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| Viking bid goodbye to two club legends |
After a long-awaited first ever meeting with CL Istanbul and Montemor in preseason, Viking North Utsire are gearing up for the new campaign. The Istanbul game resulted in a 1-0 win for Viking's visitors, but the subsequent trip to giants Montemor -- with whom they tangled in the top flight the season before last -- resulted in an unexpectedly straightforward 3-0 win against a side freshly entered into the throes of a major rebuild. It will be VNU's third term in Division 1a, and their second in a row, and they kick off with a familiar trip to Breezly 46 as their first port of call next Monday.
The Norsemen must swiftly learn to cope for the first time without two of their most experienced and decorated players, after the twin retirements at the end of the last campaign of 36-year-old midfielder Clive Whittingham and 38-year-old striker Kent-Arne Fridholm, whose exits leave manager VelvetAndroid with only one remaining player from the squad he inherited when he took charge at Dogger Bank over 16 seasons ago -- defender Andrei Brudan, 35, who has himself announced his impending departure at the end of this campaign. All three players have comfortably over 300 appearances to their name, with only former midfield greats Ilie Colibã (338) and Willi Teichmann (301) having also amassed the triple-century; Fridholm's final tally of 345 sees him retire having broken the former's club record, while Whittingham sits third in the all-time standings on 323, a figure Brudan (315) could yet top before he finishes.
It is in putting the ball in the net that Fridholm while be most missed: his spectacular career tally of 179 goals is far and away the highest in club history, with only Colibã (102) having also reached triple figures. The man whose record Fridholm broke a long time ago, Jimmy Carstairs, reached 'just' 92, with Teichmann (90) the sole other player to have managed even half of Kent-Arne's final total. Long-serving fans still fondly remember present boss Android's first season in charge, Carstairs' retirement campaign, when the Utsirans sometimes fielded a fearsome three-man attack including both Jimmy and Kent-Arne and also featuring Billy Haslop, who hit 67 goals for the club in just 100 appearances overall; the equally decorated likes of Colibã, Teichmann and Basarab Ciobotaru provided the ammunition from midfield.
With 57 assists to his name too (a total itself 6th in the all-time rankings), Fridholm's combined 'scoring points' of 236 falls just narrowly short of Colibã's record 241, with Teichmann's 212 (90 goals and 122 assists) the only other above 200. Whittingham ranks 4th overall with 156, including 68 goals (8th) and 88 assists (3rd behind Colibã and Teichmann). Sheer longevity -- 19 seasons, having joined from the academy as a 19-year-old prodigy -- brought Fridholm a total of 25 bookings, surprisingly the joint-highest in VNU history alongside Colibã, while Whittingham accumulated merely 11 across his whole career. Fridholm's superb tally of 112 Xpert XI nominations meanwhile blows all other Viking players' numbers out of the water, with Teichmann and Colibã completing the podium on 79 and 63 respectively, Whittingham coming in 4th on 50. There are some big boots to be filled at Dogger Bank this season and in those to come.
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