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Clive Mendonca: 'I still get tingles down my spine when I remember Charlton beating Sunderland'
His family and friends all warned him not to score, that he could not do it against his hometown club, the team he had supported as a boy, so Clive Mendonca duly scored a hat-trick at Wembley for Charlton to deny Sunderland promotion to the Premier League.
It is a day he remembers vividly, the conflict of interests, the confused emotions afterwards when he realised the pain he had caused to so many people he cared about. There are no regrets. Not then, not now, 20 years after that Championship play-off final that made his name.
The memories will come flooding back this weekend when his former club Charlton take on Sunderland, the one he still supports, this time in a League One play-off final.
Mendonca has returner to Wearside, where he now works for Nissan, the huge car factory that is the city’s biggest employer, but he is a Charlton legend for what he did that day to take Alan Curbishley’s side into the top flight.
In his defence, it was not Mendonca’s hat-trick that beat the Black Cats, but it did force a penalty shootout, which Charlton won after another Sunderland native, former England international Michael Gray, missed the decisive spot-kick.
“That morning, you have a nervous excitement in your stomach,” said Mendonca, who made his name as a striker at Grimsby Town after less spectacular stints at Sheffield United, Doncaster Rovers and Rotherham United. “I was just thinking, I want to score.
“As a Sunderland lad, all my mates were saying, ‘you’d better not score’. My sister was there, my wife, my children, my mates – all Sunderland. But I put that to one side and got on with it for Charlton. I had a point to prove and that was how I was thinking.”
That point was a powerful one, after he had received a phone call from then Sunderland manager, Peter Reid, a few months earlier.
“That year, Grimsby were relegated, but I scored 20 goals, so I knew I was leaving but wasn’t sure which club.
“My agent got a call from Peter Reid. He said, ‘I want you at Sunderland next season, I want you to play up front with Niall Quinn’. I was over the moon. Being a Sunderland lad, I had that thought throughout my career.
“One of my big regrets is never playing for Sunderland, being the team I support, but it didn’t happen. I told him to sort it with my agent, I went away on holiday for a few weeks, but they signed Kevin Phillips instead. I never heard back from them and Charlton wanted to speak to me...
“After the penalty shootout, the first person who came up to me was Peter Reid. I was dying to say you should have signed me, but I didn’t. He shook my hand and he was brilliant. It was really nice of him.”
Mendonca was Charlton’s record signing but paid them back handsomely with 45 goals in 96 appearances. But it is the game at Wembley that always comes up whenever his time in London is talked about.
“20 years on, I still get tingles down my spine thinking about it because it was as special day,” Mendonca told Charlton’s official programme earlier this year. “I look back on my career before that and I worked so hard for 12 years, I think that was my defining moment.”