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21 hours ago, Ogdenwoodwhittle said:

Big George edmuson in Ipswich v even bigger george elokobi Maidstone fa cup 

 

Well done to Mr Elokobi.

 

The only Latics player I've ever known to do a lap of honour to thank the fans for coming, win lose or draw.

 

Top man...

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8 minutes ago, TheBigDog said:

He was unlucky - got the ball first and his back leg was clipped as he went down - no dive for me.

Agreed.  It's still going to be fun in the pub on Tuesday with all the Ipswich locals

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22 hours ago, JoeP said:

 

Well done to Mr Elokobi.

 

The only Latics player I've ever known to do a lap of honour to thank the fans for coming, win lose or draw.

 

Top man...

Excellent interview with him and Mick McCarthy in the Times if you can get behind the paywall. 

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The team right now who encapsulate the romantic element of the FA Cup are undoubtedly the lowest-ranked club left in the competition — Maidstone United. The sixth-tier side have reached the fourth round for the first time.


Suddenly, everyone wants to shake hands with George Elokobi, the Vanarama National League South club’s manager, including the owner of the restaurant where I meet the former Wolverhampton Wanderers defender for lunch, along with Mick McCarthy, the man who brought him to Molineux in 2008.


“This happens a lot and not just in Maidstone,” Elokobi says. “Someone actually went to where my wife works [in a bakery] and handed her a congratulations card, saying, ‘This is for George.’ It was amazing. Being recognised is good, it is good for the community.”


McCarthy adds that everyone seems to know who Elokobi is but they seem to have only a slight suspicion that they ought to recognise the former Ireland defender and manager.


“I’m taking the heat off you, gaffer,” Elokobi jokes, summing up one of football’s most heart-warming relationships. Elokobi called McCarthy “the gaffer” when he arrived at Wolves, called him “the gaffer” after leaving the club, calls him “the gaffer” as we eat and will refer to him as “the gaffer” for ever more.


Elokobi’s career, from the moment he was scouted by Wolves, has been shaped by McCarthy and so, when Maidstone reached the third round, the 37-year-old invited McCarthy to the Gallagher Stadium for the tie against Stevenage of Sky Bet League One.


“My mum is proud of me,” Elokobi says, “and she was so excited to see the gaffer at that game as well. She said, ‘My goodness what a moment for you, son, to have your former boss there witnessing you make history.’


It was the icing on the cake for me, having the gaffer there.”


McCarthy dashed off after the match but left a voicemail for his protégé.


“Wahey, you f***ing beauty,” was what greeted Elokobi when he picked up his messages.


“I played it over and over,” the former centre back says. “It was like, ‘Wow’ to hear how excited the gaffer was. He’s happy to see me do what I am doing because I respected his environment. Having the gaffer there for the third-round game was just an incredibly proud moment for me.”


“And it was for me, to be asked by a former player to come to the game and watch it,” McCarthy says. “I loved it, I took it as a compliment. Bear in mind I’ve had over 1,000 games as a manager and a coach, I’ve not had too many invites so I must have pissed a few players off. You put me through the mill, George, with it being 1-0. I kicked every ball for the last five minutes, you put me through the wringer.”


Their bond first formed when negotiations over the transfer of Elokobi from Colchester United to Wolves started to drag on, with his agent and the club’s board unable to agree terms.


“So I just knocked on the door and invited myself in,” Elokobi says, “and everyone was in shock and I told them I wanted what was fair and that I wanted to play for the gaffer.”


“I’m not going to lie, we would have been getting a good deal,” McCarthy says. “He didn’t want the moon and stars, he wanted what was fair.”


Impressed, McCarthy then went to find Elokobi, asked him what would be a fair figure, and the Wolves manager returned to the boardroom to say that had to be the agreed deal.


“Before I knew it, I was signing the papers,” Elokobi says. “It was a long day for me and it was my birthday. All I wanted to do was play for the gaffer, I knew the club would take my game to the next level. I thought, he’s going to love me as a player having seen how he came across. He came with a great reputation. I knew I was still very raw in terms of my technical capabilities and the gaffer had been a defender as well.”


Elokobi, whose father died when he was 11, then lived for 12 weeks in a hotel. “I bumped into Mick when I was picking up groceries at the local Spar supermarket and he sees me and says, ‘If you want to eat well you are more than welcome to come to my house every evening for dinner.’


