FULL ENGLISH
It’s a decent quiz question. What is the significance of this band of players? Michael Oakes, Steve Watson, Riccardo Scimeca, Gareth Southgate, Alan Wright, Paul Merson, Ian Taylor, Simon Grayson, Lee Hendrie, Julian Joachim and Dion Dublin. Don’t read on for the answer … yet. Go on, have a guess. Some of you will know that these lot played for Aston Villa in the 1990s, others will spot that this is an entirely English XI. The brightest readers on the Football Daily mailing list might guess that this was the last time an all-English XI was put out in the Premier League. They would be right, and today marks the 25th anniversary of that match. But rather than being something to celebrate, some sort of post-Brexit ‘this-used-to-be-a-country’ love letter to the glories of yesteryear, it should be noted that Villa were absolutely hopeless on 27 February 1999, battered 4-1 at home to Coventry, who boasted such luminaries as John Aloisi (Australia, two goals that day), future Villa legend George Boateng (Netherlands, two goals that day), Magnus Hedman (Sweden), Roland Nilsson (Sweden) and Gary McAllister (Scotland).
