This article first appeared on TheseFootballTimes
If you were a kid growing up in the 1990s, like this author
did, you reflect on what a glorious decade it was. You romantically reminisce
on pop culture icons like Sonic the Hedgehog, the cast from Saved by the Bell,
The Simpsons and be extremely grateful that you were too old for the rubbish
that permeated in the ‘00s.
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| What a decade |
As a young football-obsessed child experiencing life in the
‘90s, the beautiful game was played everyday and in any location with a flat
enough surface (even that didn’t prevent us sometimes). Two main memories
vividly stick out, both of which coincidentally entered our footballing lexicon
at roughly the same time.
“Goooooaaaaaaallaaazziioooooooooo!” could be heard echoing
throughout our school playground and undoubtedly in hundreds of schools and
housing estates throughout the UK. We all know where that came from, the
legendary Channel 4 coverage of Serie A that made Roberto Baggio, Gabriel
Batistuta and George Weah as much household names as Ryan Giggs, Eric Cantona
and Alan Shearer.
Despite the fact that everyone, including myself, was
unknowingly shouting it wrong, if you scored a goal, wherever you were, you
wheeled away screaming it. Even though I found out in the early ‘00s that
everyone was saying it incorrectly all those years, I’ve still encountered
people to this day who when recalling Football Italia will say ‘goallazio’.
The other memory is associated to a player. A striker who
was so devastating that he was for a very brief period of time the best striker
in the early Premier League era, a time when the league was brimming with top
strikers. A player that forever will be associated with outrageous goals and
the mere mention of his name evokes memories of a piece of woodwork; Tony
Yeboah.
In the early 1990s Anthony Yeboah was the Bundesliga’s best
striker – packed with everything a lethal striker possesses; pace, strength,
agility and a truly ferocious left foot of the Sinisa Mihajlovic caliber. A
striker who was dangerous anywhere inside and outside the box and could score
seemingly every type of goal, nothing was off limits to the barrel chested
Ghanaian.
Yeboah was something of a trailblazer for African
footballers in the Bundesliga. He became
the first African captain of a German team at a time when there were very few
black footballers in the league. He suffered racist taunts from his own fans
during his early stint at Eintracht Frankfurt. He soon won them over however
through the only method he knew best – scoring goals, lots of them.
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| Yeboah the trailblazer |
In his four full seasons for Die Adler he plundered 61 goals - reaching double figures in three
consecutive seasons. Yeboah was the top goalscorer in 1992-93 (with an
unbelievable record of twenty goals in twenty-seven games) and in 1993-94. It was in his fifth season that things started
to take a turn down.
Jupp Heynckes was installed as the new manager in the summer
of 1994, replacing caretaker Karl-Heinz Körbel. Heynckes was soon engulfed
in a civil war within the club, as he singled out Yeboah, Maurizio Gaudino and
Jay-Jay Okocha – all of the club’s star players’ - or a perceived lack of
effort. In December 1994 He gave the three – and only them - extra training sessions,
which one can imagine went down like a lead balloon. The trio then decided to
take action and went on strike, refusing to play the next league game. The
writing was on the wall.
Gaudino was sent on loan to Manchester City in
January 1995, Okocha was given a stay of execution but ultimately left in the
summer of 1996 and Yeboah was sold to Leeds United. Yet even as he was being
sold, his goal-to-game ratio was still one in two, Heynckes left the club himself
a few months after Yeboah, seemingly unable to fix the problems within the
club.
The Leeds United of 1994/95 was a side drifting in a
sea of mediocrity, they had stagnated since winning the last Divison One title
in 1991/92 and most of that original side had since departed. The squad was a
mixture of young players graduating from the youth set up and mainstays from
the title-winning side such as John Lukic, Gary McAllister, Gary Speed, Rod
Wallace and Tony Dorigo. Yet the team had trouble scoring goals, by January
1995 they had only managed a meager 29 goals in the league and this was the
crux of their problem.
Howard Wilkinson tried desperately to bring in a big
name strikers, attempts for Faustino Asprilla and Ruben Sosa amounted to
nothing and so attention turned to Yeboah. Wilkinson revealed that he hadn’t
actually seen Yeboah play live and had only viewed him playing for Frankfurt
via Eurosport, who in those days had coverage of the Bundesliga. Nobody knew
what to expect from the Ghanaian as he arrived in a £3.4 million deal. Very few
people had Sky in the mid ‘90s (personally I only knew one person with it,
which was seen as a big deal then). In 1995 we were still in the final throes
of the last ‘discovery’ era – before the combination of the Internet,
Championship Manager and wall-to-wall football coverage made us aware of just
about any player professionally playing the game.
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| Yeboah celebrating a goal vs Chelsea |
Yeboah made his debut against in the final minutes
of a league game against QPR but admits he wasn’t enthusiastic about the
English game. “I wasn’t
happy at first, not because I didn’t like Leeds but because English football,
the kick and rush, didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t feel like I belonged
there.” Yet he soon came to terms with his new
environment.