“And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I rang my mum and told her the gaffer actually invited me to go to his house if I wasn’t eating right. That, to me, was like a father to a son. Was I starstruck a little bit? Yes, I had watched him as manager of Ireland and it’s incredible now that I am his player. I didn’t want to let the gaffer down.”


“What you saw was an uncompromising, physical defender and it was up to us to help him to be a better player,” McCarthy says. “He could head it, run, tackle. What we loved about him was that he was prepared to put the work in.”

Elokobi was 16 when he arrived in Britain from Cameroon and was spotted playing in the park. Soon he was a cult figure, scoring 14 goals in a career that spanned six divisions, but the most famous of his goals came against Manchester United in February 2011.


“The magnitude of the game, the entire world had written Wolves off,” he says as he and McCarthy bicker good-naturedly about the details of the league defeat by Bolton Wanderers that had preceded the win against United.


Elokobi felt the team had let down McCarthy against Bolton and so the entire team raised their game for an unlikely 2-1 victory over Sir Alex Ferguson’s side.


“That day earned me my international call-up,” Elokobi says, “and I became recognised everywhere, in supermarkets and on the roads because I had personalised my number plates. People would drive after me to take a photo on the motorway.”


McCarthy, 64, interjects to say he was followed just the once, when he had lost to Coventry City, and was driving down to Bath for a dinner. A car came up alongside his, full of Coventry fans making rude gestures.


“Nobody took pictures of me,” he says laughing. “All I got was wanker signs.”
When visiting his sister in Dallas, Elokobi rented a car and the man behind the desk said: “Hold on, hold on, is this for The Beast? I can’t believe this. McCarthy’s body double.”

 

McCarthy chuckles and explains how, during a post-match TV interview, a shirtless, muscled Elokobi had approached him and McCarthy had quipped: “Here’s my body double.”

 

“You made the best of yourself and are doing the same as a manager,” McCarthy says.


“I was out there [at Wolves] learning as much as I could, absorbing everything,” Elokobi says.

 

“Technically, tactically I was getting better. I never saw myself as a manager. I started my coaching badges in 2018, and then I stopped. Why? My reason was discrimination in football. There were no other black managers in the dugout. The only one I could see was Chris Hughton [the manager of Brighton & Hove Albion at the time]. I thought, what chance have I got? Who is going to offer George Elokobi a job?”

 

His ambition drifted to becoming a strength and conditioning coach or an assistant “because that’s what I saw at the time”.

 

However, upon joining Aldershot Town in 2019, Gary Waddock, the manager, asked him whether he was taking his coaching badges.


“I told him I was done with badges and inequality was my reason,” Elokobi says.

 

“The only way to change that is to become one,” McCarthy says.

 

Waddock told Elokobi that within his first two weeks he had changed the mentality of the club. He said, ‘So you know what that means? You are a leader. Everyone listens to you like you are the manager, please reconsider.’


“So I spoke to my missus,” Elokobi says, “who said you never know where that can take you.”
Naturally, Elokobi also asked for McCarthy’s advice.


“I recognised his leadership skills fairly quickly,” McCarthy says. “Even when we tried to sign him I could see he was straightforward, honest. He wasn’t hell set on getting a certain amount and upsetting the apple cart if he didn’t get it. It was clear he could after himself in the dressing room and on the pitch. If you do things correctly you get respect. He wasn’t the best player by any stretch of the imagination but if you do 100 per cent in training you get the respect.”


“I say this to my players now,” Elokobi says, “even when the gaffer didn’t pick me, I had to make sure I was selfless, I always put the environment first. The players knew I would run through brick walls for them and the gaffer. The gaffer knew that, the fans knew that.”


Maidstone’s Saturday lunchtime fourth-round trip to Ipswich Town, who are second in the Sky Bet Championship, will be televised live on the BBC. Portman Road, though, does not hold fond memories for Elokobi as it was the scene of the dreadful knee injury that almost ended his career.


“I was flying that season,” Elokobi recalls. “After two weeks the gaffer calls me in and says I need to slow down and that I don’t need to prove anything to him. I was given a one-in-ten chance of playing again.”


“The injury was so innocuous as well,” McCarthy says. “It’s ironic, you’re going to Ipswich in the cup tie, got injured there and I managed there for six years.
“I want George to do well. I had six happy years at Ipswich and I want them to do well. If you beat Ipswich you’ll have to play out of your skin and they will have had to have had a real bad day because they are a good side.


