There have been many memorable moments in the history of the game of football. Some are more memorable than others; others less memorable than some. But which great footballing moments would be the fifty greatest moments of all time? After much consideration and deliberation - most of yesterday afternoon, to be honest - I believe I have come up with a list of the most memorable, momentous, famous and infamous and downright bloody greatest of them all. So come with me and let's take a trip down Memory Lane as I reveal the Arthur Thacker Top 50 Greatest Footballing Moments Ever.
And...in at No 50...
DISGRACE AT WEMBLEY
Sendings-off at Wembley Stadium have been few and far between - most of them involving Scum players like Ray Wilkins, Paul Ince, Paul Scholes, Andrei Kanchelskis and a few others I could mention - but in 1974 there were two dismissals which shocked the watching nation.
August and the traditional curtain-raiser for the coming season - a Charity Shield encounter between League Champions Leeds United and FA Cup winners Liverpool. Leeds, under the guidance of Don Revie, were the Manchester United of their day - cunts who won everything and played the dirtiest kind of football you could imagine. Liverpool were the well-oiled Shankly Machine. Well, they were until Shankly packed in a few weeks before to spend more time on his allotment in Bootle. But on the pitch that day were some of the nation's finest talents: Allan Clarke, Peter Lorimer, Mick Jones, John Toshack, Ian Callaghan, Steve Heighway and Emlyn Hughes. The stage was set for a clbuttic encounter between the country's top two clubs, yet nothing could have prepared the fans for what was to happen on that sunny August afternoon.
Midway through the second half, with the score deadlocked at 0-0, Liverpool's England superstar Kevin Keegan and Leeds skipper Billy Bremner began trading punches in the centre circle. Instead of watching the game, cameras turned their attention to the scrap as it gathered momentum. Bremner threw a left hook which missed Keegan, who then threw a right cross and twatted the ginger little bastard a good 'un. Then Keegan stamped on his head and punched him some more, the pair of them rolling around on the hallowed Wembley turf. Other players then came into the fray - most notably Norman Hunter with a broken bottle and Tommy Smith with a crowbar that he used to keep down his sock. Terry Yorath pulled a knife on Larry Lloyd, while Ray Clemence, racing out of his goal, hit Paul Madeley with a sock full of billiard balls.
Both Keegan and Bremner were sent from the field by referee Dermott McDermott of Angelsey, and both tore off their shirts in disgust. Keegan was seen to stamp his feet on the touchline and scream: "Right, I'm not playing, then!" at the top of his voice. Bremner, equally frustrated and angry at being a ginger twat who had besmirched the day with his loutish behaviour, tried to say it was his ball and he was going home. In the aftermath both players were fined heavily and banned from playing football for eleven matches, which gave Bremner loads of time to ponder his future as a dirty little get and Keegan the opportunity to go and crash bikes on TV's 'Superstars'.
Truly a great footballing moment.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE BEST GOAL EVER SCORED
What is the best goal ever scored? Brazil's 4th in the 1970 World Cup Final? Zidane's scorcher for Madrid in the Champion's League Final last year? Or perhaps the Alan Mullery volley that bounced off his shin and somehow went into the net and not the crowd. Maybe the Frank Worthington keep-up, turn, dummy, and chip for Bolton f***ing ages ago. Well, the answer is none of the above. For the greatest goal ever scored was scored by the greatest player ever. Probably.
In his glittering career George Best had scored many wondrous and amazing goals, using to full effect his mesmerising range of skills and ball control. In his day he took on the world's greatest players and Europe's top club sides - Real Madrid, Benfica, Juventus, Inter Milan, Ajax, Benfica again and Northampton Town. He regularly scored twenty-plus goals a season and was voted European Footballer of the Year. But ask George which of those hundreds of goals was the best...the mazy run and shot off the post, leaving seven players from the top division in his wake? Was it the legendary goal he scored against Benfica during a famous 5-1 victory over the Portuguese champions, when he left three defenders stranded, rounded the goalkeeper and stopped on the goal line for a fag before stroking the ball home? Or the time he beat the whole Arsenal back four - and Bob Wilson - then ran up the field and did it all again before finally putting the ball into the net? No. The best goal what George Best ever scored came many years after he had reached his peak.
