October 15 – Stan the Man
ALREADY here at OTFD we have looked at a few controversial figures in football, including Paolo di Canio, George Best and even Adolf Hitler, but few people have created more headlines than today’s subject.
Stan the Man Collymore has seen the highs of playing for Liverpool and England and the lows of tabloid stories about his relationship with Ulrika Jonsson and his fondness for car parks.
It was on this day in 1999 however that a reluctant Stan was forced to crawl back to Villa after a loan spell at Fulham did not turn into a permanent deal.
Collymore had been on loan with the Londoners after Villa manager John Gregory had frozen him out at Villa park, despite paying £7m for him only two years before.
Stan had well-publicised mental health issues, a fact Gregory found hard to understand.
When Collymore claimed he was stressed, Gregory responded: “There are people who come to watch Aston Villa who earn £300 a week and spend 60 hours a week at work.
“We probably spend 10 hours a week on the training pitch and are paid vast sums of money. I find it very difficult to see how anybody could be stressed.”
While on the one hand we are finding it hard to disagree with Gregory, there can be no doubting that Collymore is a complex character, and depression has never been the preserve of the poor alone.
When he made his return to the Midlands, Gregory was silent so it fell to his assistant Steve Harrison to make the right noises about Stan’s prospects at Villa Park.
“Stan has certainly not blown it,” Harrison said.
“He has still got age on his side, he’s still got a great deal of ability and he’s got a lot to offer on the football pitch.
“He has got to be in the right frame of mind and if he comes back he would have to get stuck in and do some hard work.
“It really is up to him because he has the ability.”
With Gregory in charge, it was never going to work out for Stan at Villa so in 2000 he packed his boots in his little red and white poker-dot handkerchief, tied it to a stick and set off for a new life at Leicester City. He didn’t last long there either and was soon off to Bradford, and finally Spanish third division side Real Oviedo before he decided to jack it all in.
Undoubtedly hugely talented, Collymore seemingly lacked the mental strength to deal with being a top class footballer, and perhaps oddly for someone so sensitive, he now works in the media as a pundit for the BBC.
He also rather bizarrely starred opposite Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. We were going to show you a clip of that but it’s a bit too weird seeing him so out of context so instead, he here is showing why he has commanded transfer fees totaling nearly £20m over the years:
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February 16 - Stan Gets into Another Fine Mess | On This Football Day on February 16th, 2008
[...] was never one for the quiet life, as we’ve told you before. His career was hitting the rails at Aston Villa, so his move to Leicester City was seen by many as [...]