“Maidstone should try to win it and not sit back because if they do, Ipswich will pick a hole in them. I’m not going to give George any tactical advice, they’re better than you. Just give everything and if you do that you have a chance.”


Maidstone, anyway, have a dash of McCarthyism. “I rang the gaffer in the summer when I was rebuilding the team,” Elokobi says, “and he told me, ‘You will know what to do when you think how we got our success at Wolves’. And it’s paid off.”

 

“I guessed his team would be like one of mine,” McCarthy says. “He expects everyone to run around, any slackers wouldn’t be in the team. First and foremost you need a really good atmosphere around the place.”

 

Even Elokobi’s acting career brings us back to McCarthy. Elokobi was hired to be part of Ted Lasso as one of a group of former professionals who would pretend to be Manchester City players facing AFC Richmond. It was choreographed, not real football, he says.

 

“I don’t limit myself to one thing, I can do anything if I put my mind to it,” he says. “And how ironic is this? Manchester City is where the gaffer gave me my Premier League debut. So the crew were asking if I had ever been to the Etihad and I was laughing.”

 

He swapped shirts on that debut with Emmanuel Adebayor but immediately worried in case his gaffer thought he was more interested in the glamour of the occasion and rarely ever swapped shirts again.

 

If Hollywood came calling then he would go, he says, but only if at the end of his Maidstone career, adding that also on his resumé is a promotional video he did for a Godzilla movie, which involved being in a cage against two other footballers. He then treats me to his movie star villain stare. Ipswich beware.

 

Quickfire Q&A

Win a league title or the FA Cup?
George Elokobi : League title.
Mick McCarthy: League title, it’s the test of a season.

Strictly Come Dancing or Ted Lasso?
GE: Ted Lasso
MM: I’m all over Strictly. Were you in Ted Lasso?

Coaching or playing?
GE: Playing
MM: Playing

Yorkshire pudding or groundnut soup?
Both in unison: Yorkshire pudding.

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On 1/22/2024 at 9:24 PM, yarddog73 said:

Remember when Edmondson used to get pelters on here when he was just starting out, along with plenty of others who've gone on to do just fine in Leagues above us.

its the Latics way. theyre all idiots and the club would be better off without them taking out their insecurities on young kids trying to forge a lifestyle. probs jealousy. not sure when you'll see this bc lm being moderated 🙄

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On 1/29/2024 at 9:27 AM, Hemel latic said:

Excellent interview with him and Mick McCarthy in the Times if you can get behind the paywall. 

The interview that George gave on Football Focus ahead of the 3rd round game v Stevenage was very moving, he talks about his late father. You can see what being the Maidstone manager and their Cup run means to him. As long as there are stories like his, football will never die.

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On 1/29/2024 at 10:21 AM, TamarBridgeLatics said:

The team right now who encapsulate the romantic element of the FA Cup are undoubtedly the lowest-ranked club left in the competition — Maidstone United. The sixth-tier side have reached the fourth round for the first time.


Suddenly, everyone wants to shake hands with George Elokobi, the Vanarama National League South club’s manager, including the owner of the restaurant where I meet the former Wolverhampton Wanderers defender for lunch, along with Mick McCarthy, the man who brought him to Molineux in 2008.


“This happens a lot and not just in Maidstone,” Elokobi says. “Someone actually went to where my wife works [in a bakery] and handed her a congratulations card, saying, ‘This is for George.’ It was amazing. Being recognised is good, it is good for the community.”


McCarthy adds that everyone seems to know who Elokobi is but they seem to have only a slight suspicion that they ought to recognise the former Ireland defender and manager.


“I’m taking the heat off you, gaffer,” Elokobi jokes, summing up one of football’s most heart-warming relationships. Elokobi called McCarthy “the gaffer” when he arrived at Wolves, called him “the gaffer” after leaving the club, calls him “the gaffer” as we eat and will refer to him as “the gaffer” for ever more.


Elokobi’s career, from the moment he was scouted by Wolves, has been shaped by McCarthy and so, when Maidstone reached the third round, the 37-year-old invited McCarthy to the Gallagher Stadium for the tie against Stevenage of Sky Bet League One.


