A Shakespearean play includes Daggers and different fortunes for the players but in this case we're talking Charlton not the high academics of Elizabethan playwrights.
I first saw John Fortune at the end of season shirt sponsors evening, which I had attended on the shirt tails of Addicks Championship Diary. He had just finished his loan spell at Mansfield and so began a career that never quite reached the heights any of us had thought or hoped he would achieve.
He had two highlights for Addicks fans, the most obvious being the perpetrator of Dowies drop and Palaces relegation, the equalising goal in the last game of the season putting Palace down.
His other was that elbow from a god of football which resulted in in called for vilification by that legend of English football Bobby Robson. For those not there and those young who were not even born, Alan Shearer was given a torrid time by Fortune until they rose for a ball, Shearer spooning with Foertune behind him and slowly deliberately Shearer swung an elbow. This was at the height of Shearers power, the man who kicked Neil Lennon in the head and blackmailed the FA by saying that any charge would be greeted by retirement from international football. It connected with Fortune and surprisingly enough Fortune was laid out. The next day Robson had convinced the sundays that Fortune was feigning injury and once again Shearer got away with it and his red was rescinded.
John has played for Charlton and was subject to serious achilles injury which has curtailed his effectiveness so he has drifted from Charlton to Exeter and its not long ago that we thought his career was over. Some may say that joining Dagenham and Redbridge is the equivalent, whatever I wish him the best of luck ... maybe never reached his potential, maybe staying at Charlton was partly through lack of ambition, as Martin Simmons once indicated, but whatever he was Charlton through and through and we on the Hill wish him the very best at Daggers.
No comments:
Post a Comment