Championship Letters 3: Nolberto Solano as Paddington
Championship Letters 3: Nolberto Solano as Paddington
Not too many can attract applause from all four corners of a ground, but Nolberto Solano’s unlikely new start at Leicester on Saturday provoked a thunderous show of love from Newcastle and Foxes’ fans alike. In this, he resembles more than ever his fellow Peruvian national, Paddington Bear. Diminutive in stature and the kind of person football fans just want to hug, I’m sure he has had many a Jury’s Inn marmalade breakfast forced upon him, no doubt with the result of a very hard stare on each occasion. Both “men” have also seen their image appear on postage stamps in their time.
Rob Langham is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 50 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.