They use facilities owned by the local public school.
The school have a lot of very good sporting facilities and have produced a few famous sportsmen. Gul Khan, Mark Bailey and Nasser Hussein (6th form) are probably the most famous.
“Have access to the best facilities” would be a more accurate description.
It’s a gamble. Keepers have been caught out by a quick counter before. If you’re already losing then there’s nothing to lose. If you have a point secured it’s too risky (unless you needed the extra point to win the league/avoid relegation).
The ref can’t say if it’s the last play. Not only does it risk influencing the game, if there was a foul etc. they’d still need to call it, or they might decide that there was time wasting that needed adding to the clock. Referees don’t just wait for an attack to finish before blowing, they also need a moment when there is little possibility of infringements etc.
Players like Les Ferdinand, Crouch, Klose, Gerd Muller etc.
You could just rephrase this as target man who was great at headers without needing to move much.
And yet he still managed to carry the team season after season, which was the question posed.
The FA and Premiership pumped loads of money into “Kicking racism out of football” and British society became a lot more racially tolerant in general from the 90’s onwards, at least as far as overt racism based on skin colour goes. Peer pressure by other fans, a change in the demographics of supporters and penalties by clubs like lifetime bans on racist fans have made it pretty effective. Not to mention having a few decades of normalisation of black players becoming club icons alongside a huge influx of foreign players since the 90’s.
The reason the FA put so much effort and resources into it was just to make the game more saleable in an age of Sky TV and mass media. It needed to be family friendly, easy to market around the world and get rid of the whole working class “hooligan” image of the old 1st division. In short, they wanted to sell the game to the middle classes, corporations and generally make it more glamorous, rather than limiting it to just the traditional working class supporters. It needed sanitising to do that.
British football fans definitely weren’t previously really any better than the Spanish, with maybe a few exceptions, it’s taken a concerted effort over a few decades to change things. It’s probably one of the biggest social positives to come out of the massive commercialisation of the English top flight.
Retiring with an even more massive pension and in Messi’s case probably the closest he can possibly get to a little bit of relative anonymity (instead of everyone recognising you, it’s only half of them).
He’s made of what they remove to make Weebles.