FANATICAL FOOTBALL MANAGER HOW TO

If he was perhaps the least illustrious member of England’s most glorious team, his value was nevertheless clear. He was unique in the 1966 England team in never winning a club honour: with him in the side Fulham won promotion to the top flight and reached two FA Cup semi-finals, but there was no trophy, and no league finish higher than 10th (tellingly within two years of Cohen’s injury they had been relegated twice, and they did not return to the top flight until 2001). They were lessons that stayed with me.”Ĭohen’s club career lasted approximately a decade, all of it spent at Fulham, and was bookended by meetings with Liverpool – he made his debut against them in March 1957, aged 17, and it was against the same side in December 1967, in a tackle with his occasional England teammate Peter Thompson, that he sustained the knee cartilage injury that would force his retirement, 15 months and several failed comebacks later.

FANATICAL FOOTBALL MANAGER HOW TO

“He taught me about things like overlaps and how to run on to balls, keeping the game fluid, rather than waiting to receive the ball.

“Football is a game of movement, it’s about width and depth and it was with Dugald that I learned about positional play as a defender,” he said. I liked to get forward, and the lads used to tease me about my crosses being more dangerous to the crowd than our opponents, but primarily I thought I was a good defender in a back four where we all knew our jobs.”Ĭohen had been a teenage winger, before his first Fulham manager, Dugald Livingstone, himself a former full-back, relocated him to the right side of defence. Alf only asked you to do what you were capable of doing. I could tackle, and read the game reasonably well. “Although I used to get forward a lot, defending was my forte. I had to work at a lot of things, but I knew my asset was my strength and speed. “Frankly, if Ramsey had not been manager, I don’t think I’d have got a smell,” said Cohen of international football. The Guardian reported that he “recovered from a somewhat shaky start to give a creditable performance” but Ramsey liked what he saw, and Armfield was to play only twice more.

Ramsey first called on Cohen to replace the injured captain, Jimmy Armfield, in a game against Uruguay in 1964.

Fanatical football manager