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The MFXI has come to an end, and the honour of submitting the final team went to Chris Lines, author of the always excellent Narrow The Angle. Chris has plumped for a team unlike any other, and it’s simply impossible to tell how it would get on against all the others.

Previous Favourite XI: Born Offside
Next Favourite XI (*ahem*): Ollie Irish

Goalkeeper: Billy The Fish (Fulchester United)

What a stopper Billy was. Unconstrained by the restrictions of gravity, he could get to pretty much any shot with a nifty waft of his fins. Half man, half fish, all goalkeepers should be made this way. I also like that he was part-fish and had a mullet – mullet, fish, geddit? A tremendous servant to Fulchester United, Billy thankfully never made the much-mooted move to Dynamo Mars, where we’d have inevitably have been starved of seeing his talents on terrestrial television.

Right Back: Alexei Cherednik (Southampton, circa 1990)

Cherednik is included here largely for symbolic reasons. He encapsulates the exoticism with which my childhood self viewed foreign footballers that came to these shores. Anybody who wasn’t called Mick Gynn or Ed Stein seemed pretty damn exciting in my book. Of course, most of them turned out to be unspeakably awful, mirroring much of the rest of life. Turns out dropping a Refreshers sweet into a can of Cherry 7up and watching it fix uncontrollably isn’t the most thrilling thing in life either.

My 10-year-old self would never have believed this. My favourite Cherednik anecdote is that on debut he allegedly rolled the ball back into play, rather than the traditional behind-the-head throw-in. Barry Horne had to offer an impromptu demonstration of the rules, so the story goes. Alexei Cherednik was really quite rubbish, though his name was fun to say when commentating on yourself down the park.

Centre Back: Mark Smith (Bristol Rovers, Championship Manager 3, circa 1998)

Good old captain Smithy formed the backbone of my legendary, star-studded team on Championship Manager 3 during my first two years of university, alongside other top-drawer internationals including Dean Keates, David Woozley and Howard Forinton. Nobody got past Smith. Not even Ian Moore. That’s right, even Ian Moore was rendered useless against the mighty Mark Smith. Tackling 20, Heading 20, Strength 20 – surely the best defender in the history of the world?

Centre Back: Ugo Le Tissier (Partick Thistle, Sensible World of Soccer, circa 1995)

SWOS fans will remember the slightly clunky fashion in which new, young players would appear on the game. The database would randomly allocate an existing first name and surname from the required nationality to create a new player. This had very much mixed results – my Partick squad also contained a Graeme Graham and somebody with the surname Akinbiyi whose first name seemed incongruous with it. Might have been Tim Akinbiyi – let’s face it; you’re not going to check.

Big Ugo – who, incidentally, was white with blonde hair – was the first name on the teamsheet for me at Partick, as one of the best kits in football (red-and-yellow stripes, black shorts) showed the Old Firm who the best team in Glasgow really was. Just don’t mention the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Spartak Vladikavkaz in 1998/99 season. In the 90th minute, Ugo had the goal at his mercy to force extra time, but inexplicably ballooned over.

Left Back: Simon Melson (Orchard Lea playing fields, circa 1995)

Melson was at least six years my junior and would always turn up at the local park and skulk moodily at the side of the pitch until we let him join in. Being about half the height of us ‘bigger boys’, he’d inevitably see precious little of the ball. This would eventually become too much and he’d start to cry. This unfailingly did the trick in the pity stakes and we’d all start passing regularly to little Simon, discreetly encouraging the opposition to “give him a chance”. This grace period generally lasted either until the game finished or until Simon’s mum would come and bellow out his name – a sure sign that it was either tea- or bath-time, not to mention time for the ‘proper’ game to recommence.

Right Midfied: Mohammed Berthe (AFC Bournemouth, 1998/99 season)

Every team needs a maverick nutcase – and the only reason you’ve probably never heard of the positively pecan-esque Mo Berthe is because he was slightly too crackers for his wonderful maverick streak to cope with. A heavy-legged yet pacey, wardrobe-sized wide midfielder, Berthe’s party piece was to cut in from the right wing near the halfway line before pointing himself in the vague direction of the goal and getting any sort of connection with the ball as long as it was phenomenally hard. At this point it was usually a case of spotting which spectator in row T was about to get hurt.

Occasionally he’d get one on target and we’d all go “Ooooh!” as it fizzed through the air like a 99p plastic ball from a petrol station. On a couple of occasions these poorly manufactured Exocets went in. Boom! New goal net please. Berthe would only make a dozen or so appearances for Bournemouth, and after the game when he dived to win a free-kick with his first touch and injured his knee (causing a second-minute substitution) we didn’t hear a lot more of him. Fun while it lasted though.

Centre Midfield: Mick Kennedy (Bradford & Leicester, 1988/89 season)

Included because I’d rather have him than be against him, Kennedy is the only player I’ve ever seen that could rival Kevin Muscat in a seriously-dirty-and-nasty-piece-of-work contest. Eight-year-old me got a real treat in the late 1980s when Bradford came down to play Bournemouth at Dean Court. Kennedy got a red card and how we all laughed and jeered as he stomped off. It was like he couldn’t believe this had happened to a jobbing honest pro like him. Bradford, presumably seeing this as the final straw, sold him to Leicester.

