Andy Cole retires from football

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/spo...cle5127120.ece

Sad day. Loved him to bits. He left united a tad too early.

reflecting on a career that brought five Premier League winner's medals, two FA Cups and a Champions League, not to mention 15 England caps

I'm sure it was his career highlight

Top Red Andy, the brilliance of that winner against Spurs in 99 is often overlooked in favour of its significance.

loved him for his 'Denis Law' goal celebration when he passed the King's european record

OOOOOOOO Andy Cole .....

"...he feels that he is well placed to teach the next generation about the art of goalscoring".

Too bloody right. Starting with our current lot at the moment! Fegie Fergie sign him up!

A true Red Legend. Gave his all, after a poor start, he turned himself into a fantastic centre forward and footballer, on top of the born finisher he always was!

Thanks for contributing the best days of my United life Andrew Cole.

5 League Titles
2 FA Cups
1 Intercontinental cup
1 European Cup
Better than a goal evey other start (without penalties)
Movement
Fantastic workrate
Put the team before any of his personal problems
Red through and through
I am pretty sure he's still 3rd in all time assists too PL wise(someone may prove me wrong or right though)
Most Underrated player of his generation.

Not a bully and never bad mouthed us. A true legend.

[SIZE="5"]On second thoughts ... Andy Cole
He will always be remembered as the man who needed five chances to score, but Andy Cole has a better goalscoring record than Alan Shearer.


Glenn Hoddle has the rare quality that, when he talks, nobody listens. Pretty much everything he says is open to ridicule, with the assertion that Michael Owen is not a natural goalscorer top of the list. Yet when he suggested that Andy Cole needed five chances to score a goal, the football world took the word of Hod as gospel.

There are much more incontrovertible statistics by which Cole should be judged. In the history of the Premiership, only Alan Shearer has scored more goals (260 to Cole's 187). Even more tellingly for a player whose approach play never got any credit, never mind as much as it deserved, only Ryan Giggs and Dennis Bergkamp have more assists from open play than Cole's 127. And if you exclude penalties (Shearer 56, Cole 1), Cole's goals-per-Premiership-games ratio is actually higher than Shearer's. Longevity and outstanding service from Giggs and co can qualify these statistics, but they cannot discredit them.

Cole won three league titles in as many seasons, including a Treble. For 12 months, he was part of the best strike partnership in Europe. He scored the winning goals in the 1999 Premiership and the 2002 League Cup (the latter, deliciously, at Hoddle's expense). His departure coincided with the end of Manchester United's hegemony. Now, in his dotage, he is still a genuine threat. Of England's celebrated mid-90s crop of strikers, Cole is the last man standing on the shoulder of defenders. But always - always - he will be the one who needed five chances to score a goal.

It is an unfair slur on a player who, while palpably never a true great like Shearer, deserves to sit snugly among the ranks of the very good. His overall goals-to-chances ratio, while short of that of Shearer and Owen, is well above industry standard. Hoddle's appraisal missed the point completely. It was never the quantity of Cole's misses that was his problem, but the quality. When he missed, they were either comic gems (Finland 2001), at a seminal moment (the title decider at West Ham in 1995), or both (Real Madrid 2000), and because of that they were burned in the memory, erroneously perceived as the norm.

Cole was a confidence player and, when it went, he could be absolutely awful: you could almost see him having a brain and body melt on the pitch. In his first full season at Old Trafford, 1995-96, he was nothing short of embarrassing, crushed by insecurity, the teething problems of a dramatic change in his footballing identity - United bought a goalscorer and made him into a footballer - and, most of all, the obvious contempt shown him by Old Trafford main's man, Eric Cantona. Against Liverpool at Wembley, he came dangerously close to becoming the first player to have a nervous breakdown during an FA Cup final.

