This would-be legend for club and country suffered the indignity of moving back in with his parents – and had to beg his employers to pay for potentially career-saving knee surgery in the US. Instead, this Premier League player had to resort to renting out his modest house in Heaton Mersey because he couldn’t afford his £1,000-a-month mortgage. It is no exaggeration to predict Lake could have been every bit as big as Paul Gascoigne, Alan Shearer and David Beckham. He was still in his early twenties when Sky changed the face of football forever, making superstars of even average players.
More of a Duncan Edwards than John O’Shea, if you like.
But far from the dreaded ‘utility player’, he was simply so good that no matter where you played him, the team would be all the stronger for it. Powerful, graceful, athletic and versatile, Lake could play anywhere from full back to withdrawn striker. But a genuinely special talent, who was handed the captaincy of his beloved Blues, aged just 21 and, after narrowly missing out on Italia 90, was tipped by Bobby Robson as a future skipper of his country. Not a world beater in the manner of countless starlets who fall by the wayside when the brutal reality of the professional game hits them like a ton of bricks. Ask any Manchester City fan fortunate enough to see him play and they will tell that Paul Lake had the potential to be a world beater.
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