Unheardof Greats

i think it would be nice to start a thread dedicated to players who could have been greats, or are greats just not well known. the reason i thought about this is because i just finished watching a show about the effect of communism on football on BBC4, and i was shocked to hear about Eduard Streltsov a player only well known in russia, he is considered to be as great if not greater than Lev Yashin had he not gone through the career he had. find out more about him, i found it very interesting.

Two Bulgarian names, who may have very well become even greater players than Hristo Stoichkov if it wasn't for the Communist regime - Hristo Bonev (typical #10 like Cruyff, Platini, Rivera) and Georgi Asparuhov (Gundi) (the closest thing to a complete striker I have ever seen, after MvB). Both of them were wanted by teams like Juventus, Barcelona, and Bayern Munchen but the Communist Party in Bulgaria never allowed the move to happen.
I have read a story saying that Juve were ready to pay 800,000 US for Bonev at a time when Johan Cruyff made his move from Ajax to Barcelona for 1 million US - an absolute record and an unheard of amount of money in football for those years. There are similar stories for Gundi too.
Yet, very few people outside Bulgaria have heard those names.

Jassim Yacoub :P

Darko Pancev was a great player playing for Red Star and winning the CL with them in 1991: Red Star Belgrade 0 - 0 Marseille (Red Star won 5 - 3 on penalties) he scored the deciding penalty in this match and also he was their top goal scorer for the 4 years he played for them.

but then he went to Inter and rot on the bench, they have a long history of destroying players motherf******

Oilver Bierhoff he was a goal machine, but very underrated

everyone knows bierhoff.... this thread is about those players who were unheardof, not underrated.

Duncan Edwards, died aged 21 the last victim of the Munich air crash

He was already becoming a legend even at that young age.....

http://www.ifhof.com/hof/edwards.asp

majed abdullah would fit into this category, he is well known in the middle east but he could have played in europe but football wasn't a profession at his time and place.

Originally Posted by mk18

i think it would be nice to start a thread dedicated to players who could have been greats, or are greats just not well known. the reason i thought about this is because i just finished watching a show about the effect of communism on football on BBC4, and i was shocked to hear about Eduard Streltsov a player only well known in russia, he is considered to be as great if not greater than Lev Yashin had he not gone through the career he had. find out more about him, i found it very interesting.

I just took a look at the link about Streltsov...
Wikipedia has a very subjective and probably wrong story on his prison term.
The guy thought he became god after winning 56 Olimpics and went on a slippery slope of alcohol and other abuse, including his eventual rape conviction... After 8 years Eduard missed 56, 62 and 1966 London WC where he could not travel abroad after the release, where the USSR lost in the semifinal. However he kept playing at a good level and kept scoring
I will post another link to his biography here soon to justify my post.

The article from The observer is given below.
The main point of mine is ... Stretsov was a drunk (I cannot find other articles now about his lifestyle - he was out of control) and probably raped a woman. May be he was set up, but, but he was probably guilty:
"It was after a drunken party at a dacha outside Moscow that 20-year-old Marina Lebedeva was raped. Supporters say the party was set up to disgrace him on the orders of the powerful Yekaterina Furtseva, the only woman to become a member of the Politburo. A powerful Culture Minister, close to Nikita Khrushchev...Streltsov had apparently incurred her wrath after drunkenly insulting her daughter at a Kremlin ball.
... But it is unlikely anyone will ever know what went on in the dacha that night. Nearly everyone was drunk and the evidence of witnesses, including Lebedeva, is confused and contradictory. Streltsov himself had very little memory of what happened.

So that was another hypothesis that it was not because he refused to join Dynamo or CSCA but because of some other woman. There were as many theories to who jailed Streltsov in as with who killed JFK.
Another theory I had heard of was that Eduard was jailed by some foriegn interference who wanted to prevent him from playing in the WC's. ))) Right!