But for all the occasional shockers, his mode, mean and median performances were of a very high order, and he overcame the demons and the doubters to become the most rounded striker of his generation: the only one who could lead the line, link play and run in behind. Cole arguably blazed a trail for the modern Premiership frontman. At the time when the specialist striker was in vogue, Sir Alex Ferguson had the vision to realise that it was more productive to have a jack of all trades than a master of one. Now, that multi-faceted, perpetual motion striker is the norm at the very top clubs: Didier Drogba, Louis Saha, Thierry Henry and, to a lesser extent, Dirk Kuyt. The specialist goalscorer, like Owen or Andy Johnson, is the preserve of the second-tier side.

Cole wears numerous badges of honour that go unseen. Few strikers have reinvented themselves as successfully. Few have had the mental strength to overcome such misfortune (in 1996 he suffered pneumonia - in the summer - and then, when he was recovering in the reserves, had both legs broken in one hit from Neil Ruddock), or such relentless, savage abuse from the public and the media, and speculation about their future. In October 1997, for example, Cole responded to morning headlines that he was to be replaced by Marcelo Salas by lashing a first-half hat-trick.

Few formed as many outstanding partnerships: whereas Shearer, after his career-changing injury in 1997, and Owen couldn't gel with anybody, Cole was part of, at a conservative estimate, three massively successful pairings with Peter Beardsley, Dwight Yorke and Darius Vassell. He even dovetailed very successfully with Teddy Sheringham, particularly in 2000-01, even though the pair were not on speaking terms.

Few had such range to their goalscoring: delicate chips, overhead kicks (three before Christmas in the 1999-00 season alone), solo efforts, headers, head down and lash it, head up and place it. Few worked as hard and unselfishly, and few maintained the respect of United fans after moving to Manchester City. A legend like Peter Schmeichel couldn't manage it; Cole could.

Most of all, he could play. No English striker has moved off the ball as effectively since Gary Lineker, and none as aggressively and relentlessly; Cole ran defenders into the ground, spinning in behind, fronting up to receive possession, twisting blood and frazzling minds. Marcel Desailly once called Cole one of the hardest opponents he had faced, chiefly because of his movement. And the subtlety of his link play was grossly underrated. Two assists in particular stand out: a half-volleyed, outside-of-the-foot lob for Ryan Giggs against Aston Villa in 1997, and a wonderfully precise, dipping cross for Yorke to equalise in Juventus in 1999.

That game, when United came from 2-0 down in Turin to win 3-2 and reach the European Cup final, was Cole's zenith. He and Yorke made Juventus, the high priests of catenaccio, doubt their faith by giving them the biggest chasing (and chastening) of their lives. Hardened defenders like Ciro Ferrara and Paolo Montero just couldn't cope. For that season, Cole and Yorke were the hottest ticket in European football. Their exquisite, knife-through-butter goal in Barcelona had even the opposing manager Louis van Gaal, modern football's biggest romantic, swooning.

The Champions League was and is of a higher standard than international football, yet Cole struggled badly with England. The notion that he was not good enough is irreconcilable with those performances in Juventus and Barcelona in particular. Uniquely, Cole's first four caps came under different managers, fostering a sense of alienation that never went away. Nor was he helped by a succession of roadblocks called Shearer, Owen, Sheringham, Fowler, Ferdinand and Wright - all masters of one trade, but none a jack of all of them.

Cole, more than most, needed to belong, and when he eventually got a decent run with England in 2000-01, there was too much water under the bridge for him to succeed. Even then, it was little short of farcical that Sven-Goran Eriksson, who called Cole a "great international football player" after his first game in charge, was bullied by public opinion into replacing Cole with Emile Heskey.

By then he was a figure of ridicule, a process in which he did not always help himself. He can be surly - United are the only club at which he has truly settled - and his decision to release a abominably bad rap record in 1999, 'Outstanding', simply made him stand out to his detractors even more. His time at Old Trafford coincided with the peak of ABU (Anyone But United) culture, a movement whose credibility should have been shattered by, among other things, the haranguing of David Beckham and the pathetically ill-judged chant that "if Gary Neville can play for England, so can I". Yet nobody questioned the verdict on Cole.

