

    Note: clubs listed are the players' clubs as of 2021

    1. Alvaro Morata, Juventus: 32 (23 goals, 9 assists)
    2. Nils Petersen, SC Freiburg: 18 (13, 5)
    3. Olivier Giroud, Chelsea: 17 (15, 2)
    4. Kevin Gameiro, Valencia: 16 (12, 4)
    5. Edin Dzeko, AS Roma: 15 (10, 5)
    6. Paco Alcacer, Villarreal CF: 14 (12, 2)
    7. Javier Hernandez, LA Galaxy: 14 (11, 3)
    8. Luis Muriel, Atalanta: 14 (11, 3)
    9. Kylian Mbappe, Paris Saint-Germain: 14 (8, 6)
    10. Lucas Moura (Tottenham), Franck Ribery (Fiorentina) and Karim Benzema (Real Madrid): 13 each

    Morata's 141 combined goals and assists rank him 62nd overall in the 127-player sample. For context, that's eight behind Philippe Coutinho and 10 ahead of James Rodriguez. He has averaged between 0.6 and 1.1 goals and assists per 90 minutes for four different clubs and the Spanish national team. He also has spent a good portion of his career as his manager's second choice. He was a substitute in 58 of his 89 Real Madrid appearances, behind both Ronaldo and Benzema, and in two stints with current club Juventus he has been a sub in 50 of his 118 appearances.

    Oh, but what a sub he has been. In substitute appearances between 2013-14 and 2016-17, he scored 20 times in just 1,250 minutes -- 11 times after the 80th minute. The 28-year old left Madrid in 2017 in search of more minutes and found 103 starts for Chelsea and Atletico Madrid before landing back with (and often behind) Ronaldo at Juventus. He has been good wherever he has played, but he's been great off the bench.

    Giroud has been too, and like Petersen, he does some of his best work with his head.

    The new clutch: who is stepping up right now?
    Now, granted that Balotelli has been out of the spotlight for a while and Morata did the most of his "super-sub" damage four-to-seven years ago, which names have emerged in the past couple of years when it comes to clutchitude?

    If we look at the past three calendar years, here are your stars in the close-and-late department:

    Most combined goals and assists in clutch situations, past 3 years:

    Note: clubs listed are the players' clubs as of 2021

    1. Luis Suarez, Atletico Madrid: 10 goals and assists (10.0% of his total G+A)
    2. Ciro Immobile, Lazio: 9 (8.0%)
    3. Leo Messi, Barcelona: 9 (5.8%)
    4. Raul Jimenez, Wolves: 8 (13.6%)
    5. Iago Aspas, Celta Vigo: 8 (12.1%)
    6. Romelu Lukaku, Inter Milan: 8 (9.9%)
    7. Cristiano Ronaldo, Juventus: 8 (6.4%)
    8. Dani Parejo, Villarreal CF: 7 (15.9%)
    9. Harry Kane, Tottenham: 7 (7.4%)
    10. Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich: 7 (4.9%)
    11. Felipe Caicedo, Lazio: 6 (18.8%)
    12. Riccardo Orsolini, Bologna: 6 (17.6%)
    13. Jorge Molina, Granada CF: 6 (15.8%)
    14. Sergio Canales, Real Betis: 6 (14.6%)
    15. Andre Silva, Eintracht Frankfurt: 6 (12.2%)
    16. Andy Delort, Montpellier: 6 (11.8%)
    17. Lorenzo Insigne, Napoli: 6 (10.2%)
    18. Memphis Depay, Lyon: 6 (7.5%)

    Again, most of the names at the top also are at the top of the overall production lists, but some interesting names have made the most of their clutch opportunities.

    Take Raul Jimenez, for instance. The Mexican international and former Benfica star has played for Wolves for most of this sample, and he has been quite the points saver: he has scored or assisted the go-ahead goal five times in the past year, and he has scored three times while behind in clutch situations, too. Clutch production has made up 14% of his overall production.

