Talented players have fallen by the wayside since time immemorial (see: Adel Taarabt and Ricardo Quaresma), but some brilliant players have made the most of next-to-no natural gifts to reach the top of the game.
Miroslav Klose
Miroslav
Klose is a bizarre footballing miracle. The highest scorer ever in
World Cups (with 16 goals) and the highest scorer for one of European
football's greatest and most consistently competitive nations, without
ever having anything particularly special or notable about him.
If that sounds like a criticism, it's anything but. Klose is one of the most perfect models of professionalism, a player who made the most of his relatively modest talent with non-stop hard work and an insatiable desire to score goals, which saw him do his best work on the biggest stages.
John Obi Mikel
Chelsea's
spiritual successor to Claude Makelele, Obi Mikel is one of the modern
game's great unsung heroes. Not blessed with a magic bag of tricks or a
thunderbolt shot (he didn't score a Premier League goal for nearly eight
seasons), but he's worked tirelessly throughout his career to
facilitate the greatness of others.
The
nature of his talent means that he'll never get the praise and
individual recognition he probably deserves, but his worth to his team
is clear in his trophy cabinet - four FA Cups, two Premier League
titles, two League Cups, a Champions League and a Europa League, and a
key contributor as Nigeria won the African Cup of Nations for the first
time in 19 years in 2013. A clutch, clutch performer.
Charlie Austin
There's drive, and then there's drive.
The kind of player who'll keep hammering away at the door to get his
big chance, no matter what the odds against him. Jamie Vardy's another
example of this, but he's at least always had his lightning pace to fall
back on. Austin has... well, what?
What he has is drive. What he has is determination. To the eye, he's just a big Sunday League lad, and it seems like his luck on the bigger stage will run out - but it never, ever does, because it's not luck, it's just near-unmatched levels of hard work.
Jamie Vardy
The
rise of Jamie Vardy has been as well documented as man landing on the
moon back before most people owned a television. From the depths of
Non-League football to Premier League record-breaker in the space
of five-years, Vardy has become one of the hottest strikers in world
football.
Having
broke Ruud van Nistelrooy's long-standing record of scoring in
11 consecutive Premier League games in November 2015, the Englishman has
seen his stock rise dramatically. So much so that in
the minute after he netted against Manchester United, there were an
astonishing 26,839 tweets mentioning the Leicester striker's name,
seeing him trend worldwide on Twitter.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer
You're
going to have a little bit of hardness to you if you've done a year of
national service before you've even started your footballing career, but
Solskjaer's steel was always more mental than physical. He showed this
when he arrived as an unknown backup to superstars Eric Cantona and Andy
Cole, but still managed to establish himself quickly as a key member of
the Manchester United squad.
The 'baby-faced assassin' used to spend even his bench time wisely, saying once about his time waiting to come in "I sat there and I studied football games but I didn't exactly analyse their strikers. [...] Instead I would pay attention to what the defenders and full-backs were doing wrong."
James Milner
James
Milner. He runs and he runs and he never stops running. He's built an
entire career around working harder than anybody else, and he's been
brilliantly dedicated enough to make it work, with 50+ England caps and
counting.
Even now that he's past the age of 30, he's such an incredible model of hard work that he demands one of the highest wage packets for an Englishman in the Premier League, and he's bound to be one of Jurgen Klopp's main men on and off the pitch going forward as he tries to instill that kind of work ethic into his young squad.
Wes Morgan
The
Leicester City captain fashioned a solid but unspectacular career for
himself in the Football League, and it looked for a while as if that'd
be his peak. That was until he helped the Foxes to the Premier League
in 2014 and made his Premier League debut, finally reaching the pinnacle
of English football at the age of 30.
Since then he's just been on the up-and-up, being a surprisingly stabilising presence in a shaky defensive line, while his off-field fitness work helped him top the Premier League speed charts this year at nearly 32 years old.
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