Long retired from the game (and probably because there were no more women left over here to shag), Best had decided to ply his trade in the newly-formed and rapidly emerging National Soccer League World Championship Of Soccer Not Football. He was signed by New York Cosmos, the USA's top club, and set about earning a fortune while he got to drink loads of beer, a proper tan and could shag Miss Worlds all day long. Nice work if you can get it, and got it George most certainly did.
In a League match against bitter rivals Miami Hedgehogs, featuring many former League players who had also gone to the States because they were old and their careers f***ed, Best found himself in his own half with the ball at his feet. Setting off for goal, he took on one man, then another, and another and another until he had beaten eight players and was inside the box. He shimmied left, then right, dummying 45-year-old former Welsh bamboozling 39-year-old Bob Fanshaw (former Northwich Victoria and Crewe), before neatly tucking the ball beyond the reach of one-eyed Gordon Banks in goal. A truly amazing goal and one that, when viewed in slow motion, seems even more astonishing. Defenders seemed somehow not to want to tackle the former Manchester United drunken has-been, perhaps because he was George Best or perhaps because they had been paid not to. Who can say?
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When asked about the goal later, and when the quality of his opponents that day was questioned, Best replied: "They were seasoned professionals who had played at the very highest level of the game. Alright, so one of them was in a wheelchair. What about it? They're fast, them wheelchairs. Anyway f*** off."
The best goal ever scored or a fluke, a staged fake put on by those razzmatazz Yanks to somehow flog their pooty game to their mindless fans? Who gives a toss? It was a great goal, and George Best scored it. So, like the man said, f*** off.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
WHEN PELE GOT f***ED
During his long and illustrious career, Edson Oranges Nosferatu, better known to the world as Pele, gave us some of the finest, most memorable footballing moments of all. His two goals in the World Cup Final of 1958, his stunning performances during Mexico 1970, scoring his 1,000th goal, sullying himself by playing in America at the end of his career and, perhaps most memorable of all, being reduced to doing adverts on telly for impotence. Sad it is that the man widely regarded as the greatest footballer who ever lived has a dick that doesn't work properly. But at least he's got two balls, unlike some World Cup winners I could mention.
But for me, and on our list at Number 48, Pele's finest moment came in the World Cup Finals staged in this country in 1966.
Brazil were the red-hot favourites and determined to win a third consecutive Jules Rimet Trophy. Their golden crown of a squad positively sparkled with footballing jewels: Pele himself, Garrincha, Didi, Vava, Dildo, Dido and Vulva. Great players all, and great players keen to get their inbred hands on the most glittering prize of them all. Sadly, it wasn't to be.
It was in the group game against Portugal that Pele really shone. The only way the Portuguese believed they could stop the man known as "The Black Pearl" was to kick his arse, and kick it they most certainly did. On a damp afternoon at Bury's Gigg Lane (one of the pootier grounds chosen by the hosts), Pele was mercilessly hacked, kicked, punched, gouged, butted, stamped on, trod on, shoved, spat at, vomited on and abused to buggery, quite literally, by some of Portugal's finest hatchetmen. At one time Pele was fouled a record fifteen times during a twenty-yard run at goal, each time going down and each time getting up for more of the same. Though this gentleman of the game never retaliated once. He left that to his teammates because they can be a dirty shower of bastards when they want to be. In the end he had to be carried off on a stretcher, vowing never again to set foot in England and stating afterwards that the World Cup was a value-less piece of poo without Brazil winning it.
Always a shining example on the field of play; always a gentleman off it; but poo in bed, apparently. Pele's behaviour that day in the face of such disgraceful gamesmanship earned him the nickname thereafter of "The Black Bobby Charlton. Only With Some Hair".
