10 Footballers You Totally Forgot Played For England
6. Ryan Shawcross
Ryan Shawcross has now been playing for Stoke City for an impressive ten years, a fact even more notable when you consider he isn't yet thirty at the time of writing. Apart from getting his start (but no actual Premier League caps) at Manchester United, his only other club outings were a loan spell at Royal Antwerp in 2007. There is one other notable cap in his stats, however.
In 2012, Roy Hodgson used an international friendly to blood some new talent for his misfiring England side. The results were fairly disastrous, but especially for a young Ryan Shawcross. Playing against Zlatan Ibrahimovic at the height of his terrifying powers, he could only watch in horror as immediately after coming on as a 74th-minute substitute the Swedish striker scored a hat-trick, including a world-beating 30-yard bicycle kick. England lost 4-2 and his international career was dead on arrival.
Speaking to the papers in 2016, Shawcross stated that Zlatan finished his England career before it had the chance to get started.