    Yet that doesn't hold a candle to Felipe Caicedo. He has scored five clutch goals in three years, on only 10 shots. The Lazio star scored two late game winners in a month last winter (he also put away a win over Juventus on a counterattack), and he produced this wild winner in the 98th minute against Torino in November:



    He also has scored five goals in the 80th minute or later as a sub since the start of 2019-20. Caicedo: clutch by any definition.

    Paco Alcacer and Christian Pulisic: the new clutch super-subs
    Another recent "super-sub" also stands out.

    Goals and assists for subs after the 80th minute, past three years:

    1. Paco Alcacer, Villarreal CF: 11 (10 goals, 1 assist)
    2. Kylian Mbappe, PSG: 9 (7, 2)
    3. Angel Rodriguez, Getafe CF: 9 (7, 2)
    4. Gabriel Jesus, Man City: 9 (5, 4)
    5. Christian Pulisic, Chelsea: 9 (4, 5)
    6. Luis Muriel, Atalanta: 9 (8, 1)

    When Borussia Dortmund was making a full-season push at the Bundesliga title in 2018-19, Alcacer was their secret weapon. He scored eight times after the 80th minute; many were of the "expands-the-lead-from-one-to-two" variety, but he also scored two early-season winners. Now with Villarreal, he both broke a tie against Qarabag in the 84th minute in an October Europa League match, then sealed the game with a penalty in the 96th minute. If you need 20-25 minutes of shop-wrecking, few are more up to the task than Alcacer.


    Meanwhile, if you need a key passer off the bench in the closing minutes? Ask Alcacer's former Dortmund teammate, Captain America. Pulisic has battled both injuries and a crowded depth chart since moving to Chelsea, but he has been a lightning bolt off the bench at times. His assist to fellow sub Michy Batshuayi beat Ajax in the Champions League last year
    (and earned the nickname buy-in from his teammates), and his pinpoint pass set up the Marcus Alonso goal that put away Burnley recently.

    So let's review. One big question you might have in reading this: Where are the superstars? Don't we consider Messi and his fellow GOAT generation to be clutch as well?

    Messi, Ronaldo, Lewandowski, Kane, Suarez and even guys like late-career star Ciro Immobile remain as excellent at the end of games as they are through the first 80 minutes. If you've got one of them at your disposal, you probably don't need a super sub coming in for them at the end, nor do you need a clutch player to step up. But just as Francisco Trincao stole a game winner for Barca last weekend with an out-of-nowhere golazo, others can shine in a match's waning minutes, too. And whether it comes from a reserve of clutchness inside of you or sheer randomness, we can celebrate it all the same.
     
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  13. SugarShaun

    SugarShaun A man of many hobbies
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    Positive Lukaku article, seems sus to me
     
  14. visa

    visa Well-Known Member
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  15. IronLung

    IronLung #systeme #tchakap
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  16. SugarShaun

    SugarShaun A man of many hobbies
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    Lost it a bit watching this happen live earlier

     
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  17. El_Pato

    El_Pato Nunca Caminaras Solo
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  18. DirtBall

    DirtBall Who Cares?
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    Someone explain the Chelmsford City FC :sponsored by: to me. In my head each player has their own sponsor and there’s some random family named Panks that are huge Adam Morgan fans.
     
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  19. SugarShaun

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    He’s in the replies thanking all the people saying nice things. Amazing
     
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  20. PeterGriffin

    PeterGriffin Iced and/or sweet tea is for dirty rednecks.
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  21. Pasta88

    Pasta88 Canes, Bruins, Raps, Jays and Sunderland.
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  22. joey jo-jo jr shabadoo

    joey jo-jo jr shabadoo you know for me, the action is the juice

  23. Owsley

    Owsley My friends call me Bear
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    Qatar’s official Twitter account breaking the Neymar extension is...something
     
  24. SugarShaun

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  25. Owsley

    Owsley My friends call me Bear
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  26. Owsley

    Owsley My friends call me Bear
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  27. TheFreak55

    TheFreak55 He should keep his mouth firmly shut
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    Should be noted he did a campaign to get supplies to the homeless December 2019 too
     
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  28. AUShyGuy

    AUShyGuy Unbridled Enthusiasm
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    Colo colo won today
     
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  29. joey jo-jo jr shabadoo

    joey jo-jo jr shabadoo you know for me, the action is the juice

    i like the crotch sponsorship on the shorts
     
  30. El_Pato

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  31. Andy Reocho

    Andy Reocho Please don't get lost in the sauce
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  32. WillySaliba

    WillySaliba Well-Known Member
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    It’s a good read if anyone wants it, let me know I’ll post it.
     