All I can say "who was the guy who made Maradona place powder in his nose? that must have been a conspiracy too"


Soviet football hero Eduard Streltsov's career was ruined when he was sent to labour camps because of a rape conviction and the malice of a woman Politburo member
Special report: Russia
Kevin O'Flynn in Moscow
Sunday August 26, 2001
The Observer
A Campaign has been launched to restore the reputation of a footballer known as Russia's Pele whose greatness never really shone on the world stage because, it is alleged, he offended a Soviet Minister and was locked up in a labour camp.
Moscow's powerful mayor, Yury Luzhkov, has joined former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov in a bid to rehabilitate Eduard Streltsov, who was 21 when he was sentenced to 12 years in the camps for rape.
His sentence was handed down on the eve of the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 and his absence destroyed the Soviet Union's prospects. With his help - he was a centre-forward who spread panic in defences with his running and feinting - his team had beaten Sweden 6-0 in Stockholm in 1955. Without him, it lost to the World Cup hosts in the quarter-finals in 1958.
'The boy came to us from the land of wonder,' wrote Soviet football writer, Alexander Nilin. By the time he was 17 Streltsov was playing for the national team, and he was a star in its gold-medal winning performance in the 1956 Olympic Games.
'If it hadn't been for that terrible conviction, Streltsov without a doubt would have become the best footballer in the world,' said Karpov, president of the Streltsov Committee, formed to campaign for rehabilitation. 'It was a big loss for the nation,' said Alexander Radionov, general secretary of the Russian Football Union.
The comparison with Pele could be made with George Best. Talented and good-looking, Streltsov, who died of throat cancer in 1990, lived the high life.
It was after a drunken party at a dacha outside Moscow that 20-year-old Marina Lebedeva was raped. Supporters say the party was set up to disgrace him on the orders of the powerful Yekaterina Furtseva, the only woman to become a member of the Politburo. A powerful Culture Minister, close to Nikita Khrushchev, she committed suicide in 1974. Streltsov had apparently incurred her wrath after drunkenly insulting her daughter at a Kremlin ball.
Next month the Streltsov Committee will send a long list of discrepancies in the trial evidence to the general prosecutor, asking him to declare the proceedings void. But it is unlikely anyone will ever know what went on in the dacha that night. Nearly everyone was drunk and the evidence of witnesses, including Lebedeva, is confused and contradictory. Streltsov himself had very little memory of what happened. He confessed to the crime only after prosecutors told him he would be allowed to go to the World Cup if he did.
At the time no football fan doubted Streltsov was innocent. About 100,000 workers at Moscow's giant Zil car factory called off a march only after hearing he had confessed.
Streltsov spent five years in labour camps. Legends circulated that he had it easier than others, as prison authorities used him as a star in football matches when they wanted to quell trouble.
His first experience of the camps was harsh. He was victimised by a young criminal, and so severely beaten that he spent four months in the prison hospital. The prison report notes he was hit with either an 'iron bar or a shoe heel'. Things became easier as he found friends and supporters.
'We loved Streltsov, we believed he would return to football. And not only us,' said one former prisoner, Ivan Lukyanov, quoted in the book, The Criminal Case of Streltsov , published by the Streltsov Committee.
He was allowed to return to professional football two years after his release in 1963. He had lost speed and strength, but still had his footballing brain, and the fans flocked to see him back at his old club, Torpedo.
It was nothing new for the Soviet government to meddle with sport and players' lives. League champions CDKA Moscow (now CSKA), disappeared overnight, disbanded by Stalin after the Soviet Union's humiliating loss to Yugoslavia in the 1952 Olympic Games.
In the late 1930s the NKVD chief and Dynamo Moscow fan, Lavrenty Beria, was said to have been behind the arrest of the Starostin brothers, the backbone of Spartak Moscow.

the documentary agreed that he was a party boy, more or less like george best, but it also said that he said something ude to the wife of berria (soviet cheif officer i think, he owned Dynamo moscow) by mistake and it was decided that he would be sent to jail, it also said that his party boy image with the hairstyle he had aswell as his refusal to join dynamo or CSKA and rather to play with his local club torpedo moscow led to his imprisonment

Garrincha, was as good as Pele

Garrincha is not an unknown

Kinda, oh c'mon, he is pretty unknown, knowing that he was as good as Pele

1. hes very well known
2. hes nothing near pele