His influence on us, I would call a hypnosis by individuality.

He had a magic that made us expect the impossible.

The boy came to us from the land of wonder.

Well, welcome to It Was What It Was with me, Rob Draper and with Jonathan Wilson.

That was a Russian writer, Alexander Nilling, writing about the wonder child of Russian football.

Edward Streltsov may not be a name you're particularly familiar with because of his downfall very early on in his career,

but touted to be perhaps a great

savior of Soviet football, perhaps he would have been the greatest star ever of Russian football.

We're going to be talking about him today. Jonathan's going to be unfolding his tragic and

difficult story. But before we get into that, I just want to remind you that if you could rate,

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Make many more episodes like this.

Jonathan, this is a little pet project of yours really, isn't it?

You've written a novel on Edward Strelstov, I believe.

And he's one of those figures who seems a bit of a wild child of football,

a bit George Best-like, looks like an extraordinary talented player.

But I don't think a lot of people would have heard of him because of his downfall so young in his career. So set the scene for us. Why is he important? Where's he growing up? How does he get

into all sorts of trouble? Yeah, so the brief story is he's the youngest ever sobby international.

...