I managed to watch last Saturday\u2019s Match of the Day without knowing the scores. It really is one of life\u2019s enduring thrills. So the first time I\u2019d seen or heard of Loum Tchaouna was when he picked up the ball in the 68th minute at Turf Moor, looked around a bit and thought: \u201cSod it, I\u2019ll just whack it from here.\u201d And how! What a brilliant way to introduce himself to my brain \u2013 which was perhaps not his ultimate goal; in this instance a goal was very much his ultimate goal.<\/p>\n
By the time of this last-on-MOTD wonderstrike, I\u2019d obviously spent the previous hour watching various other footballers at work \u2013 most of them pretty familiar. The odd one did require a cursory Google. Who is Eli Kroupi? Who are all these Chelsea players? Do they really have the same sized squad as all the other teams? If I was cloning footballers in a laboratory and slipping them into the Champions League squad, I\u2019d call them Reggie Walsh.<\/p>\n
After Tchaouna\u2019s beauty, I decided against looking this guy up. Partly to just savour the moment, and partly for fear of great anticlimax. The fact he is playing for Burnley (no disrespect, etc) suggests his YouTube highlights reel won\u2019t reach that level. They are so often set to slightly overenergetic Europop with some hasty cuts just before the player gives away possession or balloons one over the bar.<\/p>\n
But to be deadly serious, maybe it was much, much bigger than that. At some moment between Kroupi<\/a> and our friend Loum, had I reached my elastic limit of footballers? A limp spring, no more disk space. Manage storage, delete your WhatsApp conversations and your duplicated photos, save the entire 1987 QPR squad to the cloud. Give \u00a33.99 a month to the man for another gigabyte. There is no room at the inn.<\/p>\n There are just so many footballers. They keep appearing, every year, younger than the last ones. Fifteen-year-olds in the Premier League, now born so recently that I haven\u2019t heard of what was No\u00a01 on the day of their birth because it\u2019s too modern.<\/p>\n Perhaps this is what being old is. Looking around and just seeing a neverending procession of new people. Is it acceptable to demand new footballers do more than just one thing before I enmesh them into the Rolodex of players that swirls way too near the front of my brain? There\u2019s a bouncer standing outside that particular cortex with a clipboard and an\u00a0earpiece\u00a0yelling \u201cOne in, one out\u201d to an ever increasing line of teenagers in an array of Premier League football\u00a0kits.<\/p>\n Max meet Eli, Eli meet Max: the Bournemouth forward celebrates his first goal against Crystal Palace. Photograph: MI News\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n More fruits of the Loum, if you will, and I\u2019ll drop out Ian Juryeff, and bring you in. A bit like making friends when you\u2019re 46. I\u2019ve already got some good ones. I\u2019m time-poor, exhausted and can\u2019t face wading through small talk about siblings and whether you enjoy Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as much as I do. If you want to break into my top 50 now, you\u2019ve frankly got to be extraordinary \u2013 and I\u2019m not giving enough back to deserve that kind of effort.<\/p>\n It is curious that with footballers, you just add and add and add and never delete. This bulging, unaudited list\u00a0\u2026 will it ever burst? There are probably podcasts and supplement\u00a0takers on Instagram who tell you how to free your mind of worthless information like this so you can reach some kind of higher plane of existence. That is of course, if there is a higher plane than being able to recall the Crystal Palace starting XI in the 1990 FA Cup final \u2013 Gary O\u2019Reilly and Phil Barber took me\u00a0a\u00a0while.<\/p>\n Depending on your vintage, your blank canvas may have been infiltrated in much the same way as mine. Dad relentlessly telling me about Gilzean and Greaves, finding common ground with Glenn Hoddle. More ingredients: add one packet of Top Trumps from Clive\u2019s house. Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen \u2013 always go height with McQueen, 6ft 3\u00bdin. Unbeatable \u2013 the taller the better for mid-80s Top Trumps. Diego Maradona was nothing; a high centre of gravity was key.<\/p>\n Regular listeners will know of my obsession with the unspectacular, solid, run-of-the-mill footballer, ideally of the 90s. I\u2019m astonished that I\u2019ve never written about it before (please don\u2019t check). Stir in Panini 86 and 87. Norwich City. Kevin Drinkell, Dale Gordon, Wayne Biggins, Ian\u00a0\u2026 Butterworth, Shoot posters all over my room of John Ebbrell and Nico\u00a0Claesen.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Add to this the real-life players I saw at the Abbey. George Reilly, Steve\u00a0Spriggs, Martin Robinson, Keith Branagan. And then an explosion of footballer after footballer zinging into my consciousness. TV: Saint and Greavsie, Football Focus, TransWorld Sport. Gary\u00a0Mabbutt talking about diabetes on Zig Zag. Bobby\u00a0Barnes missing penalties for Northampton\u00a0Town on Anglia\u00a0News. A video recorder! 101 Greatest Goals: Zico, S\u00f3crates, the perplexing John Barnes. The Premier League on Sky \u2013 Teddy Sheringham for Forest, top right-hand corner in the first Super Sunday. Andy Sinton for QPR on Monday Night Football. An Amiga\u00a0500. Championship Manager\u00a093. Steve Anthrobus is expected to move abroad at the end of the\u00a0season.<\/p>\n Then season after season after season of players lodging themselves in my brain regardless of ability or longevity \u2013 just a magnetic pull into a synapse that should know better. Rom\u00e1rio, Grant Holt, Riquelme, Billy Beall, Chris Marsden, Gus Uhlenbeek, Marians\u00a0Pahars.<\/p>\n Blink and it\u2019s Loum Tchaouna banging one in for Burnley in the autumn of 2025. Forty years of watching, thousands of names. If I\u2019m lucky I\u2019ve got maybe 40 more. Time to invest in a new hard drive to remember the next few decades\u2019 worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I managed to watch last Saturday\u2019s Match of the Day without knowing the scores. 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