It is a quirk of football’s history that even its most brilliant, most celebrated and most iconic teams are littered with players that meet none of those criteria, men who, while fine professionals that ended their careers with shelves full of trophies and medals, were undoubtedly remarkable beneficiaries of time, place and circumstance.
Stephane Guivarc’h remains the modern reference point for the genre, famously leading the line at the ’98 World Cup for a legendary France team that, by Euro 2000, was choosing between Thierry Henry, Nicolas Anelka and David Trezeguet at centre-forward, but there have been plenty of others tarred with the same brush since.