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
DUNCAN EDWARDS'S GHOST BREAKS COVENTRY PLAYER'S LEG
Fortunately, serious injury in football is a rare thing indeed - unless you come across Trevor Morley's wife or happen to be Harry Redknapp driving into a tree in the Italian countryside, that is. In a game where getting kicked, punched, elbowed and generally knocked about a bit is part and parcel, serious threat to life and limb is a rarity. So when, on an otherwise ordinary Saturday afternoon a few years ago, Dave Busst stepped out at Old Trafford to face Manchester United, he expected nothing more than the usual - a kicking from Roy Keane, bit of stamping on the head off Cantona, a Steve Bruce head-butt or a couple of Paul Ince leg-breakers. Dave Busst got a leg-breaker that day, though it was no Manchester United player that did it. Well, not a living one, anyway.
While attacking a corner in the United area, the left leg of Dave Busst suddenly, and without warning or challenge from an opposing player, snapped in half. His shinbone went right through his f***ing sock and actually got stuck in the turf. I've seen the pictures of it. It was horrible.
Dennis Irwin, the player closest to Busst at the time, said afterwards: "I don't know what happened. Nobody touched him. There he was about to kick the ball, the next second his leg just snapped like a chicken bone. Or a stick."
It took fifteen minutes for officials to clean the blood up off the grbutt, that's how bad it was, while poor Busst was carried from the pitch on a stretcher screaming things like: "Ow! Me f***in' leg!" Sadly, the harrowing incident marked the end of the Coventry man's career and he never played again. But it doesn't matter because he would have probably been poo.
Was it a freak accident that put an end to Dave Busst's career that day? Or was there something far more sinister going on? One man who thinks he knows is Dave Busst himself, a man who has become something opf a recluse since being forced to quit the game.
"A lot of people have asked me what happened that day when I broke my f***ing leg," he explains, "and I think I know what it was. I've read stories about how Old Trafford is supposed to be haunted - spirits of dead players from the past, like. And that's what it was - a ghost did it. Possibly Sir Matt Busby only I think he might still of been alive at the time. Or perhaps one of them players what died in the Munich disaster. Personally I reckon it was that Duncan Edwards cunt. I've heard he was a right dirty bastard."
For some time Busst's legal advisers had considered taking Manchester United to court, and in particular suing Duncan Edwards's ghost for damages. But, insists the former Coventry City matchstickman, there would be no point. "I reckon dying in the aftermath of Munich was punishment enough for breaking my f***ing leg that day," he says.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
ELTON'S WEMBLEY TEARS
When Watford unexpectedly reached the FA Cup Final in 1984, it was a dream come true for their most famous supporter of all - flamboyant pop superstar, singer-songwriter, musician and bent bastard Elton John. Elton had long had a love affair with the game, though he has always insisted that it had nothing to do with watching young men running around in shorts and flimsy shirts, heaving with sweat and pumping muscles, all that kissing after scoring a goal. Nothing to do with that at all. Indeed, Elton was born into a footballing family - his uncle Roy Dwight had in 1959 become the first player ever to score a goal in an FA Cup Final and then break his f***ing leg.
Sadly for Elton, a dream of actually playing the game he loved was never going to happen, mainly because he was short, fat, blind as f*** and fancied blokes instead of women. Though the latter never stopped Graeme Le Saux or Justin Fashanu. So Elton - real name Reg Twatt - turned his attention to music. It was his ensuing success in the rock business that allowed him the wealth and opportunity in 1980 to buy out the club he had followed as a boy. Well, almost. Being from down south he was, naturally, a Manchester United fan, and seeing as he couldn't afford them he settled for Watford instead.
With Elton's millions, jammy bastard manager Graham Taylor was able to buy quality players, and in successive seasons took them from the depths of Division 4 to the heights of the old Division 1. And it was the balding, non-wig-wearing-honest pop star who advised Taylor which players to buy. It was he who told Taylor to buy the likes of John Barnes, Luther Blissett, Mo Johnston and Wilf Rostron from Arsenal for f***'s sake.
At the end of season 83-84, Elton proudly stood in the royal box to watch as his beloved team lined up against Everton. And as the crowd sang 'Abide With Me', Elton was reduced to tears of joy at the spectacle and experience unfolding before him. Who will ever forget the enduring image of him standing there, erect and proud, his wife by his side as he pretended not to be queer, tears running down his piggy little cheeks?
