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“Last week, 42-year-old Kevin Ellison played against Theo Walcott in the League Cup game between Newport and Southampton. Sixteen years earlier, they came on as substitutes when Hull drew 1-1 with Southampton. What’s the record time in years for the first and last time two players played against one another?” wonders Ricardio Sentulio.
We’re fans of research here at The Knowledge, but we spent far too much time on this and came up with very little in the way of examples that even come close to matching Walcott’s and Ellison’s 16 years. Gigi Buffon had an international career that stretched an incredible 21 years, but even within that the longest gap between him facing a rival footballer that we could find was 11 years (2003-14) between meetings against Azerbaijan’s stalwart centre-back Rashad Sadyqov.