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  33. mc415

    mc415 Well-Known Member
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    yes por favor
     
  34. RockHardJawn39

    RockHardJawn39 #FranklinOUT
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    That's a wild story
     
  35. WillySaliba

    WillySaliba Well-Known Member
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    Daniel Taylor Feb 18, 2021 [​IMG] 115 [​IMG]
    “The first time I knew anything was wrong, he didn’t turn up for training one day. I didn’t have a clue where he was. I was trying to get hold of him. One of the players had heard something and then it got back that there might be a problem. And that was him gone.”

    Of all the people who spent time with Gavin Grant, who nurtured his career and desperately wanted to believe in him, nobody pinned more on the player’s innocence than Peter Taylor.

    Taylor will always be remembered for his one-match stint as England’s caretaker manager in November 2000, when he filled the void left by Kevin Keegan’s resignation and named David Beckham as the team’s new captain.

    But almost eight years later, Taylor had taken a much less glamorous job at Wycombe Wanderers, then of League Two, and Grant was one of his first signings.

    “He was a very quick forward who could score a goal,” Taylor says. “He had bags of potential and a great attitude. I couldn’t fault the boy, I liked him a lot.”

    Taylor had already signed Grant once, on loan from Millwall while managing Stevenage the previous season in what is now the National League.

    Even when he knew Grant had been accused of murder, it did not stop him from signing the player for a third time in February 2010 when he became the manager of Bradford City.

    [​IMG]
    Bradford played Grant despite knowing he was going on trial for murder (Photo: John Walton – PA Images via Getty Images)
    Bradford’s official website, welcoming the new signing, explained that Grant had missed the last year because of “personal reasons”. Local paper the Bradford Telegraph & Argus repeated that line. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that a lot of people did not realise the sinister truth about why Grant had fallen off the football radar for so long.

    When murder squad detectives executed a dawn raid at Grant’s house 16 months earlier, three days after he had played the full 90 minutes for Wycombe in a 1-1 draw at Grimsby Town, a story was cooked up by his club to try to keep it out of the news. Wycombe explained Grant’s absence as him having a cold. When team-mates started asking where he was, they were told he had a family crisis.

    Many of those players knew he had already stood trial, in 2007, in relation to a gangland killing and been acquitted of a charge of conspiracy to murder.

    What they did not realise was that, all the time, he was one of the prime suspects in a second murder and caught up in a “tit-for-tat” spate of killings that, according to Metropolitan Police, led to around 30 follow-up shootings in the part of London where he grew up.

    The judge described it as an “execution by shooting” and ordered Grant to remain in prison until 2035 at the earliest, by which time he will be in his early 50s.

    Yet the story, until now, has never been told in full.

    “Gavin Grant thought he had got away with murder,” detective inspector Steve Horsley said outside the court. “He carried on his football career while, all along, he had blood on his hands.”

    Take a walk out of Stonebridge Park train station and, directly opposite, there is a symbol of how much the place has changed since Grant was familiar with these streets.

    Argenta House, the disused two-storey building that has stood here for years as a magnet for graffiti artists, is making way for a 24-storey apartment block that feels more fitting, in the eyes of the designers, planners and architects who have flooded this part of north-west London, for the new Stonebridge. The Grand Union development, creating a new canal-side neighbourhood, is already underway.

    If you follow Harrow Road, using the arch of nearby Wembley Stadium as your guide, you will eventually come to Neeld Crescent, where Raheem Sterling grew up on the neighbouring St Raphael’s estate.

    Bridge Park, a leisure centre Sterling has been campaigning to save from closure, is on the other side of the North Circular Road.