Suspension served, Kennedy was ready to make his debut. And who were Leicester playing that weekend? Yep, Bournemouth. We ‘welcomed’ Mick back each time he touched the ball – learned a few naughty words that day, I did – and weren’t nearly done having our fun when he successfully got himself sent off again. Sent off on the same away ground in successive games. What a guy.

Centre Midfield: Jamie Redknapp (AFC Bournemouth, 1989-91)

The day 16-year-old Redknapp first stepped on the pitch at Dean Court, within half a dozen touches of the ball my dad was proclaiming him as a future England captain. People sitting nearby were in agreement. He just had it, and you could see it straight away. The kid seemed to have so much time on the ball, played with his head up, such sumptuous passing ability – we knew we had to make the most of him while we could. Bournemouth never hang on to his sort for long. Frustratingly, wily Kenny Dalglish knew a good thing when he saw it and snaffled up Harry Jnr for a piffling £350,000.

And had it not been for Redknapp’s wretched injury problems, he probably would have captained England a few times too. A fine midfielder, whose reputation as a player is perhaps tarnished for being part of the ‘Spice Boys’ group at Liverpool and by one or two rather uncharacteristic dirty tackles towards the end at Spurs and Southampton once his legs had gone.

Left Midfield: Myself, aged 16

Surely you’d put yourself in your Favourite XI, right? If not, what’s wrong with you? Leggy and worryingly lacking in stamina, but with plenty of pace and the sort of ball control that a lanky lad only gets by kicking a ball around after school every day for years, I was utterly in love with playing football by my mid-teens. Goals over girls seemed to be the way of it. I could only score good goals too. I’d beat the three men and lob the keeper no problem, but could always be relied upon to fluff the tap-ins, much to our school sports teacher’s frustration.

Stupidly though, on leaving school and flunking the trials for the sixth-form college team because they put me at centre-back for my height (I head like a girl), I promptly stopped playing football altogether for two years. A huge regret to this day, I was a quarter of the player once I started playing again at university. Beer and kebabs put paid to what little chance I had of getting it back again. Now, at 30, I’m the most ordinary and non-descript player you could ever see. I always knew I’d lose my pace; I just wasn’t prepared for the fact that I’d lose the guile too. I thought guile increased with age? Ah well…

Striker: F. Knight (Bormuff FC, Player Manager (Amiga), circa 1991)

For children of the late 1970s and early 1980s an Amiga computer was a must-have, vastly superior to any Atari or Commodore 64. And the best football management game of them all was the brilliantly innovative Player Manager, made by Dino Dini for Anco. The game’s best gimmick was that you only controlled one player – the player-manager – the rest you just managed. So you’d be hurtling around the pitch trying to tackle your own teammates, in the hope of pegging it downfield, hurdling challenges, before attempting to lob the keeper (done with a sudden, backward yank of the joystick).

It was always a sad day when the player-manager got to retirement age (normally about 33) and you were forced to just watch. Thankfully though, I had F Knight. He was my Dixie Dean. He just oozed goals. I sometimes wondered what the mysterious ‘F’ initial stood for. I think I settled on ‘Frank’ in the end. What a hero.

Striker: Andri Sigporsson (Swansea City, Championship Manager 99/00 Edition)

Perhaps the best thing about the Championship Manager (and subsequently Football Manager) series of games for the PC was that you could swap stories with your mates about the amazing yet obscure young starlets that you’d unearthed, so that they could then sign them as well.

The likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Javier Saviola and Kim Kallstrom were legends in the Championship Manager world long before anyone in Britain knew who they were in real life. But I’ve gone for Sigporsson here, the nippy Icelandic focal point of my all-conquering Swansea side. He would guarantee you 30 goals a season. It was nailed on, especially with the service he was getting from Kennedy Bakircioglü. I wonder what he and F Knight would have been capable of together…

Substitutes:

John Smeulders

Pint-sized Bournemouth reserve goalkeeper from the late 1980s that I rarely got to see play. Looked too small to play at full-back, let alone in goal. Had an excellent moustache if memory serves.

Angus Deayton

Played in the celebrity match before Bournemouth’s 1998 Auto Windscreens Shield Final at Wembley against Grimsby (which we lost, agonisingly, on a Golden Sodding Goal). Surprisingly classy, competent and composed at centre-back, Deayton looked like he could probably have played to a really decent level had comedy not come along. Would have to watch him with the Columbian marching powder though. Wouldn’t want him leading big Ugo Le Tissier astray…

Random Dutch guy who used to play for Willem II

Some time around 2001 I played for my mate’s five-a-side team as a ringer when they were short. On the opposing team was a Dutch midfielder in his late thirties or early forties who had once briefly played for the Eredivisie’s Willem II. I didn’t catch his name. He was so unbelievably good, and made us look like such utter chumps, it really made me realise just how big the gulf is between amateurs and professionals.

Anton Romasz

The Steve Fletcher of the Jewson Wessex League, I used to enjoy watching the absurdly enormous Romasz leave defenders broken and weeping during his spell at my local non-league team Fareham Town. The Creeksiders would pair him up front with a nippy ginger lad called Tyronne Bowers. Together they would wreak havoc before – as so often happens at that level – mysteriously leaving for another club of similar calibre.