Steve Bone

Yeah, it would have been in his day, wouldn't it, I suppose.

And we did sell Lasana Diarra to Real Madrid, didn't we?

Did we?

Yeah.

I can't imagine there have been too many since then.

I'm thinking back to those League 2 days where we were losing 1-0 home to York City and drawing with Torquay and struggling to beat Fleetwood and Morecambe.

I don't think there were too many Real Madrid scouts there then, was there?

Yeah, it's interesting actually because when people heard...

Real Madrid were interested in Yang, I think they were thinking, hmm, don't know if we've seen enough of him to kind of explain that, really.

But, you know, Real Madrid have probably got a thousand scouts operating around the world, so they spread their net far and wide.

They probably heard a few good things about him, perhaps through Tottenham contacts, and thought they'd have a look at him.

If they'd been looking at him playing for us in the last two or three weeks, I don't think they'd have gone away starting to write their cheques.

Whereas if they'd looked at him in those couple of games in the early season when he was...

finishing well and looked more of a threat than maybe more so.

We'll see what plans different people have for him in January, I suppose, won't we?

Yeah, I think it is a big thing for the top clubs these days.

Pompey tried it a bit ahead of their time in 2001 when they signed Yoshi.

poor old Joshi Kawaguchi the goalkeeper from Japan and they admitted pretty much at the time that part of that was to make Pompey to coin a song title big in Japan it didn't work because he wasn't very good nice bloke but he wasn't really cut out for football in this country curiously popular though wasn't he oh absolutely yeah he became a bit of a sort of cult hero in a way

but one that people were pleased to see replaced in gold when he was.

And just as an aside, sorry, I know you haven't asked me about Yoshi, and that's what I'm talking about, but when I was on the sports desk at the News, we used to, on the back page, we used to have a little panel on the back page every day, just a sort of bite-sized thing about the national and international sport.