    Sterling used to play in junior football competitions at Bridge Park when he was growing up. Grant did, too. But it is also true that this community centre, opened in 1987 by Prince Charles, used to have a reputation as a place where gangs would congregate. In 2000, four men were jailed for life because of a shootout in its car park that left one man dead and was described in court as a scene from the “wild west”.

    These days, Stonebridge is held up around the world as a shining example of how to transform problem estates. The brutalist 1970s tower blocks have been replaced by low-rise housing interspersed with communal areas, trees and street lights to “design out” crime. The children of Stonebridge no longer have to grow up in an area synonymous with crack, guns, gangs and fear.

    “Stonebridge has changed since its reputation as a no-go area,” says Promise Knight, Brent Council’s lead member for community safety and engagement. “The Stonebridge of the past, when we had concrete estates with dark spots, no longer exists. One of the things we have done is create what we call Stonebridge community champions — people who care about their neighbourhood.”

    [​IMG]
    Stonebridge has been redeveloped under the shadow of Wembley’s arch (Photo: Arcaid/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
    There was a long time, however, when Stonebridge was a lawless estate infested by violent criminals. A turf war was being fought between rival gangs. Stonebridge was so notorious that, in 1995, the then-prime minister, John Major, cancelled a speech there because of fears he may be shot.

    Grant was 11 at the time, at his most impressionable age, and maybe he knew little else. As the prosecution noted on the first day of his trial, Stonebridge operated by “more the law of the jungle than the law of civilised England”.

    Grant, though, had a better chance than some of not being sucked into the culture of gang-related violence. At the age of 14, he had signed schoolboy terms with Watford. He was released at 16 and, with no qualifications, took a job at Tesco. But he still had his dreams and Tooting & Mitcham, a semi-professional team in south London, offered an opportunity on the first rung of the football ladder.

    “I knew he could make the grade,” says Richard Cadette, the Tooting manager at the time. “He had a great turn of pace and he could score goals. I thought, ‘This kid will do me’. And I have to say, he was a lovely, lovely kid. I never had any problems with him. He turned up for training on time, he took criticism well. If somebody had said to me he was involved in something like that — gang culture — well, you could have knocked me down with a feather.”

    By then, however, Grant was already leading the double life that has left him, at the age of 36, not even halfway through a prison sentence carrying a minimum tariff of 25 years.

    In May 2004, his gang suspected a rival by the name of Leon Labastide was involved in stealing £20,000 of drug money from one of Grant’s friends. The next day, they found Labastide, also known as “Playboy”, outside his mother’s house talking on the phone. Labastide, 21, was shot through the back six times by three gunmen and left for dead on the doorstep. Grant, then 19, was said in court to have been overheard boasting about the shooting hours later.

    For a long time, the detectives on Operation Trident, the unit set up to deal with gun crime in London’s black communities, came up against a wall of silence. It was a familiar problem in Stonebridge. Nobody dared speak out because of the threat of reprisals. So the shootings continued and a year later it was Jahmall Moore’s turn to die in a blaze of bullets. Moore, a 22-year-old father-of-two, was sitting in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car when he was ambushed by four gunmen and shot 16 times.

    Grant had been playing so impressively for Tooting it was not long before Athlete1, the agency that represented him, was talking him up as “one of the hottest properties in the non-League game”.

    Barnsley confirmed they had been watching him. League One side Gillingham, then managed by Ronnie Jepson, took the plunge and gave Grant his first professional contract and his Football League debut in December 2005. But Millwall, just relegated from the Championship, had also been keeping tabs on him since a recommendation from Cadette and persuaded him to move back to London from the Kent club the following summer.

    “He was one of those young players who had the talent to progress and become a regular in the first team,” Nigel Spackman, then the Millwall manager, says. “He was pacy, he worked hard, he liked to run behind the defence and he had a good appetite for the game. He never caused any problems. He was never late, not a troublemaker. He got on with everyone, mixed in. I’d watch him and think, ‘Yeah, that boy’s definitely got a chance of achieving something’.”

