Zeli Ismail – Wunderkind?

By: Toby | December 18th, 2008

Today I shall profile a player today you may (If you’re an Uber Wolves nerd) or may not (If you have a life) have heard of, Zeli Ismail. Zeli is a product of our youth academy, the very same which has produced Internationals Lescott, Hennessey and Robbie Keane…and at the same time bench warmers Adam Proudlock, JJ Milligan and Leon Clarke. So it would be fair to say that we’ve produced some good young players, and at the same time some definite chaff in between the wheat. The jury is still out on Zeli Ismail, mainly because he’s so hard to track down, Wolves are doing a very good job of keeping him out of the spotlight. At just 10, the son if Serbian parents, he came to this country seeking asylum, he was discovered by the Wolves Academy. Now 15, he’s currently playing 2 years ahead of himself in the Wolves youth squad, with former Wolves academy director Chris Evans talking to The News Of The World about him a few months ago –

“He was smaller than the rest but his technical ability and football brain helped him overcome any physical problems. We soon realised we needed to protect him because there are so many predators, recruitment officers from the big clubs and agents in the game. It got to the stage where I had to ban agents and other clubs from the training ground. His ability made it impossible for him to be ignored. He could score four, five or six goals in a game so we tended to take him off so as not to draw too much attention to him.”

Yeah, that’s former Academy Director (who has decided that as he’s now at Bolton, all the hard work he did keeping Zeli under his hat was a waste of time, so he’d mouth off to the first paper he could think of and say something monumentally stupid, you know, something crazy, something that’ll heap the pressure on the lad, make sure everyone watches every move he makes from now on….like saying he’ll be THE WORLD’S FIRST 100 MILLION POUND PLAYER!) Chris Evans…he’s Gary Megson’s assistant now don’t you know.

But he’s right, if not subtle. Zeli is looking to be shaping into a fine young player, in the Milk cup over the summer he stole the show, getting awarded the player of the tournament, and as you can see in this video here, scoring his fair share of goals (Fast forward to 4 minutes for the Ismail show). He’s now been capped for England, so any neutrals out there might be interested, give it five years and we could see him in the senior squad, he may or may not be a Wolves player by then of course, because if you believe The Sun and The News Of The World’s combined efforts ever since they’ve heard about him, he’s been on the way to Chelsea, because HEVEAN FORFEND a talented young player not be shipped out to the big four, where he’ll have even less chance of playing a game.

So there we have it, Zeli Ismail, a talented young Wolves player, one for the future.