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1 month ago
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A month ago. Nile Ranger found a new club.
Kettering Town Football Club announcing (see below) that Nile Ranger had signed for them.
Now aged 33, Nile Ranger joining a club that plays at the seventh tier of English football in the Southern League Premier Division Central.
Kettering play in the Southern League Premier Division Central but this weekend, they face Farsley Celtic in the fourth qualifying round of the FA Cup on Saturday.
Ahead of the match, BBC Sport have talked to Nile Ranger.
This feels like the hundredth time I have read such an interview with him, how Nile Ranger would have had a glittering top level career if not for ‘messing’ things up.
We can certainly agree that he messed things up BUT what evidence is there to suggest that Nile Ranger would ever have had this great career in the Premier League and beyond? Where is the evidence?
Here are some of the takes from this BBC Sport piece/interview with Nile Ranger and then I have given my take (the reality!) on him.
BBC Sport speaking to Nile Ranger – 10 October 2024:
Now aged 33, Nile Ranger believes he would still be playing in the Premier League had he not led such a troubled life off the pitch.
“I had a decent career. I was on decent money and then I messed it all up,” says former Newcastle United striker Nile Ranger.
Ranger was a 17-year-old “wonderkid” when Kevin Keegan named him on the bench for a match against Arsenal in 2008.
By the age of 19 he was tipped for the very top when Chris Hughton awarded him with a new five-and-a-half-year contract, external worth £10,000-a-week.
“Team-mates, friends and managers would say ‘Nile, your chances are going to run out’,” Ranger tells BBC Sport. “I wouldn’t listen. I was wild, wild, wild.”
“I know I have baggage,” adds Ranger. “If I had behaved I would have stayed at the top, but I was too unruly.”
Does he feel he can return to the full-time game before his career ends?
“I could play in any team at my age if I’m fit – any team,” he says. “It has to be a fit me, not a rusty me. But the rust is coming off.
“I still feel there is one big move left in me. I’m going to roll the dice one more time.”
“My mum has had to come to meetings at every club I have been at to discuss my behaviour,” he says. “It’s been like that since my schooldays.”
Ranger was eventually kicked out of Southampton when he stole boots, training kit and even a staff member’s box of chocolates.
Where was his dad when all this was happening?
“He was around but I lived with my mum. Dad was in my life but what is he going to do? Punch me in the face? He could only speak to me.
“I’m my own man and he used to try to talk sense into me but I just didn’t listen.”
My conclusions
I don’t have any ill will towards Nile Ranger, I just get sick of reading these endless tedious interviews. Where we hear the same old claims trotted out, as though he would have been the next Messi or Ronaldo.
When he was at Newcastle United I saw no sign of this and since he left absolutely the same.
You would think Nile Ranger had experienced a career at the top, which after however long, fell apart. There was no career at the top of even the smallest significance, ever.
For starters, it wasn’t Chris Hughton handing him a five and a half year contract.
This was part of the woeful time when Mike Ashley gave control of all transfers and major decisions to Dennis Wise.
As well as the more high profile horrendous Dennis Wise moves to bring in Xisco and Nacho Gonzalez, he was also in charge of a ‘cunning’ plan to bring in young players, some of them ‘damaged goods’, in the hope of creating future superstars on the cheap. It was a predictable disaster, with the stand out of them all, Nile Ranger. Somebody who couldn’t even be bothered to turn up for training on time.
It wasn’t Chris Hughton handing out a massive contract to Nile Ranger, paying him £10,000 a week more than he was worth. It was Dennis Wise and Mike Ashley (in reality).
As for this great Premier League that Nile Ranger supposedly threw away.
He has only ever started one Premier League match in his entire ‘career’ and that was in the second half of the 2010/11 season after Mike Ashley sold Andy Carroll in January 2011. Shola Ameobi was unavailable when Newcastle played away at Aston Villa in April 2011 and it was either 93 year old Shefki Kuqi or Nile Ranger who had to play. Kuqi replaced Ranger in the second half.
Nile Ranger did make another 25 Premier League appearances but these were from the subs bench and pretty much all very few minutes at the end of games and during that season when Ashley sold Carroll and refused to allow a replacement to be bought in. Meaning without a club veteran Shefki Kuqi won a competition to play for NUFC. Yet Newcastle United fans got slated by the media when complaining about how Mike Ashley ran our club (into the ground).
The thing is as well, not only did Nile Ranger never have a Premier League ‘career’, where are his achievements even in the lower leagues???
If he was indeed Premier League quality, then even his waster behaviour would still have surely allowed him to shine as a rough diamond in the lower leagues.
Yet in his entire ‘career’ in all four divisions, a now 33 year old Nile Ranger has scored 24 goals in league football.
Yes, Nile Ranger could and should have made some kind of decent career in professional football BUT it could and would have been in League Two, maybe League One if he was lucky.
Kettering Town official announcement on Nile Ranger – 9 September 2024:
‘Richard Lavery has added to his squad with the experienced signing of striker Nile Ranger. Nile has previously played for Newcastle United, Barnsley (loan), Sheffield Wednesday (loan), Swindon Town, Blackpool, Southend United, Spalding United, Boreham Wood.
An England U19 international Nile had a pre-season at Barnet, he has played in the Premiership, Championship, League One and Two, the National League and a short spell in the Northern Premier Division One South/East.
Nile has undoubted ability and should offer a different dynamic to the Poppies squad. We would like to welcome Nile to Latimer Park and hope he has a successful time with the club. He goes straight into tonight’s squad to face St Ives Town.’

 
