Mum’s word for hero

ELLIOTT LIST’S mum Samantha won’t forget her birthday celebrations in a hurry.

Twenty-four hours after her big day, son Elliott got the party started belatedly by scoring Gillingham’s winner to knock out Premier League Cardiff.

The young winger’s match-winning heroics earned him the man-of-the-match award and a bottle of champagne, although he joked he would need to buy a better label for his mum.

“It was her birthday on Friday so we will definitely be celebrating and that one was for her,” he said.

List, 21, described his winner as the best moment of his career so far.

It was a brilliant second-half finish to earn League

One strugglers Gillingham their first win over top-flight opposition for

15 years.

And it was fitting that with his mum and dad watching on, he did exactly what they told him to do as he struggled to get over being released by Crystal Palace in 2015.

He said: “They told me to prove to the world that I can do it.

“I was in the youth team, a good youth team, Aaron Wan-Bissaka was a year younger than me and used to play left wing and I played right and we used to work together.

“Funnily enough, Neil Warnock [Cardiff ’s boss] was the manager for a period while I was there.

“But things didn’t work out for whatever reason.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen then but hopefully things can kick on now.

“When I left Palace, it was a real low point. When you sign for a Premier League club and you’re still in school, you think, ‘Wow, I’m going to go straight to the top and play in the Prem’, and it doesn’t always happen like that.

“My family got round me and said, ‘If this is what you want to do, you can go and make it happen’. “Every kid dreams of playing at the top.

“You watch Match of the Day and you want to be on it.” Frustrated Cardiff boss Warnock (inset)

hit out at just about everything after this defeat – from Gillingham’s medical team to Liverpool’s “lack of class” for loaning defender Nathaniel Clyne to Bournemouth instead of the Bluebirds.

He said: “I’m disappointed not just with the boy himself but with Liverpool as well for not ringing me, not telling me.

“To see it on television when I have done everything right and they have promised he’s my player this week – it’s a disgrace, just a lack of class.”