"My record speaks for itself," he says, "and when I have finished it will all be down there in black and white for people to see." For the majority, alas, those objective statistics will never override Hoddle's subjective appraisal.

Rob Smyth

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/20...andy_cole.html

What I'd give for a player like him in our current squad. In my top 5 personal favorite United players.

Brilliant work Crumps. I agree with everything. Deffo in my Top 5 too...replacing Hughes!

Robbo
Eric
Giggs
Cole
Hill

andy cole .legend

IMO a principle reason why didn't bag a European Cup or two before '99, a contributing factor to Eric hanging his boots up far too early and a player whose lack of first touch and indecisiveness frustrated the hell out of me.

However a solid Pro and good servant who I wish well in his retirement.

Originally Posted by Fountz

IMO a principle reason why didn't bag a European Cup or two before '99, a contributing factor to Eric hanging his boots up far too early and a player whose lack of first touch and indecisiveness frustrated the hell out of me.

However a solid Pro and good servant who I wish well in his retirement.

Couldn't disagree more with that bit.

Meanwhile, Shearer was a fantastic player of course but how many of his goals were penalties? Cole never took a single one in his career and still got 187 goals in the top flight. That's incredible.

He was a controversial one alright, and it's true that he did quite often look like a rabbit frozen in headlights. Some people never forgave him for missing that chance in the first few minutes of his debut against Blackburn. What always used to impress me though was his fast movement, which brought other players into the game. Watch the video of the 1995-96 Double Double and check out how many assists he got - there's loads of them. Think Eric's winner at Newcastle that year: Cole was the one who tidied things up, made space and sent Phil Neville away, and those where the things he spent most of that season doing. As that article above says, Ferguson turned him from a goalscorer into a footballer, a bit like he tried to do with McClair. However, a few glaring missed chances involving Keystone Cops-style ball control and things like that get totally overlooked by those who refused to see anything other than a shit footballer.

Originally Posted by Fountz

IMO a principle reason why didn't bag a European Cup or two before '99, a contributing factor to Eric hanging his boots up far too early and a player whose lack of first touch and indecisiveness frustrated the hell out of me.

However a solid Pro and good servant who I wish well in his retirement.

You're kidding right? Good WU mate.

Originally Posted by Crumps

5 League Titles
2 FA Cups
1 Intercontinental cup
1 European Cup
Better than a goal evey other start (without penalties)
Movement
Fantastic workrate
Put the team before any of his personal problems
Red through and through
I am pretty sure he's still 3rd in all time assists too PL wise(someone may prove me wrong or right though)
Most Underrated player of his generation.

Not a bully and never bad mouthed us. A true legend.



What I'd give for a player like him in our current squad. In my top 5 personal favorite United players.

Spot on! I saw him before Bunker Buster's wedding (he didn't attend the service) but instead of talking I just stared like a school girl , which in my defence was because I was dipping in and out of charity shops frantically trying to find some shoes as i'd left mine at work having just come from there...christ you should have seen what I ended up with. The point is, Andy Cole is a top top red.

Andy Cole is a United ledge. Truly outstanding player, which is more than can be said of the single that he brought out.

I'll never forget the goading he gave to Keith Curle in the derby. Now thats what i call `in yer face`. (please please somebody upload that!!!!!!)

Combined very well with Yorke and Teddy, despite the latter and Cole hating each others guts.

Originally Posted by Zorg

Couldn't disagree more with that bit.

Meanwhile, Shearer was a fantastic player of course but how many of his goals were penalties? Cole never took a single one in his career and still got 187 goals in the top flight. That's incredible.

Shearer scored 56 pens & Coley 1 apparenly. It's in that article from the Guardian.

