Dwight Yorke went from a Tobago friendly to Manchester United's treble season
In 1989 Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor toured the West Indies and watched a 17-year-old from Tobago play against his side in a friendly. He offered Dwight Yorke a trial. A decade later Yorke was the Premier League's joint top scorer and a key part of Manchester United's historic 1999 treble.
Yorke began at Villa as a right winger and only moved to centre forward in 1995-96, when he blossomed into one of the division's leading strikers. He scored in the 3-0 League Cup final win over Leeds in 1996 and totalled 97 goals in 284 games. His exit was messy: manager John Gregory wanted Andy Cole in exchange, Yorke appeared to go through the motions on the opening day at Everton, and Villa sold him to United for 12.6 million pounds in August 1998.
Paired with Cole, he was superb in his first season. He finished with 18 league goals, scored against Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Inter and Juventus in Europe, and was voted the Premier League's player of the season as United won the league, FA Cup and Champions League. By the time he left in 2002 he had 65 goals in 152 United appearances, and his 123 Premier League goals stood as the record for a non-European until Sergio Aguero passed it in 2017.
A later detour took him to Australia's new A-League, where Sydney FC paid him a million dollars a season as its marquee player. He scored the club's first league goal with a diving header, then set up the only goal of the inaugural grand final before a crowd above 41,000 and won the Joe Marston Medal. Roy Keane then brought him to Sunderland, where he was often used as a defensive midfielder.
For Trinidad and Tobago he scored 19 goals. He was in the 1989 Strike Squad that just missed the 1990 World Cup, and was dropped with Russell Latapy in 2001 after the pair skipped training following a night out. Yorke came back to captain the team at its first World Cup in 2006, winning man of the match in a goalless draw with Sweden. As a coach he won the Australia Cup with Macarthur in 2022.
Source: Dwight Yorke
