a good read on bolo

Not a question or a rumour, just a good read into the life and times of bolo zenden, and what the future may hold for him, enjoy the read.



AS one of European football’s traditional wanderers, Bolo Zenden is ready to embark on his latest summer of change – even if he would have preferred to stay at Sunderland for a further year.

Zenden is not a player unfamiliar with coming to the end of his contract. Having previously left Chelsea, Middlesbrough, Liverpool and Marseille when his deals have expired, he will be on the look out for his next club after tomorrow’s trip to West Ham United.

The Sunderland midfielder is keen to keep things close to his chest, claiming there are clubs interested in signing him, and cheekily hinted he could stay in the North-East and play top-flight football.

But the Maastricht-born former Holland international feels wherever he ends up, his new employers will be benefiting from a 34-year-old with plenty still to offer.

He wants to go to a club where he will feel part of the first team, rather than on the fringes like he has felt at Sunderland after making just nine league starts in two years on Wearside.

“I’m open to anything. The most important thing for me is I still feel I’ve got two or three years left in my locker, playing on a regular basis makes it easier,” said Zenden.

“Each time (you leave a club) it’s different, and each time it’s the same. It’s the way it’s always going to be and it’s something you deal with along the way. It’s not that big a change. Who knows, I might be back in the North-East anyway.

“At any age, if you wait one month for the game it makes it harder to keep it up. You can train as much as you want, what you need is game time.

“I’ll be looking forward to that. It could be anywhere, I’m quite adventurous. I came up here after all. I’m still very active.

“Maybe the time will come when I will return to Holland, maybe it will never come. I’ve been living a bit like a globetrotter. I’ve enjoyed getting used to it. My home is where my house is. It’s easy for me to adapt because I just go with the flow.

“I just go wherever I need to go. I’ve had a career of about 20 years and I’ll go wherever football takes me.”

Zenden has been on the move since leaving PSV Eindhoven to join Barcelona in 1998 and he did harbour hopes that his decision to join Sunderland would have been his last transfer.

However, having failed to convince Bruce that he deserved a bigger role in the Black Cats midfield during his two years, the time has come for him to look for a new challenge again.

“Yeah, maybe I do wish I could have stayed, somewhere in there,” said Zenden. “It probably came down to the amount of game time I got.

“But what they sometimes say is – and it’s also in a movie – is that life is like a box of chocolates… It’s the same thing for me and in football, you don’t know what you’ve got or what’s going to come.

“It might be better, worse, the same. You’ve got to think what do I want and what’s the best at this stage. So I came to this conclusion.”

He is not prepared to rule anything out, with the likelihood of him ending up at Newcastle United as possible as it is that he could turn up in Turkey. He is not, though, prepared to look at playing outside top-flight football.

“No I don’t want to step out of the big leagues, probably not,” said Zenden, effectively ruling out any chance of him dropping in to the Championship or lower.

“It’s already been different for me not playing in Europe during the last two years, I have missed that. Before that I’d only missed one year in my career of European football. It’s not always nice to be looking at the TV on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night, watching European football.”