Shearer - great player, but a @#%&!.

Cole - A Red Legend.

Originally Posted by Zorg

Couldn't disagree more with that bit.

Meanwhile, Shearer was a fantastic player of course but how many of his goals were penalties? Cole never took a single one in his career and still got 187 goals in the top flight. That's incredible.

He was a controversial one alright, and it's true that he did quite often look like a rabbit frozen in headlights. Some people never forgave him for missing that chance in the first few minutes of his debut against Blackburn. What always used to impress me though was his fast movement, which brought other players into the game. Watch the video of the 1995-96 Double Double and check out how many assists he got - there's loads of them. Think Eric's winner at Newcastle that year: Cole was the one who tidied things up, made space and sent Phil Neville away, and those where the things he spent most of that season doing. As that article above says, Ferguson turned him from a goalscorer into a footballer, a bit like he tried to do with McClair. However, a few glaring missed chances involving Keystone Cops-style ball control and things like that get totally overlooked by those who refused to see anything other than a shit footballer.

correction .........

cole took a t least one penalty ..for newcastle against coventry at highfield rd ..and missed it

that overhead kick against leicster was the dogs whipper n all

Originally Posted by redrose

You're kidding right? Good WU mate.

Yeah, one big huge £#%&!in' wind-up.

Of course, heaven forbid that I should actually want to refrain from the Cole love in and disagree with the commonly pushed theory that he's a United legend.. United Legend.. FFS !






However Zorg, you raise an interesting point about his work rate and one that I've taken on board many times before. However lets not forget the lad was playing in the most high profile position for the most high profile club in the world, us Manchester United, we could've done far better.

..which leads me onto Eric. The Eric and Cole years tie in pretty perfectly with my years of being an ST holder. As you know when you're at the match you have the time to notice the bigger picture, movement, first touch, space awareness, pace, vision and body language. Cole used to frustrate the hell out of Eric and lets not forget a large proportion of the support aswell. Moves and throught processes would become unstuck frequently when Cole became involved as he wouldn't look up or he needed one too many touches. At the time he was under pressure at United and we all know it, but typical United we rallied around him to the point where we elevated him to a plane far beyond his entitlement. Why, because at the same time nasty Hoddle for nasty old England had a go at him. How very persecuted of him and us, we're not having that, we 'ate and England, we're United.. actually is was so £#%&!ing Manchester City.

As time passes people forget the roar of anticipation as a counter attack unfolds changing to a groan of frustration as Cole £#%&!s up yet another move or squanders yet another chance, or fails to pull the trigger when he should because he's like a toddler with a balloon trying to get it onto his right foot, or his laughably timed headers where he's actually back down on the ground when he should be planting his nut on the ball. We all noticed, Eric noticed, that's why we were linked with the likes of Papin, Shearer and Batistuta for two or three seasons.

I'm pretty convinced that if we'd replaced Cole with one of the above it'd have been a hallelujah moment, a no brainer and one that would've seen us win a European Cup or two more... with Eric still in the side.

I also think Cole contributed to Solksjaer's elevation to Legend status because by juxtaposition he was everything Cole wasn't. Sure he lacked pace but he he was ruthlessly clinical, completely lacking in nerves and nearly always produced the goods on the big occasion.. when it really mattered.

A point so perfectly summed up by his replacing of the completely impotent Cole during the 99 EC Final only for him to stab home the winner.

I've ranted and rambled and I can't be arsed checking for typos. Just my opinion that's all.

Great player for United. Legend? Not in this horses eyes.

Imagine if we'd signed RVN in 95 instead of Cole (if it could hypothetically happen)...

Originally Posted by Mr_Ed

Great player for United. Legend? Not in this horses eyes.

Imagine if we'd signed RVN in 95 instead of Cole (if it could hypothetically happen)...

ruud would have been about 12

Originally Posted by puressence

ruud would have been about 12

Hence the word hypothetically Pure...