“My mum is proud of me,” Elokobi says, “and she was so excited to see the gaffer at that game as well. She said, ‘My goodness what a moment for you, son, to have your former boss there witnessing you make history.’


It was the icing on the cake for me, having the gaffer there.”


McCarthy dashed off after the match but left a voicemail for his protégé.


“Wahey, you f***ing beauty,” was what greeted Elokobi when he picked up his messages.


“I played it over and over,” the former centre back says. “It was like, ‘Wow’ to hear how excited the gaffer was. He’s happy to see me do what I am doing because I respected his environment. Having the gaffer there for the third-round game was just an incredibly proud moment for me.”


“And it was for me, to be asked by a former player to come to the game and watch it,” McCarthy says. “I loved it, I took it as a compliment. Bear in mind I’ve had over 1,000 games as a manager and a coach, I’ve not had too many invites so I must have pissed a few players off. You put me through the mill, George, with it being 1-0. I kicked every ball for the last five minutes, you put me through the wringer.”


Their bond first formed when negotiations over the transfer of Elokobi from Colchester United to Wolves started to drag on, with his agent and the club’s board unable to agree terms.


“So I just knocked on the door and invited myself in,” Elokobi says, “and everyone was in shock and I told them I wanted what was fair and that I wanted to play for the gaffer.”


“I’m not going to lie, we would have been getting a good deal,” McCarthy says. “He didn’t want the moon and stars, he wanted what was fair.”


Impressed, McCarthy then went to find Elokobi, asked him what would be a fair figure, and the Wolves manager returned to the boardroom to say that had to be the agreed deal.


“Before I knew it, I was signing the papers,” Elokobi says. “It was a long day for me and it was my birthday. All I wanted to do was play for the gaffer, I knew the club would take my game to the next level. I thought, he’s going to love me as a player having seen how he came across. He came with a great reputation. I knew I was still very raw in terms of my technical capabilities and the gaffer had been a defender as well.”


Elokobi, whose father died when he was 11, then lived for 12 weeks in a hotel. “I bumped into Mick when I was picking up groceries at the local Spar supermarket and he sees me and says, ‘If you want to eat well you are more than welcome to come to my house every evening for dinner.’


“And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I rang my mum and told her the gaffer actually invited me to go to his house if I wasn’t eating right. That, to me, was like a father to a son. Was I starstruck a little bit? Yes, I had watched him as manager of Ireland and it’s incredible now that I am his player. I didn’t want to let the gaffer down.”


“What you saw was an uncompromising, physical defender and it was up to us to help him to be a better player,” McCarthy says. “He could head it, run, tackle. What we loved about him was that he was prepared to put the work in.”

Elokobi was 16 when he arrived in Britain from Cameroon and was spotted playing in the park. Soon he was a cult figure, scoring 14 goals in a career that spanned six divisions, but the most famous of his goals came against Manchester United in February 2011.


“The magnitude of the game, the entire world had written Wolves off,” he says as he and McCarthy bicker good-naturedly about the details of the league defeat by Bolton Wanderers that had preceded the win against United.


Elokobi felt the team had let down McCarthy against Bolton and so the entire team raised their game for an unlikely 2-1 victory over Sir Alex Ferguson’s side.


“That day earned me my international call-up,” Elokobi says, “and I became recognised everywhere, in supermarkets and on the roads because I had personalised my number plates. People would drive after me to take a photo on the motorway.”


McCarthy, 64, interjects to say he was followed just the once, when he had lost to Coventry City, and was driving down to Bath for a dinner. A car came up alongside his, full of Coventry fans making rude gestures.


“Nobody took pictures of me,” he says laughing. “All I got was wanker signs.”
When visiting his sister in Dallas, Elokobi rented a car and the man behind the desk said: “Hold on, hold on, is this for The Beast? I can’t believe this. McCarthy’s body double.”

 

McCarthy chuckles and explains how, during a post-match TV interview, a shirtless, muscled Elokobi had approached him and McCarthy had quipped: “Here’s my body double.”

 

“You made the best of yourself and are doing the same as a manager,” McCarthy says.


“I was out there [at Wolves] learning as much as I could, absorbing everything,” Elokobi says.

