Player who no one noticed

FOR YEARS, it was Andy Pearce’s name against the picture of the blond man in the Coventry City shirt on the iconic Premier League launch photo.

Yet we can reveal a long-standing case of mistaken identity — the Coventry player in the picture is actually Lee Hurst.

‘Andy Pearce played for Coventry at the same time and had long blond hair like me,’ Hurst tells The Mail on Sunday three decades later. ‘I say he copied me! I understand the mistake... but he was 6ft 4!’

Yet it was never former defender Pearce. It was always Hurst, then an up-and-coming homegrown midfielder, now a painter and decorator in Nuneaton, who also runs his own football coaching school.

‘It was nice to be a part of in the first place and it’s nice to be a part of it now,’ he says. ‘It was iconic. All the people in the area knew it’s me.’ Now so does everyone else.

Hurst made his Coventry debut in 1991 aged 20. He played 35 games in that inaugural Premier League season, scoring twice, including a 30-yard rocket against Blackburn.

He looked to be a regular for years to come, only to suffer a career-ending injury at a pre-season army camp in Aldershot.

‘I jumped off a brick wall and snapped my knee,’ he says. Hurst never played for Coventry’s firstteam again. He was 22 when it happened. He retired in 1996.

‘We didn’t expect the Premier League to go the way it did. We didn’t give it much thought afterwards apart from when you’re driving to the ground on a Saturday and the billboards on every corner have got your face on it.

‘We got looked after like princes but the way it has gone now, they are treated like kings.’