Robert Prosinecki at Portsmouth
Posted on | June 17, 2009 | No Comments
Last year, Portsmouth won the FA Cup. 250,000 of us went down to Southsea common the next day to welcome home our heroes. It was the club’s biggest success for nearly 60 years. But I think if you ask any Pompey fan, Prosinecki’s time at Portsmouth is something that provokes a response almost as strong!
Prosinecki was unlike any other player I have ever seen at Fratton Park in terms of his sheer ability on the ball. Opposition players would slip and trip trying to keep up with what Prosinecki was going to do next, and so would the crowd! I remember more than once wondering how he had quite managed to get the ball to do that!
His party piece was the famous rolling the ball under the foot manouevre just when he was making to shoot or pass. Suddenly the space would just open up in front of him! He scored some cracking goals that season after opening up space like that and created more the same way.
One particular example of Prosinecki on the ball springs to mind at Rotherham in a Friday night game when he must have gone one way and then the next about five times, with the defender ending up on the turf! We lost the game 2-1, which summed up the season really. The team was fragile, and the manager Graham Rix was gone before the end of the season, a bottom half finish not enough of an improvement on the previous season’s flirt with relegation. They were strange times, and we had the Yoshi Kawaguchi saga too, along with a 4-1 defeat to Leyton Orient in the FA Cup third round, at home! Prosinecki faded towards the end of the season, and it was all change as Harry Redknapp took over.
But that is all strangely fitting, really. This was about one player, an individual with tremendous skill on the ball, an entertainer. We will forever salute our Cup winning side, but not one of them could come close to drawing the same excitement from the crowd as Robert Prosinecki.
Tags: FA Cup > Fratton Park > Graham Rix > Harry Redknapp > Leyton Orient > Pompey > Portsmouth > Robert Prosinecki > Rotherham United > Yoshi Kawaguchi
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