Marlon King – sad times for a player that used to be one of my heroes

Marlon King was one of my heroes. As a Watford fan I was not thrilled when then manager Aidy Boothroyd brought him to the club as he was a player who carried an awful lot of personal baggage and also seemed to be a striker who didn’t score goals.

Flopped

He had done pretty well at Gillingham but had then flopped at Nottingham Forest where he had found the net just ten times in fifty appearances. A loan spell at Leeds had been even less successful where he failed to score in nine games.

Against that background and his numerous criminal convictions, he seemed like a very strange person to bring to a club who were favourites for relegation from the Championship and didn’t have anybody who could find the net.

Promised

That 2005-06 season however, saw King score twenty-one goals in forty-one league games and play the major part in taking unfashionable Watford to the promised land of the Premier League via a 3-0 play-off final win against Leeds.

In the Premier League, King opened his account with a stunning strike against West Ham and then scored a second against Fulham. He then picked up a knee injury that kept him out of the game for six months and Watford careered towards relegation.

Returned

When he returned it was too late to save the club from going down but he did score in the last two games of the season.

Before Christmas the next season in the Championship, King had already bagged ten goals as Watford sat at the top. In the January transfer window a move was inevitable and although a move to Fulham fell through because of a problem with the medical, he was taken to Wigan for a fee of £3 million.

Failure

That was when it all went wrong for King again. One goal in eighteen for Wigan, five in twenty for Hull and two in thirteen for Middlesbrough. However, it wasn’t the failure to produce on the pitch that was the major problem, it was his off field behaviour that made the headlines.

He has just been released from prison after he had been sentenced to eighteen months for sexually assaulting a twenty-year old woman in a nightclub and punching her in the face, breaking her nose. After he was found guilty of the attack the court heard he had thirteen previous convictions.

Identity

King says that he was the victim of a case of mistaken identity. He had been out that night celebrating the fact that his wife was pregnant again, but has always denied being the man involved in the attack on the woman.

Talking to the BBC, King said,

“I’m not trying to paint myself as an angel but I am no sex beast. Just because I’ve made mistakes it doesn’t make me guilty of every crime I’m accused of. People say to me, ‘why aren’t you remorseful?’ You can’t be remorseful for something you haven’t done.”

Unlikely

King says he will do all he can to clear his name and have the conviction overturned, but as a lay person with only a limited knowledge of the facts, I see that as being highly unlikely.

The question is now whether at thirty years of age, with just eight goals in his last fifty-one appearances, a bad knee and having served a prison sentence, anyone will take a chance on King and give him the opportunity to show that his great performances at Watford were not just a ‘flash in the pan’.

I’ve watched him play at close quarters and at his best he was close to being unplayable. He is no longer one of my heroes but I will always remember just how good he was in that one season at Vicarage Road.