How the Footballing World Got on With Jamie Carragher’s #CarraChallenge

​You’ve got to run 5k on Monday, find some loo roll to attempt a few keepy-ups with on Tuesday and for some reason do a neknomination on Wednesday… no, it’s not the world’s worst remix of Craig David’s ‘7 Days’, but the reality of life in quarantine, where it seems like a new social media challenge surfaces every other second.

Amidst the plethora of WhatsApp crazes and Instagram nominations, however, a rather interesting viral challenge/riddle/fantasy thought experiment has taken off, having been started by an unlikely source…former Liverpool centre-back Jamie Carragher.

The rules seem reasonably straightforward, all you have to do is make a world XI – from your life time – where no two players have represented the same club or country.

The challenge? It’s like doing sudoku upside-down while reciting the Russian alphabet – you can spend a painstaking two hours completing it before Alan Shearer’s Southampton career suddenly pops into your head and ruins the whole thing.

Tip: one-club men are your friend.

That didn’t stop some of football’s greatest minds from getting involved in the fun, with current Rangers manager and Carragher’s former Liverpool teammate Steven Gerrard making good use of his free time to produce a nicely balanced team (Andy Robertson was in Celtic’s academy but you’d have to be super-pedantic to pull him up on that).

One of the real challenges of the side is accommodating both modern GOATs in Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, being as the latter has represented Juventus, Manchester United and Real Madrid, but another former Liverpool man in Phil Thompson was more than equal to the challenge.

It was another of Carragher’s former colleagues who really caught the defender’s eye, as Stan Collymore cobbled together a magical, mouth-watering midfield three of Gerrard, Michel Platini and Zico.

Extra marks for creativity should be awarded in a format where Jan Oblak has seemingly been chosen in nearly every XI, and a slightly left-field captaincy selection by comedian Kevin Bridges delighted its recipient.

Given its own famously eclectic mix of talents, it was only natural that Soccer Aid got in on the act, although the likes of Ben Shepherd and Robbie Williams’ mate will be wondering how they’ve missed out on this impressive (if slightly rule-bending) XI.

Journalist Sam Wallace managed to squeeze in one of the best front lines imaginable, throwing into question just how old the boyish-looking Telegraph writer really is…

It certainly wasn’t a challenge for the faint-hearted, requiring at least half an hour on Wikipedia and the ability to recall how many clubs Pavel Nedvěd has represented on demand, and unsurprisingly, some players were just happy to be there…

Let’