His final club was Nottingham Forest where he was not given the chances he expected to increase a highly impressive career goal tally of 289, writes Stewart Coggin. The 187 Premier League goals he amassed has only been surpassed by Alan Shearer. In short, Cole was the poacher supreme.

The Nottingham-born centre-forward made just one league appearance for his first club Arsenal in 1990 before moving to Fulham on loan where he netted three times in 13 appearances. A permanent move to Bristol City followed in 1992, his £500,000 price tag the most expensive in the Ashton Gate club's history at that point. Twenty goals for the club and a strike-rate of almost one in every two matches persuaded Newcastle United to shell out a club record £1.75m fee on the striker.

12 goals in as many league matches helped seal promotion from the First Division under Kevin Keegan. 34 goals in 40 Premiership matches in the 1993/94 campaign signaled Cole's transition into a major force at the pinnacle of the English game. This upward trajectory also mirrored and proved a major influence on the club's own emergence as a genuine contender in the upper echelons of the top-flight landscape. A third place finish was achieved that season and Cole's partnership with Peter Beardsley played no small part in this. Cole's total of 41 goals in all competitions broke the club's seasonal goalscoring record which had been set by Hughie Gallacher nearly 70 years earlier. It was little surprise when the PFA Young Player of the Year award followed at the end of that season.

It came as a major shock the following season when after nine goals in 18 FA Carling Premiership matches Cole was sold to Manchester United on 10th January 1995. The £6m fee plus the exchange of Keith Gillespie (valued at £1m) made the transfer the most expensive in British history for a short time. Two years earlier Cole had been plying his trade in the second tier of English football, now he was a world name. 12 goals in his first 18 FA Carling Premiership matches went a long way towards justifying the price tag, and his haul of five in the 9-0 destruction of Ipswich Town that season is high up in his list of career achievements. Cole will, however, look back less fondly on two good opportunities missed as United were held to a 1-1 draw by West Ham United on the final day of that season, a result which saw future employers Blackburn Rovers claim the title. The following season Cole was not at his most prolific but contributed 11 league goals as United regained the title. He also helped the club to the FA Cup as they became the first side to win the double twice.

The 1997/98 season proved particularly fruitful as Cole helped himself to 18 goals as he finished the campaign as joint top scorer in the FA Carling Premiership. His first European hat-trick arrived in a Champions League match against Feyenoord and he was also proving an able partner for Teddy Sheringham, with the players' respective styles complimenting eachother.

On the day of his retirement, Cole made the unsurprising assertion that the 1998/99 season was a career high. This was of course the year when Manchester United won their historic treble. If Cole's partnership with Sheringham the previous season had been productive, his alliance with good friend Dwight Yorke was nothing short of sensational as the pair contributed 53 goals between them. Cole scored key goals, notably the winner in the second-leg of the Champions League semi-final against Juventus and the decisive goal as United defeated Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 on the final day of the season to pip Arsenal to the title by a point. Cole admits that goal holds a special place in his memory.

Cole helped the club to the title in each of the following two seasons before making a move to Blackburn in December 2001. Within two months of arriving he had scored the winner in the League Cup final against Tottenham. He was reunited with Yorke the following season and the pair helped Blackburn achieve an impressive sixth place finish.

After enduring a frustrating 2003/04 season, Cole moved to former club Fulham for the following campaign, and finished the season as the club's top goalscorer. However, with his family keen to move back to the north west, Cole was on his way again, joining Manchester City at the beginning of the 2005/06 campaign. Cole scored nine goals for the club before his season was cut short by injury in March.

Subsequent spells at Birmingham City, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Burnley and Forest yielded only 10 goals, but despite flitting between clubs over this two-year period, Cole says the only real regret he has about his career was leaving Manchester United too early.

He will, however, not look back on his international career with a great deal of relish, having managed just one goal in 15 matches for England. That goal came against Albania in a 20th March 2001 World Cup qualifier. Cole's first four caps came under four different managers, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle, Howard Wilkinson and Kevin Keegan. Such a lack of continuity was surely a hindrance in the demanding arena of international football - not to mention the presence of Shearer for the duration of Cole's England career - and after being omitted from the 2002 World Cup squad by Sven-Goran Eriksson, he announced his international retirement.

The 37-year-old said of his decision to retire from the game as a whole after failing to score in 10 appearances with Forest: "It's not an ideal ending but I wouldn't change a thing - I've lived the dream."

Now he intends to move into coaching in the belief that he has plenty to offer up-and-coming strikers.

"You would think so - unless I just happened to have a lot of luck in my career," he said. "I've all this experience. I don't want to keep it to myself. I want to give something back. I don't think it's the end of the Andrew Cole story. Hopefully it's a new chapter."

In his pomp, Cole was a pacy front player with a sixth sense for locating goalscoring positions and profiting with some deadly finishing. But he was by no means just an individual talent; he had the intelligence to dovetail superbly with the likes of Beardsley, Sheringham and Yorke. Cole was not only a finisher of one-on-one situations, as he was quite adept at producing deft lobs and fine curled efforts from further out. If he can pass on just some elements of his multi-faceted game to tomorrow's strikers, English football can look forward to more displays of  such supreme opportunism for years to come.