Search: ' Hamilton Academicals'

Alex Gulrajani tells the bizarre tale of how Leon Knight found himself unable to play in the English league

Leon Knight has nearly seen it all. Since making his debut for Chelsea as a youngster ten years ago, he has played for 14 other teams, the latest being Coleraine of the Irish League. But while club fallouts have marred his career, nothing could compare with what happened at Rushden & Diamonds – which brought the 28-year-old to the north coast of Northern Ireland. “Peter Taylor came in at Wycombe. A month in, he was overlooking me and bringing in his own players so we had a few words and I decided to leave. I was on my way to Scotland when the call from Rushden came.”

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Ian Plenderleith looks at a site celebrating fooball's strange expressions, and has a trawl around Scotland

Kudos is due to the website Danger Here for its documenting of great moments in football language, including nonsensical and little-known quotes from the back catalogues of Kevin Keegan, Glenn Hoddle and the Irish commentator George Hamilton, who merits his own section. His garbled metaphor comparing the Real Madrid defence to a rabbit is too long to reproduce here, but well worth logging on for alone, although my own favourite was: “The midfield are like a chef… trying to prise open a stubborn oyster to get at the fleshy meat inside.”

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Cris Freddi trawls further through the dustbins of 20th century football by selecting champion crap sides from the merely awful

This is a category you know you’re not going to be able to cover properly. For a start, there are so many poor teams around, at every level. Selkirk losing 20-0 in the Scottish Cup, Hyde 26-0 to Preston in the FA Cup, the Austrian club who lost every match in a season except the one in which their opponents didn’t turn up because they’d folded. There’s always some schoolboy side cheerfully conceding dou­ble figures in every game. We could all make acceptable lists and none would look the same.

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