Kieron Dyer

[The Fish 10857]

Shame as he had so much natural talent and speed.

 

I remember seeing him play against Southampton when we won 1-0, think it was 2006 when we had the gold NR sponser, one of the few games I've sat almost touch line for, and seeing him run at their defence time and time again was phenomenal, his speed almost didn't seem to make it fair.

The Cup game where some clogger banjaxed any hopes of him going to the World Cup? I was gutted for him because his form was top class around that time.

[PaddockLad 17262]

The Cup game where some clogger banjaxed any hopes of him going to the World Cup? I was gutted for him because his form was top class around that time.

 

Naa that was a league game in 2002, first time we played at St marys. Big Tunisian fucker halved him, said fucker had played at 3 world cups for his country..Dyer did go to the WC, but only came off the bench a couple of times. He was a fit as Beckham, who started every game. Erikson was more of a fan boy then a manager.

[Sonatine 11378]

The Cup game where some clogger banjaxed any hopes of him going to the World Cup? I was gutted for him because his form was top class around that time.

 

 

Think that was the last game of the 2001-2002 season, before Japan-Korea hosted the WC, iirc.

[Kid Dynamite 7029]

I seem to remember him being unable to hit a ball with his laces! Almost every goal he scored was a side footer. The further out he was the harder he side footed it!

[Anorthernsoul 1221]

Who can forget the handbags with Bowyer, the look on Bowyers face after being split up was priceless.

[aimaad22 4156]

Was waiting for somebody to bring that up, still the most disgraceful thing I've ever seen on a football pitch. Was trying to remember the guy in a fond way, now cant get past thinking what an absolute pair of twats the two of them are for doing what they did wearing the black and white in front of the whole world.

[Howmanheyman 33219]

Took the piss out of SBR behind his back which lead shepherd to think we needed a disiplinarian like Souness.

[desmondTUTU 0]

Took the piss out of SBR behind his back which lead shepherd to think we needed a disiplinarian like Souness.

 

Wasnt there another player aswell?

 

Disgraceful.

[Howmanheyman 33219]

Think there was a few, might've been blown out of proportion but it ultimately fucked Bobby with Shepherd and Douglas hall.

[desmondTUTU 0]

The man was a genius.

[Monkeys Fist 42449]

Timely repost of this article, especially since it's 4 years today that Sir Bobby died.

http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/opinion/columnists/oliver-holt/Revealed-the-secret-history-between-Kieron-Dyer-and-Sir-Bobby-Robson-that-reveals-so-much-about-both-men-article175139.html

[desmondTUTU 0]

I didn't realise how much bearing he had on Robson's sacking, it's a terrible shame. At least Dyer had the decency to apologise.

[Gejon 2]

My mate called him a cunt in The Cooperage once and apparently he didn't even say owt back, he must know.

Your mate sounds like the cunt in this story tbh

[Ayatollah Hermione 13869]

Your mate sounds like the cunt in this story tbh

 

Dyer strutting about the place, pushing people out of the way acting Billy Big Balls and had nowt to say when someone pushed back, more like. If he was that big a wrestling fan, he'd have got my mate in a perfect Figure 4 Leg Lock but since he's a jumped up little arsehole with cheese strings for ligaments, he soon got sheepish.

[ewerk 30611]

He represented both the best and the worst of that team.

[ChezGiven 0]

 

Dyer strutting about the place, pushing people out of the way acting Billy Big Balls and had nowt to say when someone pushed back, more like. If he was that big a wrestling fan, he'd have got my mate in a perfect Figure 4 Leg Lock but since he's a jumped up little arsehole with cheese strings for ligaments, he soon got sheepish.

[Kitman 2207]

Throughout the time Dyer played for us, I got the sense he was a complete shit of a man. I don't buy that he has much of a conscience over how he behaved under Sir Bobby's reign and if he feels any regret, it'll be for himself and his career. I expect a lot of premiership footballers are self regarding little twats like him, I'd have forgiven him all of that if he'd lived up to his potential with us. Unfortunately he spent too much time injured.

[Kid Dynamite 7029]

When you consider his last decent season was when he was still playing for us, and he has been on a decent contract since then, he's made some stock of money out of not very much effort. I bet he was on £60k pw+ at West Ham

[Kitman 2207]

His injury record was a disgrace. And how he passed his medicals and then kept on breaking down seems odd to me. Something never really added up in his case.

[Kid Dynamite 7029]

Wasn't there rumours he had hepatitis or similar?

[Kitman 2207]

I think so. Another rumour iirc was he'd failed drug tests and the injuries were a cover for rehab.

[Barney 0]

So, farewell then a lost talent Dyer. There is of course a cheap crack waiting to be made about the news that Dyer, who has spent the last six years not really playing football, has this week retired from playing football. Something along the lines of the Pope formally renouncing Zoroastrianism, or Lee Bowyer indicating he is no longer available to perform publicly as a concert-standard solo bassoonist. If this seems a little harsh then the general white noise of public indifference that greeted the news was perhaps equally wounding: the absence of tribute and elegy, of Kieron Dyer memorial pull-out sections, the shrine of wilting flowers, the limited edition commemorative porcelain tea set.

Then again, perhaps it's not that surprising. Certainly there has for many years been a low level yowl of affront at Dyer's disastrously well-remunerated struggles with injury and ineffectiveness. On top of this there is the passing of time to contend with, those long years of nothing-much since the humid excitements of his youthful not-quite-making-it, that far-off period where Dyer might once have turned out to be, in the end, quite decent. But still the lack of interest in his passing seems to overlook something more profound in this surprisingly poignant might-once-have been, a player who in a certain light starts to look like English football's own definitive shadow-dandy, a living, breathing, jinking embodiment of the squandered possibilities of the Premier League's gilded post-lapsarian years.