But for Elton the dream of owning his own club would soon be over. Once he anounced to the world that he liked bumming men, players became nervous in his presence, refusing to let him visit them in the changing rooms after matches as he had done before. So in 1992, Elton John sold Watford to some Asian bloke for fifty quid and say no more about it.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
NOBBY DANCING
England had just won the World Cup, the nation was rejoicing, Bobby Charlton cried tears of joy, Geoff Hurst had rotten teeth and there, on the hallowed Wembley turf, was a scene that no England football fan will ever forget. Ever. Little Nobby Stiles, socks rolled down, baldy head shining in the afternoon sun, gummy smile, carrying the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft and dancing a jig of unbounded delight. What a cunt.
But Nobby - real name Nobbertson - was no stranger to dancing. Before joining Manchester United as a teenager he had had trials with the Royal Ballet Company, where he got to study under perhaps the greatest dancer ever, Nijinsky. But football was little Nobby's true vocation, and he left dancing behind at seventeen to sign professional forms at Old Trafford. Nijinsky, so disappointed to lose his star pupil, gave up dancing and became a racehorse, going on to win the Derby in 1970.
After a glittering career in football, during which time 4'6" Nobby won every major honour, including that World Cup winner's medal, Stiles turned to management. First he went to Preston North End and tried out several new and revolutionary training and playing methods. Among these were the introduction of players doing the cha-cha before kick-off, the samba at half-time and, most revolutionary and controversial of all, the locomotion during free kicks by the opposition.
Disillusioned with the game, Nobby left it behind for good in 1978 and went back to dancing. He auditioned for Pan's People, Legs & Co and Hot Gossip before joining the cast of 'Cats' on Broadway. In 1985 he won a prestigious Olivier award for his performance as "Curly" in Tom Finney's production of 'Oklahoma'. And he delighted the audience that night with an impromptu remider of perhaps his greatest moment - when he danced atop the Wembley turf on that summer's afternoon in 1966. He took off his specs, took out his teeth, rolled up his pants leg, kicked Melvyn Bragg in the chest and jigged off stage to rapturous applause.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
DI CANIO SHOVING THAT REF OVER
Time was that the referee was a man to be respected. His decision was always right, always fair and always final. Players accepted referees' decisions, however controversial, with decorum, deportment and discipline. But all that changed when we started allowing foreigners over here to play in our league. Foreign players, unike British ones, have always shown disprespect to the man with the whistle. They dive, cheat, swear, push, shove and generally treat the man in black in a way you wouldn't treat your mother-in-law. Well, maybe you'd like to but daren't because she's bigger than you.
In an otherwise inauspicious league game between Sheffield Wednesday and...someone else, I can't remember who, Paulo Di Canio, then a relative newcomer to the game in this country, became incensed by the way referee Ken Stott of Cricklewood was handling the game - not booking members of the opposition, refusing to give penalties every time the Italian dwarf dived in the area, not letting him swear and wave his arms about in typical Latin manner. When the referee awarded a decision against his side, Di Canio walked up to him and shoved him. The referee, a slight chap of middle age and wearing a wig, staggered a bit then fell flat on his arse. Much to the amusement of spectators because, frankly, it was f***ing hilarious. Di Canio was dismissed, fined, banned and threatened with deportation if he did anything like it again.
Some observers believed that the referee made a meal of the situation and didn't fall flat on his arse at all. Some people said he did it on purpose, whilst others pointed out that why would anyone want to make himself look like a twat in front of millions of viewers? Which was fair enough, like. Mr Stott remained adamant. "He shoved me and I fell flat on my arse," he said in an interview with Brian "I've Got A Degree Me" Glanville. "Di Canio shoved me with such force that I couldn't avoid falling flat on my arse."
The incident led to much discussion within the FA, basically because they had sod all better to talk about. Graham Kelly, himself a former referee and fat bastard, ordered a review of refereeing. Other people came from a different angle, citing the physical stature of referees as a major contributing factor.
