The goals counted; the players still do

What does a forward do when the scoring stops?

Jiří Pudil scored 269 goals in 856 club games, 209 of them in 571 appearances for Chelsea. He played for seven clubs and won 137 caps for his country, scoring 62 times. He was a Czech forward who spent the best part of two decades at Chelsea, and he finished playing in 2052/53. That is the ledger. It does not say what he did next.

What he did next was stay. Since 4 November 2058 he has been a coach at Chelsea's under-21s, five years of mornings on a training pitch, of players who were not born when he first pulled on the shirt.

The numbers, and the man

Look at the clubs and the shape of a career emerges. Teplice, where it began in 2031/32: 34 games, one goal, a teenager learning what a professional pitch feels like. Norwich City for 41 games and six goals; Tottenham Hotspur for 44 and seven. Then Chelsea, from 2033/34 to 2048/49, where the goals came at better than one every three games. And at the end, two seasons abroad: FC Nantes, 82 games and 34 goals, and Al-Ittihad Club Jeddah, 84 games and 12 goals, the legs going before the instinct did.

He was not a player who made the game look easy. He made it look like work, and the work was rewarded. The 70 trophies of his career were the subject of a piece in these pages in September, and they are the kind of thing that gets counted when a player has been at a club through a period like Chelsea's. But trophies are won by squads, and Pudil was one man in a very large machine.

What the under-21s get

Chelsea's under-21s do not play in front of the crowds that watched Pudil. They play in front of parents and scouts and, on a good day, a handful of people who have nothing better to do. The players are young and in a hurry and convinced that the first team is a matter of weeks away. Pudil was once that player.

He is not a shouter. People who have watched him work describe a coach who stands close to the touchline and talks a forward through the run he should have made, not the one he did. He knows the difference between a striker who has stopped scoring and a striker who has stopped believing, because he was both. The goals dried up at the end in Jeddah, 12 in 84 games, and he kept playing. That is the lesson he passes on.

There is a nice piece of symmetry in the fact that the first team is in the news this week. Chelsea's Júnior and Vanja Mačkić are both wanted by Al-Hilal Saudi Football Club and Al-Nassr Football Club, and Bruce Hilgers by Al-Nassr too. And on the same day, Marcelo Formicola scored a hat-trick for Chelsea against Sportklub Sturm Graz in the Champions League. Pudil's under-21s will have watched that. Their coach knows what a hat-trick feels like, and he knows what comes after it: the next training session, the next game, the long ordinary middle of a career.

The long middle

Pudil's own middle was 571 games for Chelsea. That is not a number you reach by being brilliant once. It is a number you reach by being available, by being useful, by being the player a manager picks when the game is tight and the crowd is restless. The under-21s he coaches now are trying to learn that. Most of them will not play 571 games for Chelsea. Some will not play 571 games anywhere. But they will have had a coach who did, and who can tell them what it cost and what it gave back.

He is 48 now. He has been at Chelsea, in one capacity or another, for most of his adult life. The club's run of English Premier Division titles goes back to 2022/23 and is still going; its run of Champions League titles ended in 2062/63 when the club finished runners-up. Pudil played through the middle of that. Now he watches from the side of a smaller pitch, and the work goes on.

The goals are counted and finished. The players are not.