In many ways Dyer remains the standard bearer for that first generation of English Premier League players to be derided, belittled, and even hated for their own apparently wilful moneyed yahooism. This is of course unfair. Dyer was above all an unlucky footballer, and an enduringly committed one too, well paid or not. But it is a distinction that has also been hard earned. It seems safe to say now that, plotted on a scale of fiscal reward versus actual achievement, Dyer's career is perhaps the most preposterously overblown in English football history. Those numbers again: in 17 years he played just over 300 matches, scoring 23 Premier League goals, including none at all between 2007 and 2013. In this time he earned between £20m and £30m in wages. He never won a trophy or any individual award of note. He leaves effectively no mark at all, his most memorable act on a football pitch being punched by a team-mate in 2005. His career is, in outline, a modern sporting absurdity.

And yet it is a sign of football's own capacity for hope against hope against hope that there is still a sense of loss at his passing, if only for the memory of his time at Newcastle where briefly he looked like a brilliantly energetic and complete central midfielder, able to pass and dribble and sprint, a jinking, swerving figure, chasing every ball with a frantic sense of purpose, like a man chased everywhere by his own personal cloud of ravenous midges.

He was also – and paradoxically perhaps – always a hopeful player, communicating to the end that same sense of doomed youthful zest. So much so that it still seems inconceivable that the season will be allowed to start without the certainty that somewhere, on some distant substitutes' bench, Kieron Dyer is still crouched beneath his knitted beanie hat, removing his headphones, doing some stretches, coming on as an 87th-minute substitute and darting about with that old compelling sense of skittish purpose, perhaps even putting together a run of games, scoring a few goals, staying fit at last, against all odds getting another England call-up, playing finally like the Kieron Dyer of the imagination, filling that problematic forward scamper-munchkin role, leading England to Brazil in triumph, conjuring a series of improbable victories against the head, and ending up captured forever in iconic pose, tears streaming down his face as he lifts the World Cup, borne aloft on the shoulders of Joe Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Jonathan Woodgate as behind him a weeping Kevin Keegan …

Except, it seems this won't actually happen now. Perhaps, on refection, it never was going to happen. Dyer was never that good – but he was, crucially, a player who remained always exactly the same: irrepressibly a product of the puppyish, overblown, but still somehow rather seductive 1990s. There never was a mature Dyer, or a late, seasoned, sober Dyer. There was simply Kieron Dyer, right to the end the most promising 34-year-old footballer in the country, like the last Japanese soldier still frantically fighting the second world war in a small jungle copse in rural Burma.

In the end though, Dyer's career was that of a man who so often seemed to be on the verge of doing something, before turning out not to be about to do it after all. Instead he became a kind of footballing Forrest Gump, a curdled everyman of the Premier League's early years, ever present as next big thing, false hope, bad boy, crock, attacking right back, attacking midfielder, right winger, left winger, second striker and, briefly, solution to the Left-Sided Problem. And really Dyer always had the air of an ill-fitting part, out of whack and fuzzy-edged, seen through a prism of not-quite-rightness. He was by nature one of those players – a not quite midfielder, a nearly-attacker – by whom English football has traditionally been confused, joining that species of footballer whose destiny it is to struggle against rather than with the prevailing tide: Glenn Hoddle, for example, who always seemed somehow to be playing in a ruff and frock coat, handkerchief raised to his nose, or Matt Le Tissier, the Premier League's own captive man‑child genius, trundling about in his bath-chair yawning out his calculus, his impenetrable higher maths in between eating Pot Noodles and reading Mr Men books.

Dyer was some way short of these of course. He was more an example of something hidden and systemic, a lost middle tier of the quite good, the potentially decent, the undersized but differently skilled, English football's own lightweight lost boys. The fact is at any given time every top football nation should have its own disposable sheath of Kieron Dyers floating about the place: 20 Kieron Dyers, 50 Kieron Dyers, a hundred Kieron Dyers. English football had the one, remembered now as the definitive Premier League disappointment, a perfect triumph of monetary reward over actual achievement – and yet still containing at his centre a more-ish sense of trapped talent, wasted zeal. And in this sense he belongs to all of us, a product of our own sclerotic system. We are all Kieron Dyer – I am Kieron Dyer. You are Kieron Dyer. Joe Cole is Kieron Dyer – just perhaps not to the same extent Kieron Dyer has had to be Kieron Dyer. He could have been better. He could perhaps have been a little nicer. But really Dyer should be remembered kindly, a poster boy for English football's own grand and ravenous confusion, and above all a confusingly everyday wasted talent.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/aug/02/1?CMP=twt_gu

Edited August 2, 2013 by Ant

[Kitman 2207]

that article is excellent

[aimaad22 4156]

We are all Kieron Dyer – I am Kieron Dyer. You are Kieron Dyer. Joe Cole is Kieron Dyer – just perhaps not to the same extent Kieron Dyer has had to be Kieron Dyer.

 

[scoobos 298]

Apart from the Bowyer disgrace (which I'll never forgive, it did so much damage to Bobby) I feel for the lad - he was really mint for about 2 seasons, but ever since then its been returning from injury and he's just been a weight on any team he's been associated with.

 

Unlike Jenas, I've always wanted him to do well, if only for England - I wish Jenas could have had Kierons injury problems and Kieron get an extended stint with Tottenham.