SOCCER:IF, AS looks increasingly likely, he does start in Skopje tomorrow night, it will be a remarkable conclusion to an eventful season for 24 year-old Simon Cox who, only two years ago, was plying his trade with Swindon Town in League One in England.
He virtually kept the club up single-handed that year, scoring 29 goals in 45 games, a rate of return that made him something of a hot property at the end of the campaign. Roberto Di Matteo won the race for his signature with the then West Brom boss paying an initial fee of around €1.75 million for him as he sought to assemble a side capable of winning promotion back to the Premier League.
Cox was not quite so prolific at the higher level but still did his bit, scoring eight times in 19 starts. Once West Brom were back in the top flight, however, he started to drift towards the margins of the team. In the League Cup he managed three goals in two games but failed to make the hoped for impact in the league and by the time Di Matteo was sacked, the striker was beginning to wonder about his future with the club.
When Roy Hodgson came in and left him out of his first starting line up, he admits; “I thought that was me,” but the former Liverpool manager gave him his chance, in the more withdrawn role behind the strikers he has played a fair bit over the years at club level; not long after and having come on to score a stunning goal at White Hart Lane, he was a regular.
He had first signalled his ambition to play for Ireland, on the basis of a maternal grandmother, Mary Langan from Headford, Co Galway, last season but was sufficiently sure nothing would come to pass this summer that he had booked a holiday in Spain.
Instead, he got both his call-up and, with Kevin Doyle injured, his debut. Scoring the fifth goal in the win over Northern Ireland rounded off a pretty good night.
“Yeah,” he said last week, “I thought I played well. I was quite happy with the way myself and Robbie linked up, We are sort of similar in the way that we play together, the same type of player and I thought personally it was a decent all round performance.
“I wasn’t expecting to play in the first game, let alone the second. I didn’t think that far ahead to the Macedonia game or indeed the Italy game. It was just all ‘gonna come over, enjoy, get to meet everybody’.”
Just a few days later he is the most certain of the three strikers of his place, with Shane Long now appearing to be waiting to see whether Keane is fit enough to start.
It’s something of a turnaround on Cox’s days at his hometown club, Reading. He joined at eight and made his first team debut in late 2005. He was gone a year later, though, having found his opportunities for advancement effectively curtailed by, amongst other things, the arrival of a couple of promising young strikers from Cork City. . .