    Darren Byfield, another Gillingham player, had also signed for Millwall in that window. Grant, he says, quickly endeared himself to his new team-mates. “He was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. Honestly, he was so funny. Not a practical joker, just one-liners, a very dry sense of humour.”

    Byfield was going out with the pop singer Jamelia at the time and had the paparazzi on his trail. He remembers one photographer, in particular, who used to wait outside his house.

    “I was driving to training one day, there was a car behind me, and when I looked in my mirrors I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s the guy who’s been taking pictures of me’. I tried to lose him but couldn’t shake him off. So I rang Gav. ‘You need to help me out, Gav — when I get to the training ground, get behind me and slow him down’. Gav has come out and done it brilliantly. And this photographer has nearly killed him, nearly ran him off the road. Gav came back in. ‘Darren, I’m not doing that again!’. I’m laughing just telling this story.”

    Was Grant ever violent? Did he create issues? Did he talk about gang life? “Never,” Byfield says. “He never showed any aggression in training. Never got into any arguments. To us, he was just such a nice guy. Everybody loved Gav. He was younger than me. I remember the first night he came out with everyone on a players’ night out in London. He was telling us, ‘Yeah, I can drink’, all that kind of stuff, and very quickly it became clear he couldn’t. We had to look after him that night, make sure he got back OK.”

    What they did not realise at the time was that the player waking up on goalkeeper Lenny Pidgeley’s sofa the following morning, nursing the hangover from hell and facing allegations of being a “lightweight”, had another group of friends that operated with a different set of rules.

    “I got a phone call from somebody in the hierarchy of the club to say he had been arrested,” Spackman says. “I didn’t really know the severity of it. Then you think, ‘OK, we need to look into this and what it’s all about’.”

    To some, it might seem inconceivable that Grant was allowed to continue playing for Millwall while on bail after being charged with conspiracy to murder. However, they made their position clear after his first appearance in court. “Gavin strenuously denies the charge,” a club spokesman said. “He is not in breach of his contract and is continuing to train.”

    Was there any pressure on Millwall to think twice about selecting a footballer who stood accused of arranging someone’s murder? Spackman does not recall that being the case and Grant also remained involved after Willie Donachie took over as manager in September 2006.

    “I remember speaking to Gav about what was going on,” Byfield says. “He used to plead his innocence. He’d be with me, Danny Senda, Ryan Smith, and he’d open up sometimes. He didn’t go into the full story but he’d say, ‘Nah, they’re trying to blame me for something that’s nothing to do with me’. He was a good player, working hard.”

    Millwall did eventually move him out on loan to non-League Grays Athletic where Grant’s electronic ankle-tag, issued by the courts to prevent any risk of him going on the run, did not stop him from making an immediate impact on the pitch.

    His impressive form for Grays, then managed by former Tottenham Hotspur defender Justin Edinburgh, came to an abrupt end when he vanished one weekend because of what the Essex club, using a line that would follow Grant throughout the rest of his career, described as “personal reasons”. That, again, was a way of concealing a more serious truth: Grant had been arrested for breaching the curfew that had been set as part of his bail conditions. He was remanded to prison until, five months later, a jury at the Old Bailey found him not guilty.

    Stonebridge was being transformed with a £250 million regeneration that meant 1,200 properties being decanted, demolished and rebuilt over a 46-acre site. Jason Roberts, the former Premier League striker who had started his career at nearby Hayes FC, was setting up a foundation, based in the heart of Stonebridge, to inspire children on the estate where had grown up.

    Grant had a fresh opportunity, too. He went back to Millwall to resume his career. He returned to Grays on loan for the first half of the 2007-08 season before switching to Stevenage in February 2008 in a similar arrangement, scoring seven times for manager Taylor in 14 league games.

    What he did not realise was that the officers on Operation Trident had been trying to find a “supergrass” to break the network of serious crime in Stonebridge and that, ultimately, Grant would be turned in by one of his own. His luck was about to run out.

    It isn’t easy to understand why Bradford City decided to go ahead with Grant’s signing when the people at the top of the club knew he was on a murder charge.

