Great player Francis never quite achieved greatness

LONDON : There was so much more to Trevor Francis than becoming British football's first one million pound player but, despite boasting what would be an enviable CV for most players, there was always a feeling that he never quite fulfilled his potential.

Francis, who died of a heart attack at 69 on Monday, made his Football League debut at 16, scored a European Cup final winning goal and collected 52 England caps in a 23-year playing career as a hugely exciting, talented and brave forward.

But, other than his first couple of highly successful seasons with Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest, Francis always seemed to be almost tantalising in the wrong place at the wrong time both for club and country.

It would be unfair to say the record transfer fee was an albatross around Francis's neck, as Clough is reputed to have suggested it might have been when claiming that Forest actually paid 999,000 pounds.

But the striker was never quite able to attain the superstar status that seemed his destiny when he blasted onto the scene as a brilliant teenager in the famous blue and white Birmingham City "penguin" kit.

To today’s generation used to players earning a million pounds a month and being sold for 100 times that amount, it is impossible to appreciate the impact of the deal that took Francis to Forest in 1979 for almost double the previous record.

"I never realised at the time the significance of it. I smashed, literally smashed, the transfer record. It was just a magical figure – a million pounds," he told the Guardian on the 40th anniversary of the transfer in 2019.

MERCURIAL SKILLS

By the time of his move Francis had already been toiling at St Andrew's for almost a decade, his mercurial skills somewhat blunted by the club's perennial