This is rather a cunning clue, but Peter James Crouch was the figurehead for Ariel washing powder. Apparently he was picked because he was tall and the washing powder pods were the largest on the market. Anyway, Ariel also make powder specifically for washing clothes by hand, which is a massive tangent, but there you go!
Our man was born on January the 30th, 1981 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, and for such a talented player, he seems to have worked his way through an awful lot of clubs. Maybe wandering was in his blood, as his father moved the family to Singapore when he was not even a toddler. They were there for three years, and then came back to London. His first team was the Northolt Hotspurs, in North West London, from where he was spotted and asked to join Brentford. He was also spotted there, and picked up three offers, from Chelsea (which was the team his father supported, and where he had briefly been a ball boy), from Milwall, and from Queens Park Rangers, which he picked.
Then it gets a bit sketchy; most sources say he stayed for just one season, and then he found himself at Tottenham Hotspur, who took him on as a trainee, but, for some reason, never played him as a senior, instead they chose to loan him out, to a fairly local team called Dulwich Hamlet, and then to a club miles away in Sweden. After this, he was either sold back to Queens Park Rangers, or he had been there all along and the three intervening teams were all loans. I have not been able to find that out yet.
Whatever happened, he only stayed there a year, moving to Portsmouth when Queens Park Rangers were relegated in 2001, because the demotion meant they could not afford to keep all their top players.
He moved to Aston Villa in 2002, which is reputedly when his "Rookie" card appeared (as No.56 of the Merlin "Premier League" stickers) but I am pretty sure there would have been earlier ones. He never really settled there, though, and was again loaned out, this time in an easterly direction, to Norwich City. The following year saw him at Southampton, back on the South Coast again, but in 2005 he joined Liverpool where he seems to have enjoyed things more, and where he was also on the team that not just lifted the F.A. Cup in 2006, but was runner up the following year in the UEFA Cup. However, after three seasons, he went south again and turned up back at Portsmouth. He spent just one season in his second spell at Portsmouth and left for Tottenham Hotspur, then turned up at Stoke City in August 2011. He also stayed for almost eight years, his longest time with any one team. Then, suddenly, he joined Burnley, for six months, before announcing his retirement - at the age of thirty-eight.
These stickers record the 2010 Panini FIFA World Cup, in which he came on as substitute only twice, once in the opening match and once in the second round.
Intriguingly, there are a few variations of the set - all of which revolve round the backs. Our card is the blue back version, which says "Made in Italy", but you can also get another blue back version which says "Made in Brazil", and, uniform with these, there is a black back version which says "Made in Italy". There are two more though, just for good measure , though they are pretty scarce. One of them says "Industria Argentina" (or made in Argentina) and it was circulated only in that country - whilst the other has a pink back, and it was only circulated in Switzerland, and you can easily tell that because they have gold borders and there is a large circle on the back which says "Schweiz - Suisse - Svizzera".