    City Gent, Bradford’s fanzine, certainly had a lot to discuss after the news in July 2010 that Grant, and two others, had been found guilty of Labastide’s murder.

    Less than a fortnight earlier, another Bradford player, Jake Speight, was sent to prison for 12 weeks because of an assault conviction.

    On the front cover of a subsequent edition of City Gent, a cartoon showed Taylor standing outside a prison while inmates scaled the walls to escape. Taylor had a puzzled look on his face. His speech bubble said, “Any of you lads fancy playing for Bradford City?”

    When Grant had arrived in Bradford five months previously, however, not many people appeared to have questioned the wisdom of bringing him up from London, with his electronic tag, his curfew and Louis Vuitton wash bag, when a man had been shot dead and a murder trial was coming up.

    “He came here and behaved himself,” says Mark Lawn, then the club’s joint chairman. “To be fair, he wasn’t on a lot of money. We had a natter at the first meeting and then Peter offered him the wage. He took it straight away. We’d agreed to look at him for a year and then talk about whether he stayed or not.

    “We’d got him on the cheap and said, ‘Let’s see how you do and, if it goes well, we can take it from there’. If he hadn’t gone to prison, I do believe we would have offered him a new contract. He was a decent lad, certainly not a problem around the club. There was nothing in terms of his mates coming up, or anything like that. He was a fast little winger. He had something about him, could go past a player.

    “We knew he was going to court but he kept saying he was not guilty. Then, all of a sudden, ping! Honestly, as he went away to court we fully expected him to come back. He said, ‘I’ll be back in a week’. We had no reason not to believe him. But I do remember someone coming to me midway through the trial and saying, ‘There’s a witness who saw him do it’. I was, like, ‘What?!’. That was the first we knew about it.”

    [​IMG]
    Grant impressed at Bradford, his final club before being found guilty of murder (Photo: John Walton – PA Images via Getty Images)
    Detectives had made a deal with Darren Mathurin, the getaway driver in Jahmall Moore’s killing, in return for his 16-year prison sentence being halved, an arrangement approved by the director of public prosecutions. For Operation Trident, it was a turning point. They had their supergrass. Mathurin, also known as Spider, was prepared to give information about several shootings, robberies, drug deals and other gang-related crimes. He was willing to betray his friends and associates by testifying against them in court — and Grant was one of them.

    More than that, a female witness, who alleged she had heard Labastide’s shooting being planned, agreed to give evidence under the pseudonym of Susan Norwich in exchange for a lesser sentence on drug charges. Her decision to testify was crucial, according to the police, in securing the guilty verdict.

    “It came as a huge shock,” Bradford’s Lawn says. “You really don’t want your club being tarred with something like this. He had already been to court once before and was found not guilty. When he told us (about the next trial), he was confident, saying he hadn’t done it. I believed him. Who wouldn’t, after he’d been found not guilty?”

    Grant’s former team-mates at Wycombe were preparing for a pre-season friendly at non-League Burnham FC when they heard the news via Luke Oliver, who had left the club to sign for Bradford, initially on loan, that March.

    Byfield can also remember hearing the guilty verdict. “I don’t think we will ever know all the details,” he says. “Sadly, there are lots of people who get sucked into gang-affiliated stuff. Your friends are getting involved in wrongdoings. You’re sucked in because you’d look like the ‘punk’, as they’d call you, if you didn’t go with them.”

    Wycombe had been so convinced about Grant’s innocence they tried to help him get bail when he was charged with murder. Grant had just been given a pay rise, triggered after making his 11th appearance. He had made a positive impression and, to begin with, the club tried to cover up the news of his arrest.

    “It was a very well-kept secret,” says one senior Wycombe figure from the time. “There were even people at the top of the club who, for quite some time, didn’t know the truth. It’s a standing joke now among the fans. If any player is missing with a genuine injury or illness, the fans say, ‘Oh yeah, remember Gavin Grant? We were told he had the flu — and never saw him again’.”

