Imagine what a player he would have been if he hadn't destroyed his knee within minutes of the start of an tour down under whilst still a teenager(?) or if he had access to modern medical techniques.

Yeah, I remember reading this sad news, when daily papers actually had a little rugby league coverage in them.

Just think of some of the dross with international caps in Ronnie's era.. Darrell Powell (he got LOADS) and Gibson

Bob Eccles always gets missed out doesnt he....37 tries in one Season they can say Phil Cantillon holds the world record with 48(in a lower divison aswell) and Hanley may have the record in the top flight but Eccles was an out an out second rower or even prop he wasnt a stand off/centre/loose forward and that was a tremendous effort that season.

probably the fact he usually needed a crack off someone to get really fired up for a game means he was often tagged as lazy but what a top top player.....in todays game he would have been ideal having a twenty minute spell then a rest then coming on again in the latter stages....

I haven't put a team into this thread because there are so many players to actually choose from. I did start a team, but then found that I was arguing with myself about the second row. How can you pick two from Nicholas, Martyn, Roberts, Eccles, and Westwood? My 13 would have to be Mike Greg, it couldn't possibly be anyone else, and I had a pair of centres, then someone mentioned Ronny Duane. My halfbacks were Fulton and Gordon (like the 13, there can only ever be one No. 7 for me), but what about Kelly, Shelford, Murphy, Langer, and Briers? To me, picking a best ever Wire 13 you've seen play is virtually impossible, but maybe that's what makes it such fun.

Ronnie Duane is up there with Mark Roberts as a player who could have been very special indeed if they had been luckier with injury. I think Keith Holden comes into this category as well.

Those type of players always get mythical status as to what might have been. Like Paul Lake at City.

Can you imagine if Kevin Penny had been injured at the end of the 2007 season, he would have gone down in history as potentially the greatest winger since Bevan.

Ronnie Duane was a Great Britain international and Mark Roberts Made Andy Gregory look like the best player in the world. They both played well over a hundred games..... hardly Mythical!


Keith Holden maybe I can see your point as he joined us as an unknown but he was a direct replacement for Andy Gregory and filled his shoes with ease with all fans raving about how good he was, added to the fact John woods would have been his stand off partner for the next three seasons its easy to say what might have been.... Holden barely played a year before doing his ankle...that was a massive loss

I'm not a city fan but wasnt Paul Lake Shit....

Fair points re Duane and Roberts.

As for Paul Lake I think he was good but now its hard to remember how good he was.

He was on the fringes of the England squad and seen as an outside bet for Italia '90 but he didn't make the squad. Then he did his knee ligaments early the next season, and from then he was always on the comeback trail and never made it back. To the City fans he was always the Great White Hope, when he came back, he was going to take City to glory he was that good. At school there would be arguments like 'who's better, Ince or McAllister' and then some City fan would pipe up that a fit Paul Lake was better than Ince, McAllister, Platt, Wise, Keane, Gazza, Clough, any of them.

I think what people liked about Lake was he wasn't a bog standard 'high work rate' midfielder, he was a ball player with a lot of skill and he played fullback, sweeper as well as midfield. But I've seen him described as "potentially the lost England captain through the 1990s" and I don't know if that's an exaggeration. The other young emerging midfielder at that time was David Rocastle who looked quality when he started out at Arsenal but by his mid 20s had fizzled out, had he got injured in his youth like Lake did he might have been regarded in the same terms as what might have been.