Professor Hobson Truscott, a PhD in Futilty at Barnsley University and a recognised expert in conning money from the Lotteries Commission for superfluous academic reports, believed that the physiognomic dynamics of football referees made them susceptible to gravitational lapses. In other words, they were so small that if you shoved them they'd fall flat on their arse. In his 10,000-page report 'Why Referees Fall Flat On Their Arse' he said: 'Football referees have a higher centre of gravity than most normal people, and this is why they are so easy to shove over and sometimes fall flat on their arse. Most people would only fall over if they received a shove of, say, 150lbs psi; wherease a ref would need only about a quarter of that. You'd have more trouble shoving a baby over to be honest.'
Neverthleless, such was the severity of what Di Canio did that day that no-one since has tried to shove a referee over.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
LEEDS f***ED BY THE MACKEMS
The year was 1973 and mighty Leeds United, the greatest English club side of their generation under the tutelage of the then motor-neurone-less Don Revie, had reached a third FA Cup Final in four years. Feared by much of Europe for their uncompromising approach, hated by opposing fans for being dirty bastards and despised by the media because, let's be honest, they probably won their fair share of matches by bribing the opposition, they positively oozed clbutt in every department. Cup holders, they faced at Wembley the underdogs of second-division Sunderland who were hoping against all odds to capture their first major trophy since f*** knows when. Everyone feared a demolition; no-one gave Sunderland a hope in hell. Except perhaps Sunderland themselves.
Billy "Little Bastard" Bremner and Johnny "Cunt" Giles were expected to dominate the middle of the park, while in defence Jack "The Giraffe" Charlton and Paul "No Nickname" Madeley would boss Sunderland's pathetic strikeforce of Ian Porterfield and Vic Halom. With Norman "Bites Your Arse" Hunter and Paul "Not Really A Black Man" Reaney also at the back, the lethal shooting prowess of Peter Lorimer and deadly marksmen Allan "Sniffer" Clarke and Mick "Ooops I've broke My Shoulder" Jones, Sunderland surely never stood a chance. But the FA Cup has a history resplendent with the glory of the underdog, and that drizzly Wembley day would prove once again that nothing in this beautiful game is to be taken for granted.
Sunderland's big Dave Watson nullified the threat of the Leeds strikers, whilst in midfield skipper Bobby Kerr (standing only 3'7") and Mick Horswill gave Bremner and Giles no room at all. On the bench, Terry Yorath did his usual trick of keeping his arse warm, whilst neither 'keeper really had a shot to save in the opening half hour. Leeds, pressing and building slowly, looked like taking command of the game. But when Billy Hughes banged over a corner there was pandemonium in the Leeds penalty area. The pandemonium was removed by stewards and the game carried on. The ball fell to Ian Porterfield who brought it down on his chest and slammed an unstoppable shot past Leeds 'keeper David "Dracula" Harvey. One-nil to Sunderland, and a real upset was on the cards.
In the second half Leeds came at the Rokermen, feeding the ball to Allan Clarke who, for some reason best known to himself, kept spazzing up in front of goal. Then, with Sunderland under real pressure, came the moment that changed the game. It was probably the biggest moment that changed a game in the history of the FA Cup, producing arguably the greatest double-save ever witnessed in this country or any other. Trevor Cherry made a superb diving header that seemed a certain goal. "A certain goal!" exclaimed the totally biased Leeds fanatic David Coleman. However, a split second later Sunderland 'keeper Jim Montgomery had parried the ball onto the bar. The ball rebounded only to find the thunderbolt right boot of Peter "Stitch That f***er" Lorimer. Cue the almost orgasmic David Coleman again: "And Leeds have scored! Oh, f***, no they haven't!" Montgomery, with hardly time to regain his feet, had saved the supposedly unstoppable shot from Lorimer. It was the first time that anyone had ever saved a Lorimer shot, though it wouldn't be the last because after that he was pooe.