 

“Technically, tactically I was getting better. I never saw myself as a manager. I started my coaching badges in 2018, and then I stopped. Why? My reason was discrimination in football. There were no other black managers in the dugout. The only one I could see was Chris Hughton [the manager of Brighton & Hove Albion at the time]. I thought, what chance have I got? Who is going to offer George Elokobi a job?”

 

His ambition drifted to becoming a strength and conditioning coach or an assistant “because that’s what I saw at the time”.

 

However, upon joining Aldershot Town in 2019, Gary Waddock, the manager, asked him whether he was taking his coaching badges.


“I told him I was done with badges and inequality was my reason,” Elokobi says.

 

“The only way to change that is to become one,” McCarthy says.

 

Waddock told Elokobi that within his first two weeks he had changed the mentality of the club. He said, ‘So you know what that means? You are a leader. Everyone listens to you like you are the manager, please reconsider.’


“So I spoke to my missus,” Elokobi says, “who said you never know where that can take you.”
Naturally, Elokobi also asked for McCarthy’s advice.


“I recognised his leadership skills fairly quickly,” McCarthy says. “Even when we tried to sign him I could see he was straightforward, honest. He wasn’t hell set on getting a certain amount and upsetting the apple cart if he didn’t get it. It was clear he could after himself in the dressing room and on the pitch. If you do things correctly you get respect. He wasn’t the best player by any stretch of the imagination but if you do 100 per cent in training you get the respect.”


“I say this to my players now,” Elokobi says, “even when the gaffer didn’t pick me, I had to make sure I was selfless, I always put the environment first. The players knew I would run through brick walls for them and the gaffer. The gaffer knew that, the fans knew that.”


Maidstone’s Saturday lunchtime fourth-round trip to Ipswich Town, who are second in the Sky Bet Championship, will be televised live on the BBC. Portman Road, though, does not hold fond memories for Elokobi as it was the scene of the dreadful knee injury that almost ended his career.


“I was flying that season,” Elokobi recalls. “After two weeks the gaffer calls me in and says I need to slow down and that I don’t need to prove anything to him. I was given a one-in-ten chance of playing again.”


“The injury was so innocuous as well,” McCarthy says. “It’s ironic, you’re going to Ipswich in the cup tie, got injured there and I managed there for six years.
“I want George to do well. I had six happy years at Ipswich and I want them to do well. If you beat Ipswich you’ll have to play out of your skin and they will have had to have had a real bad day because they are a good side.


“Maidstone should try to win it and not sit back because if they do, Ipswich will pick a hole in them. I’m not going to give George any tactical advice, they’re better than you. Just give everything and if you do that you have a chance.”


Maidstone, anyway, have a dash of McCarthyism. “I rang the gaffer in the summer when I was rebuilding the team,” Elokobi says, “and he told me, ‘You will know what to do when you think how we got our success at Wolves’. And it’s paid off.”

 

“I guessed his team would be like one of mine,” McCarthy says. “He expects everyone to run around, any slackers wouldn’t be in the team. First and foremost you need a really good atmosphere around the place.”

 

Even Elokobi’s acting career brings us back to McCarthy. Elokobi was hired to be part of Ted Lasso as one of a group of former professionals who would pretend to be Manchester City players facing AFC Richmond. It was choreographed, not real football, he says.

 

“I don’t limit myself to one thing, I can do anything if I put my mind to it,” he says. “And how ironic is this? Manchester City is where the gaffer gave me my Premier League debut. So the crew were asking if I had ever been to the Etihad and I was laughing.”

 

He swapped shirts on that debut with Emmanuel Adebayor but immediately worried in case his gaffer thought he was more interested in the glamour of the occasion and rarely ever swapped shirts again.

 

If Hollywood came calling then he would go, he says, but only if at the end of his Maidstone career, adding that also on his resumé is a promotional video he did for a Godzilla movie, which involved being in a cage against two other footballers. He then treats me to his movie star villain stare. Ipswich beware.

 

Quickfire Q&A

Win a league title or the FA Cup?
George Elokobi : League title.
Mick McCarthy: League title, it’s the test of a season.

Strictly Come Dancing or Ted Lasso?
GE: Ted Lasso
MM: I’m all over Strictly. Were you in Ted Lasso?

Coaching or playing?
GE: Playing
MM: Playing

Yorkshire pudding or groundnut soup?
Both in unison: Yorkshire pudding.

That’s lovely that. I want George as manager to finish the job when MM’s taken us to L1. 

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