A STRIKER with wildly differing fortunes in a varied and much-travelled career made a good early impression when joining Albion on loan from Norwich City back in the autumn of 1994.
Ade Akinbiyi had not long since broken through to the City team as a teenager and he scored four times in seven games on loan to the Seagulls.
Just turned 20, Akinbiyi arrived at a time when Liam Brady’s Albion hadn’t registered a win for 11 games and, although Albion lost the first game he played in, the remaining six produced three wins and three draws.
There is some YouTube footage of him scoring Albion’s second goal on a snowy pitch at Hull City’s old Boothferry Park ground in a game that finished 2-2.
“He is powerful and big and he can take knocks and we have missed having somebody in that mould,” Brady wrote in his matchday programme notes.
Later in his career Akinbiyi would prove to be a real handful for the Seagulls – I recall him shrugging off a powder-puff challenge from a young Dan Harding at Withdean and muscling his way to a winning goal for Stoke City. Manager Mark McGhee subbed Harding off and publicly lambasted him afterwards.
Born in Hackney on 10 October 1974, Akinbiyi was more interested in athletics at an early age, as he told the Lancashire Telegraph.
“I was interested in football but not massive on playing it,” he said. His school PE teacher persuaded him otherwise. “I went to play for my district team, Hackney, and it all started from there.”
From Hackney, Akinbiyi joined nearby Senrab, the team that blooded the likes of Bobby Zamora, Leon Knight, John Terry and Jermain Defoe.
His age group earned a place in a children’s tournament in Great Yarmouth called the ‘Canary Cup’ where he was spotted by a scout for nearby Norwich, who signed him as a schoolboy.
“The schoolboy and youth team system was second to none, as it still is now,” said Akinbiyi. But he found it hard living away from home, missing his mum’s native Nigerian cooking.
But after finding new digs with a few of his team-mates, he stuck at it and earned a dream debut as a substitute against Bayern Munich in the return leg of their UEFA Cup second round game, less than a month after his 19th birthday.
“I thought my debut would come in a cup game, perhaps against lower league opposition, not against Bayern Munich,” he said. “Not many people make their debut in a European cup competition.”
Although Akinbiyi made 51 league appearances for Norwich, his Canaries career never really took off, hence the Brighton loan spell and a similar move to Hereford United.
Eventually, though, a manager who believed in him, Tony Pulis, made him a record £250,000 buy for Gillingham in January 1997. Akinbiyi repaid Pulis’ faith in him with 29 goals in 67 starts, leading to Bristol City paying £1.2million for the striker following their promotion to the old Division One (now the Championship).
After scoring 21 goals in 47 league appearances for the Robins, in 1999 he completed a £3.5m move to Wolverhampton Wanderers. In the same year, he played his one and only game for Nigeria, in a friendly against Greece in Athens.
He made a great start at Wolves, scoring eight times in his first 12 games for Colin Lee’s side, but a year later, switched to Premier League Leicester City, after the Foxes’ boss Peter Taylor (later to replace Micky Adams at Brighton) paid out a £5m fee for the striker.
Akinbiyi was brought in to replace Emile Heskey, a real Filbert Street hero who had been sold to Liverpool for £11m. However, his goal touch eluded him and he managed to score only 11 goals in 58 league appearances for the club – some Leicester fans dubbing him Ade Akin-Bad-Buy!
Akinbiyi looked back on it in an interview with Four Four Two magazine and said: “I came in as Emile Heskey’s replacement, but he is a different breed of footballer.
“He’s big, strong and scores goals, but, back then, if Heskey wasn’t scoring a lot he could get away with it. He was the local hero. I was a different player – I’d be running in behind and trying to cause people problems. But Leicester looked at my record in the Championship and thought I’d come and do the same thing.”
Eventually they cut their losses and sold him to Division One Crystal Palace for £2.2m. At Selhurst, he was rather ignominiously given the number 55 shirt! Having scored just one goal in 14 league and cup appearances, in 2003 he was loaned to Stoke City, under his old boss Pulis.
He scored twice – the second goal coming in the last game of the 2002-03 season, when the Potters won 1-0 against Reading to seal their Division One (now the Championship) status (the season Albion were relegated).
Akinibiyi discussed the events in an interview with another ex-Stoke, Burnley and Brighton striker, Chris Iwelumo, for Stoke City FC TV.
It led to Akinbiyi joining on a permanent basis, on a free transfer, and he became a cult hero with the Stoke City crowd.
In March 2005, Burnley signed him for £600,000 – and he was promptly sent off on his debut! The game was only two minutes old when he head-butted George McCartney of Sunderland, and was shown a straight red.
Less than a year later, he was on the move again, switching to Sheffield United in January 2006 for what was then a club record £1.75m fee.
He scored on his Blades debut against Derby County but by October that year he was in the news for his alleged involvement in a training ground bust-up with team-mate Claude Davis.
In all, Akinbiyi made only five appearances for the Blades in the Premiership in 2006 and, on New Year’s Day 2007 he returned to Burnley for a £650,000 fee, with add-ons.
He scored in his first game back, against Reading, but only notched three by the season’s end. Burnley fans have some good memories of him, particularly in a brief spell when he played alongside loan signing Andrew Cole, but on 2 April 2009, Burnley offloaded him to Houston Dynamo.
Dave Thomas, a prolific writer on all things Burnley, talked about Akinbiyi’s cult hero status among Burnley fans, telling thelongside.co.uk: “Ade certainly had a talent and that talent was scoring goals. The story that he was utterly bad at this is totally inaccurate, but that is the legend that developed, at one club in particular, Leicester City.
“In truth, at Burnley too, he missed sitters that Harry Redknapp might say his wife could have scored. But then so do all other players and, in many games, he displayed all the things that he was good at, and the attributes that he had in abundance.”
After he was released by Houston, back in the UK he played 10 games for Notts County, as they won the League Two title In 2009-10, and the following season pitched up in south Wales to play for then non-league Newport County.
In July 2013, Akinbiyi became a player-coach for Colwyn Bay, managed by his former Burnley teammate Frank Sinclair, but both resigned in January 2015 after a 5-0 defeat at Boston.
Akinbiyi now lives in Manchester and in 2015 was interviewed about work he has done as an ambassador for Prostate Cancer UK after his father died from the disease.
The Albion matchday programme featured Curbishley when the Seagulls hosted the Hammers for a Barclays League Division 2 game on 16 September 1989. Describing his time with the East London club, he said: “It was a brilliant set up although I was definitely a bit headstrong in my early days.
In parallel lines 