Leeds tried everything to get an equaliser, even bringing on Terry Yorath for a laugh with ten minutes left. But at the final whistle Sunderland had won the cup, thus providing the greatest and most popular upset in the history of the game. Well, at least since Leeds had been laughably turfed out two years earlier by Fourth Division Colchester United. Now that was f***ing funny. Sunderland boss Bob Stokoe, who ran onto the pitch to hug his heroic 'keeper, attributed the stunning victory to something that had happened some eighteen years earlier. Then, at the Cup Final of 1955, Stokoe was a player with Newcastle United. In the final they faced Manchester City, for whom a young Don Revie was a blossoming wing-half. Then, with Newcastle two goals up, claims Stokoe, he was approached by Revie who said: "There's fifty quid in it for you if you throw the game and let us win. If you don't I'll have some of my lads break your f***ing legs." Stokoe told him to f*** off, just as his Sunderland side did on that drizzly May afternoon in 1973.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
BERT TRAUTMANN BREAKS HIS f***ING NECK
There have been many examples of bravery in the history of football: Terry Butcher splitting his head open and carrying on for England; Liverpool's Gerry Byrne playing an hour of the 1965 Cup Final with a broken collarbone; Bryan Robson bravely dislocating his shoulder again and sobbing as he limped off the pitch in the World Cup. But no player has ever displayed the kind of bravery of Manchester City's giant German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann.
Trautmann had come to this country in 1942 when, as a pilot in Hitler's Luftwaffe, he was shot down over Coventry. He survived the crash and was taken prisoner, being frog-marched almost a hundred miles to Burtonwood in Cheshire where, for the next four three years, he would be held as a prisoner of war. But holding the 7'3" German would prove something of a problem for the British army. On nine occasions he tried to escape and make it back home to Germany - three times in the back of a lorry full of twigs, twice in a boat, twice hidden inside a vaulting horse, once on a motorbike and, perhaps most famously of all, in a tunnel. Sadly for Trautmann, the tunnel was discovered in some trees near Oxford, and he was arrested and taken prisoner once again. He was put before a firing squad and shot fifteen times in the head. But, amazingly, Trautmann survived with only minor injuries.
After the war Trautmann remained in England and resumed his footballing career. A former Munich 1860 player, his potential was noted by local side St Helens Town, for whom he played in the Lancashire League, establishing himself and quickly earning the nickname of "That f***ing Kraut In Goal".
Manchester City signed him in 1951, and it was in the FA Cup Final of 1956 that he was to really make his name. During that season he let in only one goal and became the first Kraut to appear in a Wembley final.
In a challenge with Birmingham's Noel Kinsey after only two minutes, Trautmann went down and was seriously injured. It became apparent that he had broke his f***ing neck and would not be able to continue in goal. But despite the fact that his neck was cleanly snapped in half, and with his head lolling to one side, Trautmann decided to carry on. Paralysed from the neck down, like that Christopher Reeve bloke, he played out the remainder of the game. "Ich couldn't feel ein f***ing thing," he said afterwards. "All Ich could do vbutt roll around auf der floor und do my best."
Trautmann made a string of stunning saves that would have shamed a bloke like Gordon Banks who couldn't be arsed playing because he lost a f***ing eye, and City won the match 3-1. Later he was voted Footballer Of The Year as recognition for his outstanding bravery.
For the remainder of his career, Trautmann played in a wheelchair, being pushed around the box by a specially-trained nurse. It was only a cruciate knee ligament injury that forced him to quit the game in 1965 at the age of 49.
Still living in Manchester, Trautmann now trains youngsters, with the aid of a motorised wheelchair and computerised voice. Like Stephen Hawking. But this quietly-spoken, former Nazi spy and Cup-winning spastic will always be remembered for that one act of sheer bravery and determination.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE MATTHEWS CUP FINAL
The year was 1953. Britain had a new monarch after the rest of King George, Mount Everest had at last been conquered by Sir Edward Hilary and Sherbert Tensing, Sir Roger Bannister had just run the first ever two-minute mile, and 67-times Champion Jockey Sir Gordon Richards, after 70 years of trying, had just won the Derby for the very first time. Britain needed just one man, one more hero, to make such a year of great sporting landmarks complete. And that man, that hero, was Stanley Matthews.
