As the Premier League entered its inaugural season, Ian Branfoot, who had sold Neil Ruddock, replaced him with Ken Monkou, a muscular, yet agile, centre-back, arguably the manager’s best buy at £750,000. 

Born in Suriname, 11 years before the country became independent of Holland, Ken played his first football as an Sunday League amateur in Holland and didn’t really get into the pro game until he was spotted by Feyenoord and made his debut within a few months, aged just 20. He had three and a half years in Rotterdam learning from the likes of Johan Cruyff until Bobby Campbell, Chelsea’s manager took a shine to him while scouting in Holland and brought him to Stamford Bridge. Chelsea’s player-of the year in his first season he enjoyed three good seasons but when Ian Porterfield took over Ken found himself out of favour and approaching 28 a move to the south coast made sense.

The Saints would flirt with relegation during much of his seven years at The Dell Ken’s last three appearances were in the climactic run of three wins that pulled them clear in 1999, but it is with the  “Great Escape” of 1994 that he is especially associated, for his last-minute goal in one of his highlight-games: the 5-4 win at Norwich.

Matt Le Tissier has included, in his “Top Ten” assists, his corner from which Ken headed the winner. For his part, Ken remembers being “good going forward, that day. But we conceded four, so I can’t have been that good at defending.” He was good enough, though, to play more than 200 games for the club with the only down time occurring when Graeme Souness was the manager. For some reason Souness seemed to take a dislike to the central defender and snubbed him socially as well as only giving him eight starts in the one year he was in charge.

However hugely popular with the fans and his other managers and an urbane man off the pitch (he speaks fluent English, Dutch, German and Surinamese),

he left, at the age of 34, to play 20-odd times for second-tier Huddersfield. And, after a break, he had a season in Chelsea’s Reserves. In 2004, he started a company – Just Six – to mentor young Dutch footballers who aspired to play in the Premier League. His own introduction to the English dressing-room had made him only too aware of the need to prepare foreign players for a culture-shock, although it must be hoped that the vulgar, homophobic environment at Stamford Bridge, in which Ken was cast as an “outsider” (as explained in Graeme Le Saux’s profile) was an extreme example.

He launched a football-lifestyle magazine, called Football Life,and then in 2007 he purchased a pancake house in Rotterdam which he used to frequent as a child. He explained “I had an open kitchen, and between midday and 2pm we had something like 150 customers, who would all watch me making these pancakes. People didn’t believe it at first that an ex-professional footballer was in the kitchen. I only had six burners, so I was working like a trooper, but it was fantastic. It was family run so it was great to spend so much time with me. It was up for sale, and the lady owner said ‘What do you reckon?’ I came back home to discuss it with the guys, and all the figures stacked up, so I thought ‘Why not,’ and I gave it a go.”

After two years flipping pancakes he enrolled on a FA and PFA-run “On The Board” course which resulted in him travelling the length and breadth of England giving advice about equality and diversity to the 92 League clubs. With all that it is a surprise that he also finds time to be a pundit on Dutch TV and an ambassador at Chelsea FC on match days. NB See Alan Neilson profile for further image.