When Fabrizio Ravanelli watched Kerry Mayo score the winner
Can you imagine what Fabrizio Ravanelli was thinking as he disembarked from the Derby County team coach at Withdean Stadium on Saturday 16th November 2002?
This was a man with 22 Italy caps and eight goals for the Azzurri to his name. In four brilliant seasons with Juventus, he’d won a Serie A title, a Copa Italia and scored in a Champions League final when Juve defeated Ajax on penalties to lift the trophy.
Just two year’s before his trip to Withdean, he’d won another Serie A and another Copa Italia by helping Sven-Göran Eriksson’s Lazio to a domestic double. He’d played for the biggest club in France, Marseille. His famous “shirt over the head” celebration was copied in countless school playgrounds across Europe.
And yet here he was, arriving at an athletics track surrounded by temporary stands propped up by scaffolding. Getting changed in an actual Portakabin. Warming up in the pissing down rain in front of a crowd less than 1/10th the size of that which had watched him lift the European Cup in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico six years previously.
If Ravanelli’s mood was bleak before Brighton took on Derby that day, then it would have been even bleaker by the time 5pm rolled around. The extent of his involvement at Withdean was to run up and down the running track a few times, trying not to get his famous white hair too wet. He remained an unused substitute for the Rams, watching on from the bench as Kerry Mayo scored the only goal of the game to deliver what was only bottom of the table Brighton’s third league win of the 2002-03 season.
Just two years previously, the most exciting opposition player to visit Withdean was a 40-stone, 43-year-old Neville Southall playing for Torquay United in Division Three. The Albion’s back-to-back promotions had suddenly elevated us from bottom tier to second, but even so the sight of a player of Ravanelli’s ilk in our midst was a completely new experience for an entire generation of Seagulls supporters. Not to mention the fact that he earned more than Steve Coppell’s entire Albion squad put together.
Ravanelli wasn’t the only big name in the Derby side. They also had Georgi Kinkladze, the Georgian playmaker whose dribbling ability and spectacular goals had made him a cult figure in the Premier League with Manchester City. Kinkladze finished the season as the Rams’ Supporter’s Player of the Year, but he failed to make any impression on proceedings at Withdean despite playing the entire 90 minutes as he was marked out of the game by Robbie Pethick. Georgi Kinkladze. Marked out of a game. By Robbie Pethick. Ravanelli wasn’t the only one having a bad afternoon – it was just one of those days.
For much of the 90 minutes, as Ravanelli watched on and Kinkladze struggled to get away from a man who was still bleaching his hair at the age of 32, it looked like the game would finish 0-0. Richard Carpenter went close with a couple of trademark long distance efforts for the Albion and Paul Watson saw a free kick punched clear by a young Lee Grant in the Derby goal.
Just before the hour mark, County were reduced to 10 men when Malcolm Christie picked up a second booking. His first had been for a bone-crunching tackle on Michel Kuipers, which on another day could easily have earned a straight red. His second yellow was taking stupid to the extreme, Watson being all ready to take a free kick when Christie rather helpfully decided to kick the ball back to where he thought the set piece should be taken from. Referee Rchard Beeby viewed it as dissent and so Christie was off for an early bath.
That didn’t sit well with Derby boss and former Albion midfielder John Gregory. Gregory was in a miserable mood as it was, having been barracked throughout the game by the South Stand over comments he’d made about Dick Knight five years earlier when he was Aston Villa boss.
Knight was pursuing Villa for compensation after their signings of Brighton youth team players Gareth Barry and Michael Standing which infuriated Gregory, who told the press, “Dick Knight wouldn’t recognise Gareth Barry if he stood on Brighton beach in an Albion shirt with a ball tucked under his arm and a seagull on his head.”
Despite Gregory’s claims and Dirty Doug Ellis’ determination not to cough up more than £3000 for the pair, Knight’s perseverance eventually paid off and Villa were ordered to pay £1,075,000 for Barry. Gregory meanwhile lost all the respect that his distinguished record of 72 appearances as part of the first ever Albion team to be promoted to the top flight had previously earned him.
Gregory went off on one after the match, complaining that Mr Beeby had lacked common sense when it came to Christie’s dismissal before whinging that he couldn’t remember the Albion having a shot in the whole game. If he hadn’t been so busy chewing on all those sour grapes, then he might have recalled Mayo’s shot which won it in the 89th minute.
It came when Simon Rodger swung over a corner from the right. Mayo met it with a crashing header which cannoned off the post. The Ginger Prince wasn’t going to be denied though, and he reacted quickest to reach the loose ball before anyone else and fire it past Grant from close range for the only goal of the game.
It was Mayo’s first goal for two years since he’d netted in a 2-0 Division Three victory over Leyton Orient in September 2000. Ravanelli had spent that same week playing for Lazio against Arsenal in the Champions League. Yet here the great Italian now was, sitting and watching a man from Peacehaven score a winner against his club at a running track in a housing estate on the outskirts of Brighton.
Just imagine what Ravanelli was thinking.
