Blast from the Past no.65: Peter Ndlovu

Reviving the Premier League players you forgot existed…

Coventry has never been considered sexy. Not when people started being colloquially “sent” there in the mid 17th-century, not when they had a brown kit in the 1970s, not when they spent the best part of 30 years narrowly avoiding top-flight relegation, and certainly not now as they plummet dismally towards homelessness and oblivion. It’s just not a sexy kind of place, Coventry, or a sexy kind of football team.

And that’s precisely why the people of this fair city still look upon Peter Ndlovu as a kind of god.

He was gifted, he was exciting, he was exotic and he had innate star quality. He was, in a nutshell, everything that Coventry stereotypically wasn’t, and by association he carried the tantalising promise of making Coventry all those things too.

In essence, Ndlovu put the sex into Coventry, and having the sex put into you is not an experience you tend to forget.

The sex was first discovered in 1991 by City manager Terry Butcher, playing for its hometown team Highlanders – that hometown being Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

For a fee of £10,000, Butcher brought the 18-year Ndlovu to England, where he would be the only African outfield player in the entire football league.

He was initially used as an impact substitute – and the impact was emphatic when he scored the winning goal in a 2-1 win at Arsenal in one of his first appearances.

Ndlovu was soon upgraded to a starting place, despite his tender years, and a goal-of-the-season contender in a 1-0 win against Midlands rivals Aston Villa confirmed the improbable turn of events – namely, that the top flight’s hottest young star was strutting his stuff in the unfashionable surroundings of Highfield Road.

“He looked like a kid on the pitch but he was so quick and full of tricks that he jinked past defenders with ease,” said one fan on the Sky Blues Talk forum.

“I’ll never forget the roar at Highfield Road when he got the ball at his feet and launched a counter-attack,” recalled another.

“I couldn’t believe we had someone so good playing for us,” admitted a fellow awestruck City fan.

Equally at home on the wing or down the middle, Ndlovu was the type of player who would dribble for dribbling’s sake, an approach that left various defenders looking silly. The former Blackburn clogger Andy Morrison once claimed that Ndlovu “ruined” his Rovers career after he was repeatedly “ripped to shreds” by the Zimbabwean’s skill during a match.

There was also something sexy – in the most literal sense – about Ndlovu’s off-field persona. Rumours circulated that he was something of ladies’ man – backed up by a couple of well-publicised paternity cases – and it’s a reputation that evidently endures to this day. An intriguing article entitled “Sex Craze Peter Ndlovu Stole My Wife” – possibly the Zimbabwean version of Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster – found its way onto the internet in 2015.

Ndlovu’s second season in England coincided with the dawn of the Premier League, and he briefly led the Sky Blues to its summit as Bobby Gould’s entertaining side – playing a bonkers 4-2-4 formation – threatened to dazzle the nation.

It could be said that Ndlovu was a scorer of great goals rather than a great goalscorer – his solo strike in an unlikely top-of-the-table clash against Norwich demonstrating his penchant for the sublime.

But no matter how many goals he scored, it was never enough to get any English commentators to pronounce the U at the end of his name (as they should have done if they were speaking proper Zimbabwean). “Endlove” became the most common attempt, the “love” bit intonated with particular zeal by Ray Stubbs, as immortalised in this bizarre moment in TV history.

Coventry didn’t win the inaugural Premier League (because you would have heard about that) – and in fact they never finished higher than 11th in Ndlovu’s time at the club – but this does not lessen his standing among City fans. If anything, it made them more grateful he stuck around.

“We were lucky to have him and lucky to keep him for so long,” said one supporter.

“Nuddy gave us six years of joy, the typical player who would get you out of your seat every time he got the ball,” commented another.

Those six joyous years were littered with wonderstrikes, Ndlovu having a particular speciality for mazy solo runs capped off with thunderous finishes – a talent perfectly illustrated by this goal against West Brom in the FA Cup.

He also achieved the rare feat of scoring a hat-trick at Anfield – the first opposition player to do so in 30 years – as he inspired a 3-2 Sky Blues win at Liverpool in 1995 that feels like it could have taken place in another universe.

Not that anyone was pretending Nuddy was perfect.

“He was one of the most frustrating players to grace the Sky Blue colours – so many times he would do the hard work of beating players but not look up when crossing,” pointed out one Coventry fan.

“I felt there was more in Ndlovu’s locker than we got out of him and he perhaps should have moved to a club with better players, but wow what a discovery he was,” said another.

Rather than moving to a club with better players (and despite rumours of a British record £4m bid from Arsenal around the time of his 1992/93 peak) Ndlovu eventually ended up dropping down a division.

Amid an influx of overseas stars and a general improvement in the standard of the Premier League – exemplified by City’s new strike duo of Dion Dublin and Darren Huckerby – what once seemed exotic became commonplace.

In the summer of 1997, the Sky Blues accepted a £1.6m bid for Ndlovu from Birmingham City. He helped the Blues reach the play-offs twice in his four years at St Andrews, but the Premier League eluded them. Brum fans on the Small Heath Alliance forum remember him as a “cracking” and “very talented” player, albeit one who “lacked end product”. (Although he is still adjudged have score their third best solo goal of all time.)

Sheffield United snapped up Ndlovu in 2001 and he became a fan favourite in three seasons at Bramall Lane – especially for his (far from spectacular) winning goal in a league cup match against Yorkshire rivals Leeds.

“Some will say he would run down blind alleys or his final ball wasn’t consistent enough, but he was a real entertainer. He’s my all-time favourite Blade purely based on how much I loved watching him play,” said one United fan on the S24SU website.

Alas, Ndlovu suffered more play-off disappointment with the Blades and would never again return to the top flight, leaving England for the South African league in 2004. His life was touched by tragedy in 2012 when two passengers in a car he was driving, including his brother Adam, were killed in a crash. Ndlovu recovered from his own injuries and was appointed manager of South African side Mamelodi Sundowns, where he continues to flourish.

“The most naturally gifted player I have ever seen in a Coventry shirt, and maybe even in English football,” concludes one misty-eyed Sky Blue supporter.

“Nuddy was blisteringly good in his first proper full season (92/93) but got worse year on year after that until he ended up in Division Two,” was one less rose-tinted assessment.

And it is true that, when all is said and done, Peter Ndlovu was just a man who played for Coventry, Birmingham and Sheffield United and got progressively less effective as time went on, which doesn’t sound very sexy at all.

But that’s missing the point, because Ndlovu was a man who remained sexy in spite of his surrounds – he remains an African history-maker, a Zimbabwean sporting legend and an attacking magician who allowed a much-maligned English city to feel more special than it has ever done since.

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