Yeboah injected new life
into the frugal-scoring side as he catapulted them up the table and finished
the 1994/95 season in fifth place, earning a UEFA Cup slot. He had notched 13
goals in all competitions, including three braces and a hat trick whilst
winning the adulation of the Leeds faithful. Yet the spectacular would all
arrive later. Yeboah was just getting warmed up.
He exploded at the beginning
of the 1995/96 season, netting two goals against West Ham at Upton Park – one a
truly thunderous volley from just inside the Hammers’ penalty box. The
following game would write Yeboah into the annals of English football history.
Leeds’s first home game of
the season was against Liverpool, a Monday night game broadcast by Sky. Yeboah
grew up in Ghana a Liverpool fan, watching their glorious teams of the late
70’s and 80’s dominate the domestic and European game. He was determined to
leave his mark.
The game was meandering
along until the 50th minute when - we all know what happened next - Yeboah
would hit that strike from Rod
Wallace’s unlikely knock down which would elevate him to footballing
immortality. His life would never be the same again.
David James, the hapless
Liverpool goalkeeper, never forgave Yeboah. “ I hate that goal” James remarked
in an interview “ I spent quite a few weeks moaning about the fact that I
should have saved it.” No goalkeeper on the planet could have saved it. Just
over a month later, Yeboah would replicate the Liverpool goal, only this time
he took it a notch higher.
Leeds were winning 1-2
against Wimbledon on a gloriously sunny day at Selhurst Park. The game is
approaching half time when a familiar scenario unfolds. The ball is
ping-ponging around periphery of the Wimbledon box after a series of attempts
by the Wimbledon backline to clear the ball, it lands to Yeboah some thirty
yards from goal, the ball bounces off his chest, he knees it once, cuts the
ball inside with his left foot, it bounces awkwardly up to his right knee, he
instinctively pushes the ball forward with his knee whilst running at the speed
of a locomotive train and smashes the ball with his right foot.
Never one to outdo himself,
the ball crashes off the crossbar not once but twice en route to the back of
the net. If the Liverpool goal was a thing of stunning beauty, the Wimbledon
strike was the opposite; a goal of such visceral violence. As Yeboah peels away running towards the
sidelines, the camera, focusing on him, shakes, as if vibrating from the
after-effects of one of the most vicious of goals. It added to the allure of
Yeboah as this striking powerhouse who couldn’t be stopped, and it must be said
at that moment in time, no one could. He finished the match with a hat trick.
It was now that Tony Yeboah
transcended into pop culture. Every child, teenager and adult who scored a goal
that travelled in via the crossbar was known as a ‘Yeboah’. I knew of people who didn’t follow football –
but played the game – knowing what ‘a Yeboah’ was. Never has a player been more
associated with the crossbar than the Ghanaian.
Asked which goal was
better, the man himself maintains that the Liverpool goal was the better of the
pair, due in part because it was live on Sky and it was against his boyhood
club. “Wimbledon was all about control and if
we’re talking technically, that is probably the best goal. But it’s about
feeling and emotion as well, no? So it’s Liverpool. That was the one.” He
stated.
The goals kept flowing,
including a spectacular goal against Sheffield Wednesday where he breezed past multiple
Owls’ defenders with consummate ease before rifling the ball into the bottom
right hand corner from twenty yards. There were further extraordinary goals
against Manchester Utd on Christmas Eve and against Birmingham City in the
League Cup semi final – the latter a bicycle kick. Yeboah was on fire.
Just as suddenly as he
exploded on to the English game, Yeboah scored his last goals for Leeds in a
2-1 away win at QPR in March 1996, coincidentally the team he made his debut
against thirteen months prior. His absence mid-season due to the African Cup of
Nations derailed Leeds’ campaign, Yeboah returned injured and would miss most
of the remainder of the season as they finished a disappointing 13th.
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| One of his last outings for Leeds |
The following season saw
Wilkinson sacked after a poor start and was replaced by George Graham. The
drill-sergeant Scot and Yeboah didn’t see eye-to-eye (in many ways it was
the Heynckes situation repeated) and after being substituted in a game against
Tottenham he threw his jersey on the ground on the way to the dressing room. He
never played for Leeds again and was sold to Hamburg in the summer of 1997.
Yeboah’s first goal for
Leeds came in February 1995, his last strike of thirty-two in all competitions was
scored in March ’96. He was amongst the initial wave of foreign stars to grace
the new Premier League, yet two decades on, it’s arguable that no foreign
player burned so bright and faded as quickly as Anthony Yeboah. Nevertheless
his legacy would last far longer than the man himself, a ‘Yeboah’ goal would
still be yelled out by people of all ages across the country throughout the
rest of the ‘90s and to my generation, a goal that hits off the underside of
the crossbar will forever be known as a ‘Yeboah’. Not a bad piece of pop
culture to leave behind is it?
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