| Dan Petrescu |
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PETRESCU IN ENGLAND Petrescu moved to the Premiership with Chelsea in 1995, in a £ 2.3m transfer from Sheffield Wednesday . He featured prominently for Chelsea for the next five years, and was a member of the teams which won the FA Cup in 1997 and the League Cup and Cup Winners' Cup (both in 1998 ). After falling out with Chelsea manager Gianluca Vialli after a defeat to Manchester United , Petrescu never played for the club again and wasn't even selected as a substitute for the 2000 FA Cup final against Aston Villa . He moved to Bradford City for £1m that July and then had a spell at Southampton . During his time in England, he was the answer to a popular trivia question: Name a Premiership footballer who shares a name with a TV programme. The answer related to Pet Rescue , a BBC TV programme presented by Rolf Harris . To this day he still considers the time spent at Chelsea as the best part of his playing career and is still loved by the fans, who consider him to be one of the best non-english footballers in the club's history. As a sign of affection and loyalty to the Stamford Bridge based club, he named his daughter Chelsea. RETURN TO ROMANIA Petrescu returned to his native Bucharest for a last season as a football player, with FC Naţional . His last match was the Romanian Cup final, on May 31 2003 . Naţional lost 1-0 to Dinamo Bucharest , during which Petrescu received a lot of abuse from some of the Dinamo fans as he left the pitch at the end of ninety minutes, even though it was the last game of arguably one of Romania's greatest footballers. This was because he used to play for Dinamo's greatest rivals, Steaua Bucharest. INTERNATIONAL CAREER Petrescu registered 95 caps for the , Euro '96 and finally the 1998 World Cup , where the entire team famously dyed their hair blond as a team building exercise. Petrescu's first World Cup, in the USA in 94 saw him score the only goal in a win against The USA which saw them qualify for the Second Round as group leaders, where they were handed a difficult game against Argentine Team . They won this but then lost to The Swedish team in the quarter-finals. Euro 96 was a disappointment for Romania, losing all three of their matches while scoring only one goal. At France 1998, he raced past his Chelsea teammate Graeme Le Saux and scored the winning goal against England , which effectively won them the group and ensured they would not have to face the dangerous Argentines in the Second Round. In the end, the Romanians lost their second round game 1-0 to Croatia . RETIREMENT Petrescu is currently pursuing a career as a Coach . He resigned from Rapid Bucureşti in October 2004, after only six games and four months at the helm. On January 1 2006 he became the manager of Polish champions Wisła Kraków , replacing the temporary coach Tomasz Kulawik . |
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