Alex McLeish’s Birmingham City side are going from strength to strength in the Premier League, with veteran striker Kevin Phillips’ late brace against Wolverhampton Wanderers at St Andrew’s consolidating their 8th-placed position and leaving Blues with just one defeat from 17 games. This current squad looks like they could be going places, but Sport.co.uk wants to know: whatever happened to the following 5 Birmingham City players?
1. Liam Daish
Former Blues manager and extremely loud man Barry Fry once said of Daish that if a squadron of F-111s attacked the Birmingham penalty area he would attempt to head them away. This theory was never given the chance to be put into practise, but the Irish international (born in Portsmouth, naturally) centre-half was arguably the Scot Dann or Roger Johnson of his day until he joined Coventry City for £1.5m in 1996. He is currently head coach of Ebbsfleet United, the non-league outfit of MyFootballClub fame.
2. Jeff Kenna
The Dublin-born defender with the middle name Jude made 69 appearances for Blue between 2002 and 2004, scoring 3 rarer-than-rare goals, including one against his first club Southampton. He resigned as manager of St Patrick’s Athletic in September last year.
3. Stan Lazaridis
The Australian left-winger spent seven years at St Andrews’, scoring a winner against bitter local rivals Aston Villa, a stunning solo effort in a 3-0 win over Everton and, all in all, he made 222 appearances for the club. He went on to play in his native A-League but got banned and dropped after testing positive for notorious masking agent anti-androgen Finasteride.
4. Paul Tait
The midfielder, who made 170 appearances for Blues in 11 years at the club, is most famous for scoring the winner in the 1995 Auto Windscreens Shield final before revealing a t-shirt that read “Sh*t on the Villa”, a stunt that was paid tribute to by Swansea City players in the same fixture eleven years later when Lee Trundle revealed a shirt depicting a Swansea player urinating on a Cardiff City shirt.
5. Ian Bennett
The goalkeeper made 350 appearances for the club between 1993 and 2005 and, now aged 38, is still going as substitute goalkeeper at Championship club Sheffield United.