    Matt Bloomfield, Wycombe’s longest-serving player, was interviewed by the Bucks Free Press after the real story finally emerged. “He was a nice quiet lad who came in and got on with his work,” he said. “We knew he had been in trouble before, but we thought he had turned his life around. When we were told there was something up with his family, we thought that was all it was.”

    [​IMG]
    Grant, right, disappeared one day at Wycombe and was not seen at the club again (Photo: Hamish Blair/Getty Images)
    It was October 2008 and Wycombe paid Grant’s wages in full for the rest of the month. He also received 50 per cent of his salary until Christmas. Eventually, though, it became clear he was not coming back. His contract was terminated and the players were called to a meeting to be informed their now former team-mate had been charged with murder.

    “Everyone expected him to come back out,” Bloomfield said. “We didn’t think he could be involved. We fully expected him to play again that season.”

    Leon Johnson, who spent seven years at Wycombe, used to carpool to training with Grant and another player, Matt Harrold. “We’d have a laugh and a joke,” Johnson says. “We had a few night outs. He was just a normal lad who liked a laugh and a joke and wanted to get on with his football.

    “Then, on the morning he disappeared, I was waiting for him in my car just off the M25. My phone rang with a private number and it was his girlfriend. She said, ‘Look, Gavin won’t be in today, his little boy is ill’. I was like, ‘Oh bloody hell, OK, I’ll pass the message on to the manager’.

    “I got into training and went upstairs to see ‘PT’ (Taylor) to tell him that Granty’s boy was ill and he wasn’t going to be in. The next day went by, the next day went by, and no one had heard anything from him. The club were asking me questions but I didn’t have a clue where he was and his phone was off.”

    Johnson finally got back in touch with Grant after his team-mate was freed on bail and signed for Bradford on a pay-as-you-play basis.

    “The police went up to Bradford to check out the hotel where he was staying, and whether they were going to allow him to play, because he was on some kind of house-arrest,” Johnson says. “I was speaking to him regularly. ‘Mate, I have no clue what is going on’, he’d say. ‘The police are out to get me because they put a lot of time and money into the (Moore) trial’. He was a little bit worried about that, but he was also saying, ‘But they don’t have a case’. He was adamant he hadn’t done anything. He was confident he was going to be cleared.”

    Taylor, in particular, refused to give up on Grant. “Maybe Peter was guilty of wanting to see the best in everybody,” one former colleague says. “Maybe, because Peter’s such a nice guy himself, he didn’t see the bigger picture and didn’t want to believe one of his players could have committed such a crime.”

    Was Taylor wrong to piggyback in an alleged murderer? Russ Spence of the Bradford City Supporters’ Trust, writing in City Gent, argued not. “By the law of the land, Grant was innocent until found guilty and how can you expect the Bradford City manager to make what is in effect a moral decision, which isn’t part of the job description, without being in full possession of the facts?”

    It is still remarkable, nonetheless, that a murder suspect could make 11 appearances for Bradford that spring while waiting to go on trial.

    “That was me giving him another chance, hoping it would work out OK,” Taylor tells The Athletic. “He came to me to say, ‘I’ve got my trial, but I think I’m going to be all right’. Again, that shows how much I liked him. I had every excuse to say, ‘No, I’m not bothering, you won’t be able to concentrate’, but I was desperate for him to have a chance.

    “He was telling us he would get over this trial. He was always confident he was going to be OK. He always maintained his innocence. Nobody said to me, ‘Don’t take him because he’s not a good boy’. He was a lovely boy. He was terrific, he was polite. So when it all happened I was totally shocked.

    “Honestly, I was shocked. I’m still shocked. The dealings I had with him were first class. He wasn’t a problem as a professional footballer. He couldn’t have been, because there was no way I would have signed him for Stevenage and Wycombe, as well as Bradford, if he had been.”

    Now 68, Taylor still has the letter that Grant sent him from prison.

    Grant, who refused to answer questions in his police interviews, always kept to his story that he had been set up and was doing “the nappy run” at the time of the shooting. Labastide, he said, was one of his childhood friends.

