Stoke City: 9-day absence just part of the reason Peter Coates branded £900k signing “a disgrace
Stoke City have had a fair few controversial players on their books over the years and maybe none more so than Guinean striker Sammy Bangoura.
The Potters were stuck in a rut in the Championship in the mid-2000s, and their Icelandic owners had overseen some key changes prior to the 2005/06 season, with boss Tony Pulis sacked and replaced by Dutch manager Johan Boskamp.
Boskamp oversaw the arrival of numerous overseas players, such as Carl Hoefkens, Hannes Sigurdsson, and Martin Kolar, but it wasn’t until deadline day that Stoke forked out a club-record fee of £950,000 for then 23-year-old Bangoura from Belgian club Standard Liege.
He got off to a strong start with the Potters as they chased promotion, but things soon went wrong for him at the club after he went off to represent his nation at the African Cup of Nations.
Sammy Bangoura failed to turn up to Stoke training after AFCON
Bangoura had been a consistent scorer in the Belgian First Division with Lokeren and Standard Liege, but he had to bide his time with Stoke as he waited two months for his work permit to be granted and then was arrested at East Midlands Airport in the process of moving.
He soon had his charges dropped, however, and was able to feature for the Potters.
The Guinean bagged on his first start at the Britannia Stadium in a 2-0 win over Crewe Alexandra, and soon went on a great goal-scoring run, with seven goals in six games in the lead-up to Christmas to win the Championship’s Player of the Month award for November.
He had been a regular for his country since his international debut in 2000, so left Stoke in mid-January to play in the African Cup of Nations in Egypt and led Guinea to a quarter-final defeat against Senegal before he was supposed to report back in the Potteries ahead of the club’s February 4 visit of Preston North End.
Bangoura, however, was a no-show at the training ground, and he had still not turned up by February 9, after his agent had claimed that he had been the subject of a £2.75m bid from an unnamed Russian club.
Stoke chairman Gunnar Gislason duly turned down the bid for his star man, which boss Boskamp was pleased about, but the Dutchman had some strong words to say to the media regarding the 23-year-old’s disappearance after he still failed to turn up following the club’s 3-0 loss to Cardiff City on February 11.
“It is three times more than we paid for him a few months ago, but the main thing is we want to keep him,” Boskamp told the Stoke Sentinel.
“I drove past his house on Tuesday night and the lights were on, so I don’t understand (why he hasn’t appeared at training).
