This fantastical modern day, footballing equivalent of the classic board game has taken another twist this weekend. After what I initially saw as a revelation that TSF played with Paolo Di Canio, I’ve now taken that clue back as just a possibility. I had initially got all excited that in not referencing Paolo using inverted commas (as he had previously done with “Tony”) TSF must actually have been referring to a player called Paolo. However, so many tweets and comments from you today have made me reconsider.
As a result I’ve split the checklist (found on each player’s page) into two sections: Known Facts (numbered) and Debatable Clues (lettered). Added to the latter alongside the Paolo clue is the statement about TSF having a daughter. It has also been pushed by a fair few people that TSF could have been speaking figuratively when he said ‘my daughter will be told to stay away from footballers’. As a result Scott Parker comes back out of the ‘candidates ruled out’ section.
Now, we need to do some detective work on our candidates – Go and look through the player pages: If there are points on the checklist not yet listed ‘For’ or ‘Against’ the player and you think they should be then find a link as evidence and post it as a comment on that player’s page.
8 responses to “Guess Who?!”
Couldn’t everything he says be a “figure of speech” and therefore you can’t rule anybody out or anybody in?
I think you’ve undermined the credibility of the whole exercise by deciding which clues are real and which aren’t, just so you can include people previously eliminated. After all, maybe his comment about playing a game recently was a “figure of speech”. He must have played a lot of games and therefore could be referring to any one of those games but just said it was a recent one to throw people off the scent. Also, calling England “us” is just a figure of speech, particularly if you’ve lived in the country for a long time, so maybe he’s Welsh and doesn’t feel strongly patriotic and happily supports England at major tournaments as he knows so many of the players.
It could be anyone, right? But what’s the point of this website if not to eliminate people so that eventually you come down to one person, and that’s your guess. Where’s your achievement when the guy is finally revealed and you’ve got it “right” because you still have 20 people on your list? Surely it would be better to get down to one or two and be wrong, then to have no opinion and be right?
> when the guy is finally revealed
who is to say he will ever be revealed? he has said a fair number of incendiary things in the various articles. It could be that he also throws the odd proverbial spanner in too.
This is not a thing like the stig, but a real person at a real club talking about player infidelities and all kinds of things.
Indeed. It’s tough because I don’t want to personally dictate the results here, rather make it a community process. But you’re right about anything potentially being a ‘figure of speech’. That is why I took the decision in the first place to go with what he said as fact, because he had previously been explicit about talking in representative terms (with “Tony”). It was when so many people responded that it was wrong to think Paolo was a real person that I thought ‘best go with the majority’ in order to try work this out as a process. I’ll think it over … ;)
“This is not a thing like the stig, but a real person at a real club”. Ah… but how do we know?
My guess is that it’s a journo drawing on what players are telling him. For a start, we seem to have here someone educated at least to the degree where they can toss around quotes from Darwin and Kipling. Where has this literate and articulate footballer been hiding all this time? Why have we never enjoyed his expressive insights in interviews? I know it’s a mean thing to say but most footballers have trouble stringing together a couple of sentences. (I know I know… Martin Amis and Howard Jacobsen wouldn’t be much cop in Stoke’s midfield either).
I think the assumption that he can’t be a real footballer because he’s articulate and knowledgeable says more about our prejudiced views about footballers than it does about TSF’s identity. I’m sure there are players with searing intellects and a wide grasp of all kinds of issues at plenty of clubs, we just don’t see them because “footballer is nice normal bloke” doesn’t as many papers as “drunk footballers pull train on teenager.”
TSF is real, he’s also a gift. As much as I’m dying to know who he is, I hope we don’t find out until he’s retired.
Well said Ben. A lot of people seem to think that as soon as you sign a professional football contract you lose any intellectual capacity you may have previously held. And completely agreed on TSF. It is a pleasure to read every week. I just wonder whether he may be retiring very soon. That’s not to say of course that he’ll just give his identity away as a result…
I didn’t read the full article from which you draw the French player clue, but remember that there are a number of African countries in which French is spoken.
A total stab in dark but I believe the secret football we is Andy Impey, Reason being he retired and came back, also he had a spell at Leicester city in premier league and started out at yeading fc non league. Just a guess but a good one too.