The boy who kept scoring

There was a time, and it doesn't feel like sixteen years ago, when a slight lad from Lisbon stood in the tunnel with the rain coming down sideways and the noise rolling off the stands like a tide. He'd come from Benfica, where he'd scored a few and learned a lot, and now he was pulling on a black-and-white shirt for the first time. Nobody in that ground knew quite what they were getting. They do now.

Sousa went on to play 594 games for Newcastle United between 2029/30 and 2046/47, scoring 296 goals. When he finally left for Arsenal, he added another 94 games and 36 goals in a season and a bit. Add the early days at Benfica and Benfica B, and you get 806 club games and 369 goals. Not bad for a player who never looked like he was built for the rough stuff.

He wasn't a bully of a centre-forward. He was a runner, a thinker, a player who arrived in the box at the exact moment the ball did. The old-timers on the terraces used to say he had eyes in the back of his head. He didn't. He just read the game quicker than anyone else. And he did it for sixteen years in the toughest league going.

The trophies came, too. Eleven of them, spread across his career. Three UEFA Europa Conference League titles, two Portuguese Premier League titles, two Portuguese Super Cups, two Portuguese League Cups, an English FA Cup, and an Olympic gold medal. He was named UEFA Europa Conference League Player of the Season in 2034, and Young Player of the Season the same year. In 2037 he won the UEFA Europa League Golden Boot. For Portugal he played 112 times and scored 56 goals. You don't do that by accident.

But the numbers, as I say, don't tell you everything. They don't tell you about the way he'd drop a shoulder and leave a defender for dead, or the way he'd celebrate a goal by running to the corner flag and sliding on his knees in the mud. They don't tell you about the time he came back to Newcastle in an Arsenal shirt and got a standing ovation from the home crowd before kick-off. He scored that day, I seem to remember. Of course he did.

The game has changed a lot since he stopped playing after the 2047/48 season. The money's different, the tactics are different, the boots are different. But the things that made Diogo Sousa a great player – the movement, the finishing, the hunger – those things don't change. They never will.

So here's to the boy from Lisbon who became a favourite in the North East. He didn't shout about it. He just kept scoring. And sixteen years on, we're still talking about him. That's the mark of the man.