On a recent episode of The Chelsea Spot Podcast, we were lucky enough to speak to Chelsea legend Pat Nevin. He was fantastic throughout the interview, giving us loads of amazing insight into what it was like at Chelsea when he was a player, what it’s like being in and around Chelsea nowadays, and everything in between. In this article I will briefly detail some of Pat’s best quotes from the interview, but I highly recommend listening to the podcast the whole way through here, as Pat was so generous with his time.
Some of the best players I remember playing against during my time for Chelsea were Glenn Hoddle, Bryan Robson, Graeme Souness, Kenny Dalglish, Gary Lineker, Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi.
What a list of names, eh!
Pat was keen to point out that although he played Gary Lineker loads of times, ‘we usually hammered his team’.
I’ve got a load of old shirts, and I found out that I played against France, because I had the shirt. I can’t remember playing against France! Anyway, I must have swapped shirts at the end of the game, and I ended up with the number 9. I wondered to myself, ‘who played number 9 for France that day, because I can’t remember the geezer.’ Anyway, I looked it up, and it turns out that it was some bloke called Cantona!
So Pat had all these shirts that he had just dumped in a bin liner, and turns out they’re the old shirts of the likes of Cantona, Konchesky, and many more!
When I played for the the Premier League amalgam team at Wembley against the ‘Rest Of World XI’, I played against a couple of geezers. One guy called Platini, he was alright, and one called Maradona! To be honest though, Diego was rubbish that day.
Pat did make it clear that it wasn’t a slight at Maradona, who is one of his favourite players ever!
Pele said to me, ‘hey, we got on great. Why don’t you come over and stay with me in Brazil?’
This was part of an absolutely insane story from Pat (if you can’t tell already, he was full of them) in which he had to take care of Pele for a day and it ended up with Pele asking Pat to come over and hang out with him.
There was a real push from clubs and people in power to not allow you to speak out against racism in the game, but I couldn’t give a stuff.
When I see the guys taking the knee, my heart soars, because I’d love to have seen that in my time – for us to be able to have done that, and not get snide remarks.
These two quotes are just a tiny snippet of a fantastically detailed answer from Pat to my question on how important it is that more white players follow in Pat’s footsteps in condemning racism in the game.
The fact that all the quotes in this article come before the fifteenth minute in the interview, which is seventy-one minutes long in its entirety, just shows how fantastically full of stories Pat was. I highly recommend listening to the whole Podcast to hear all the other fantastic quotes from Pat that came in the other fifty-six minutes!
You can listen to it in this article, in which you can also find all the links to the Podcast on various different platforms.
The Chelsea Spot 