Perhaps the greatest player of all, Stanley Matthews, known as the "Blizzard Of The Dribble", was playing for Blackpool, a team of hopeless poobags, trying deperately to win the one trophy that had eluded him all his illustrious career - the FA Cup. Of course, it hadn't helped that for twenty years he had played for an even more hopeless shower of poobags, Stoke City. But there you go. But this gentleman of the game, England captain and a true legend in his own lifetime, would have given anything to get his hands on an FA Cup winner's medal. He had reached the finals of 1948 and 1951, only to be denied by The Scum and Newcastle respectively. And at Wembley Stadium in May in 1953, the nation held its breath as Stan lined up for Blackpool to take on Lancashire rivals Bolton Wanderers.
Bolton scored early on through Nat Lofthouse, then increased their lead after half an hour when Nat Moir headed in from close range. A third Bolton goal came in the second half when Nat Bell rammed in a cross from winger Nat Shuttleworth, and at 3-0 it seemed that Bolton would win the day, thus denying Matthews that much-coveted winners medal. Then, with only two minutes left, Stanley Matthews, long shorts billowing in the breeze, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He punished the Bolton defence with dazzling displays of his wing wizardry, cutting in from the right and crossing for Blackpool striker Stan Mortensen to fire past Bolton 'keeper Nat Cripps. Ten seconds later and Matthews was at it again, this time cutting in from the left to cross again for Mortensen to nod home a second. The score was 3-2 to Bolton. With three seconds left of play, Matthews pbutted sublimely for Stan Mortensen to fire home a third. Extra time beckoned, but still Matthews wasn't done. With only one second of time remaining he shot down the wing, running fifty yeards and beating five Bolton defenders (all called Nat) before crossing for inside right Stan Perry to fire home the winner. The whistle went and at last Stanley Matthews had achieved his ambition.
This match became known immediately as "The Matthews Cup Final", and Matthews was duly knighted in the royal box by the new Queen Elizabeth when he collected his medal, the only medal that was missing from Stan's remarkable collection. Actually, come to think of it, it was the only medal in Stan's remarkable collection, because it was the only thing the cunt ever won. Even though people think because he was Stanley Matthews he won loads, which he f***ing didn't.
Matthews returned to Stoke City to finish his career, where he didn't win nothing else neither, and continued playing until the ripe old age of 64. Then, this fine gentleman of the game and a great example to us all, who had sportingly given a Nazi salute to Hitler in Berlin in 1936, became a coach. And it was during the seventies that Sir Stanley Matthews broke the international sporting boycott of South Africa and took up a coaching post in Johannesbourg.
Sadly, Matthews died two years ago at the age of 109, but not without leaving us some of the greatest footballing memories of all, none more so than the Matthews Cup Final of 1953. Which wasn't fixed honest.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE BALDNESS OF BOBBY CHARLTON
Bobby Charlton, perhaps the most famous bald footballer of all time. But when exactly did he lose his hair? Was it a gradual thing, as with most slapheads, or did he become bald overnight due to some unspeakable trauma what he has never spoke about? Well, despite trying to keep his baldness a secret for most of his playing career, the truth is that Bobby's bonce became bald one winter's night back in 1958.
Bobby Charlton was a survivor of the immortal Munich air disaster of 1958, when most of The Scum team were cruelly wiped out because the pilot was pissed as a fart. It was rumoured at the time that Bobby, knowing that the plane was going to crash, leapt from the stricken aircraft and saved his own arse, running away and leaving his teammates to perish in the snow. Not true. Bobby was a hero that night as he fought to save his fellow Scum players, dragging Sir Matt Busby from the wreckage and giving him mouth-to mouth before doing the same for several other players. Then he ran away to save his own arse just as the plane disintegrated. And it was the trauma of that night that caused the young Bobby to lose all his hair and become the famous bellend-headed player we all grew to know and love.
"My hair started falling out in clumps after that," Bobby said in an interview recently with Sky's Martin Tyler. "At first I was too embarrbutted to admit it, but there was no avoiding it. I was going bald. I tried to keep it from my teammates and the football world in general because, in those days, it was seen as something of a stigma - to be a world-clbutt footballer what was bald. So what I used to do was grow a couple of bits at the side and comb it over so that people wouldn't notice I had no hair. No-one realised just how bald I was back then, because I was so good at disguising it."
