Blast from the Past no.43: Jose Dominguez

Reviving the Premier League players you forgot existed…

Like a rare comet racing across the night sky, a Venetian sunset or an owl doing press-ups outside an off licence, the spectacle of Jose Dominguez playing football is the kind that - once glimpsed - you can never forget.

Outlandishly skilful, maddeningly inconsistent and as tiny as a baked bean, the floppy-haired Portuguese winger’s Premiership debut for Tottenham against Derby in 1997 was typically enigmatic.

As one attendee on the Fighting Cock forum recalled: “I went to more or less every home game in mid-late 1990s and very few moments still live on in my mind, but Dominguez’s first game is one of them. He came on and proceeded to completely mug off one Derby player after the other with his amazing dribbling. Lee Carsley eventually resorted to punting him up in the air.”

Dominguez being punted into the air earned Spurs a match-winning penalty that day, as White Hart Lane acclaimed a new star. The fans would learn in time that his genius, like that of many such complex artistes, was flawed. But that day, they couldn’t take their eyes off him.

Admittedly, this was partly because he seemed impossibly small.

At 5ft 3in*, Dominguez is the shortest player in Premier League history - a record unlikely to be broken unless a gifted 10-year-old child emerges from someone’s youth academy or Shaun Wright-Phillips makes a comeback decades from now as a shrunken 80-year-old man.

“When he went on a dribble it looked like he was playing with a beach ball,” was how one Spurs fan memorably put it.

“I remember being five or six years old and asking my dad if I was taller than him,” said another.

But despite his youthful stature, Dominguez was not new to English football. He had initially joined second division Birmingham City three years earlier as a precocious 21-year-old.

Despite suffering relegation to the third tier in his first season, Blues fans loved to watch him, especially when he helped them gain promotion the following year.

A lovely solo goal an against Hull, juxtaposed against the backdrop of a stadium that had apparently been hit by a nuclear attack, was a particular highlight.

“Got to the by-line after skinning three players on a regular basis. Then low cross: goal,” was how one City fan remembered his wing wizardry.

“He dribbled a lot but got tired after 15 yards at which point he fell over. I liked him very much,” agreed another.

Blues fans even forgave Dominguez for posing in a Sporting Lisbon shirt prior to his return to Portugal. They could hardly blame him, given he had been chosen as the club’s replacement for a certain Luis Figo, who had just left for Barcelona.

Dominguez filled the great man’s shoes manfully (if not literally, given their probable difference in foot size). But after two seasons with Lisbon, during which time he earned all of his three Portugal caps, Dominguez came to the attention of a fellow purveyor of lusciously bouncy hair, as Spurs manager Gerry Francis paid £1.5m to bring him back to England.

Despite his impressive introduction against Derby, Dominguez’s flair would appear only in short, sharp bursts. Supersub became his best position.

“We thought he was the dog’s gonads after his debut but we were proved well wrong,” said one Tottenham fan.

“He reminded me of a headless chicken and only occasionally caused the opposition a problem,” said another.

But even in the lean times, Dominguez retained a certain star quality.

“I used to watch ‘Dream Team’ at the time, and I felt like Jose Dominguez was our real-life version of Luis Amor Rodriguez,” said another fan in a reference that will only make sense to a select group of people who also watched 'Dream Team’ in the late 1990s.

It will come as no surprise that Dominguez was also very much the kind of player who would mark goals with a celebratory back flip - a spectacular albeit rare sight that was most often witnessed in matches against Southampton.

As another Spurs fan summarised: “Dominguez was a skilful player but the physicality of the Premier League was always going to be hard for him. He gave us plenty of entertainment and some moments of genuine quality in what was a pretty ropey time for the club. But he was unable to find any real consistency to settle and become a player worth keeping.”

In many ways he was antithesis of a George Graham player, so it was bad news for Dominguez when the former Arsenal manager took charge at White Hart Lane in late 1998.

He was an unused substitute in the club’s 1999 League Cup final victory, a role that became increasingly common as Graham gradually froze him out.

In November 2000, having been demoted to the reserves, Dominguez was sold to Kaiserslautern for £250,000, subsequently trying his luck in Qatar and Brazil before retiring aged 31.

Nowadays he is a manager, most recently taking the helm at Portuguese second-tier side Recreativo de Huelva.

More pertinently for Spurs fans, Dominguez is credited with helping to nurture the talents of Eric Dier while coaching Sporting’s reserve team between 2012 and 2013. Perhaps that will be his final unexpected gift to English football. But with Jose Dominguez, you can never quite be sure what’s going to happen next.

*Dominguez’ official height is the subject of much conjecture as he has never let anyone measure him. The definitive truth will not be confirmed until he goes back-to-back with Alan Wright.

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