    “It was a very nice letter to say that what was happening to him was not right,” Taylor says. “I find it very sad that the boy has not had a football career. All the other bits and pieces, I can’t talk about. I know what I think but I will keep that to myself. I just can’t imagine someone being locked up for so long. It’s a shame because, in my opinion, he was a good boy.”

    What Taylor might not appreciate is that the number of shootings in Stonebridge fell by almost half after Grant, and others, were arrested. Police say gangs had terrorised the area with their crimes and anything-goes mentality.

    “It’s such a sad story,” Cadette says. “Sometimes, it’s not about leading a double life. It’s about getting involved with the wrong people and not having the right guidance, at a young age, to get out. It’s a waste of life and, for Gavin, the waste of a career. But someone, ultimately, has died from violent means and we can’t ever forget that.”

    As Grant and his co-accused were sentenced, a woman shouted from the public gallery, “It’s all fixed”, and “You are coming out”. Yet Grant’s bid for freedom was thrown out by the Court of Appeal five years later. And, however much Stonebridge might have changed, it can still be a hard-faced place.

    Mathurin — now living with a new identity, outside of London, under the witness protection scheme — is the subject of a song, Are You Alone, by rapper K Koke, who grew up in Stonebridge and knew him from a young age.

    You told and ratted on your co-ds/So for that you forget that you know me/You will never have a home back in Stone B/We don’t condone in that, we don’t condone in rats/Nah, there’ll never be a home for that/You’re a snitch ’cause ya speaking to them/I can’t lie, can’t even pretend/it’s click-clack when I see you with skengz.

    “Skengz” is street-slang for guns. K Koke, the first UK rapper to sign to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, was acquitted of attempted murder in a 2011 trial relating to the shooting of a man at Harlesden station, the next stop after Stonebridge Park on the Bakerloo line into central London.

    Labastide’s family, meanwhile, were so frightened for their own safety, and so tortured by the memories of what had happened, they had to move away from the area.

    In a statement read to the murder trial, his mother, Diane Havill, said her son “loved life and had ambitions”.

    It also turned out that the man gunned down on his mother’s doorstep because he had “disrespected” the wrong people had a lot in common with Grant.

    Labastide also loved to play football, she said, and was passionate about the sport.

    “His senseless killing by so-called friends who grew up with him has left it hard to understand the futility of snatching Leon’s future away while at the same time destroying their own.”
     
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  36. joey jo-jo jr shabadoo

    joey jo-jo jr shabadoo you know for me, the action is the juice

  37. aisle seven

    aisle seven Well-Known Member
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    Current EFL League Two table is wild.

     
  38. Pasta88

    Pasta88 Canes, Bruins, Raps, Jays and Sunderland.
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  39. Hogger

    Hogger Well-Known Member
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    I can’t imagine how boring of a match this must’ve been. No Mourinho jokes please.

    “End of the match

    Antalyaspor: 0 (0,02)
    Basaksehir: 0 (0,05)

    In total, 3 shots took place in the match and 0.07 xG was generated. This match went down in history as the least produced xG match of the Super League since the xG was held.”


     
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  40. football501

    football501 I once ate a Twix with the wrapper on it
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    Lovely goal from the Championship (I think?)

     
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  41. SugarShaun

    SugarShaun A man of many hobbies
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    3 divisions too high
     
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  42. football501

    football501 I once ate a Twix with the wrapper on it
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  43. SugarShaun

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    I was just adding that thinking it made it even more impressive
     
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  44. DeToxRox

    DeToxRox Uncle T
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    Tying goal in the 97th minute
     
  45. SugarShaun

    SugarShaun A man of many hobbies
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  46. JGator1

    JGator1 I'm the Michael Jordan of the industry
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    Florida GatorsTampa Bay RaysTampa Bay BuccaneersTampa Bay LightningChelsea

  47. Pasta88

    Pasta88 Canes, Bruins, Raps, Jays and Sunderland.
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    Miami HurricanesToronto Blue JaysToronto RaptorsBoston BruinsSunderland

  48. Det. Frank Bullitt

    Det. Frank Bullitt God Bless Texas
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