LONG before Ronaldinho hit the headlines, the widest smile in football belonged to Trinidad and Tobago's Dwight Yorke, a smile that got wider in 1999 when his 29 goals helped Manchester United to an unprecedented treble.
It was Yorke's first season at Old Trafford after a £12.6 million transfer from Aston Villa and he hit the ground running, forging a lethal partnership with the conversely grim-faced striker Andy Cole.
Yorke was 28 at the time and winning the English Premier League and the FA Cup followed with victory over Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, which he described as his "World Cup final", was thought to be the pinnacle of his career.
Now Yorke, who once said he grieved at seeing team-mates go off for World Cup duty, and in the twilight of his illustrious career, will finally grace the competition he so lamented having missed.
Yorke could have missed the competition outright after a falling out with the head of Trinidad and Tobago's football federation and retired from international football for several years until he was offered an olive branch in 2005.
By this time Yorke's career was seemingly winding down somewhat from its dizzy heights.
He won two more English Premier League titles with United in 2000 and 2001, but his penchant for nightclubbing had angered his manager Alex Ferguson who marginalised him and eventually sold him to Blackburn Rovers at a knock down price after Ferguson signed Ruud Van Nistelrooy.
Yorke has since had mediocre seasons at Birmingham and Derby now plays in in Australia's A-League with Sydney FC.
But the likeable Caribbean can look back with pride to one of the greatest performances ever by an English side, United coming from 2-0 down at Juventus to win 3-2 in the 1999 European Cup semi-finals.
As a teenager Yorke moved to England when Aston Villa boss Graham Taylor signed him for £10,000, but he missed the beaches and his mother's cooking and wanted to go home the first time he saw snow.
When he does go home now it is with the keys to Port of Spain in his pocket, to play in the stadium named in his honour, and while it is unlikely the team or Yorke can make any real waves in Germany, qualifying Trinidad and Tobago for the World Cup Finals is folklore enough in itself.