But one man who did know about Bobby's secret was his brother, former Leeds hatchetman and fellow World Cup winner Jack. "I knew all about it," says Jack. "He'd sit down to watch telly or have his dinner, and when he got up there'd be loads of blond hair all over the chair. He once went out and got a poodle, just so we would think it was that moulting all over the f***ing place. But it was Bobby's hair alright, and I should know. Mother made some cushion covers in 1961 and we filled an entire three-piece suite with them full of Bobby's hair. His pubes started going as well. There they were, every morning, stuck to the soap and all round the rim of the bog."
However, Bobby's baldness didn't stop him being a great footballer, even though he looked like Alf Garnet. With his darting runs from midfield, his superb crossing prowess and his thunderbolt shooting, he more than made up for being something of a billiard ball. And there was no shortage of ladies neither. Young girls, inexplicably turned on by Bobby's light bulb dome, queued for hours at Old Trafford, just to catch a glimpse of him and hope to get him into bed. But for Bobby, being bald still had its considerable drawbacks. He found that he was so busy trying to gather those flyaway bits about his head that he couldn't concentrate on his game. And because of it, Bobby has always believed, he lost his place in the England team, ironically, to Ralph Coates of Spurs who was even more f***ing bald. In 1970, and in a last desperate attempt to rediscover his form, Bobby signed in at a private clinic for a hair transplant. Having tried wigs, which he found uncomfortable, and even hair restorer, which he found made his head even more shiny and therefore more ludicrous to look at, Bobby spent £1,000 on the best treatment money could buy. Sadly, it didn't work, because they never do, unless you're Elton John. And in 1972, frustrated with his lack of form and tired with the endless ridicule from fans, Bobby hung up his boots for good.
Bobby finally "came out" about his baldness in his 1997 autobiography 'Me And My Head', in which he detailed his resentment at not having no hair. 'It's true that I would of been a better player if I'd had some hair. I believe it held me back in ways people with hair would never understand. If I'd had some hair I might of been taken more seriously as a manager, and if I was playing today it wouldn't have been a problem. Bald managers are ten-a-penny now, though you still don't see many slapheads turning out for England.'
There are few in the game who would disagree with Sir Bobby, as he is now known. And there are many other people who also believe that, if he had of had some hair, Bobby Charlton would never have turned out to be the miserable whining whingeing bastard that he is today.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
SHANKS CALLS IT A DAY
Bill Shankly, probably the greatest manager who ever lived, was at the height of his managerial prowess. Having taken Liverpool from the mediocrity of the old Division 2 to the dizzy altitude of European glory, winning three championships and two FA Cups along the way, he suddenly decided to pack it all in and retire from the game. The silly old bastard. He could have won so much more, taken so many more glittering prizes in a career that could of gone on for years; instead he said he had had enough and opted to hang up his overcoat for good. It was a decision that had the football world, and the world in general, reeling in utter shock and mayhem.
The royal family immediately issued a statement in which the Queen herself pleaded with Bill to reconsider, whilst Prime Minister Edward Heath, taking a break from sailing across the Atlantic with a couple of young boys, recalled Parliament for an urgent sitting to avert the crisis. Even the Pope, taking a break from touching up little kids, decreed that Shankly must rethink his future. But Shanks, that tough and canny wee Scot of Scouse descent, was adamant. At the grand old age of 86 he had, he claimed, achieved all he could in the game and was off to pastures new.
Bill Shankly had come to Liverpool in 1959 as something of an enigma within the game. "He's something of an enigma," wrote the Liverpool Echo at the time. Whilst fans of this great old club were bemused by his appointment, having never heard of him. "We've never heard of him," they said. "Who the f*** is he?" They were soon to find out as Shanks, weighing in at 15 stone and standing only 5'2", with familiar shaven head and James Cagney stance, took their club to new highs of success. Shankly based his managerial style on toughness bred in the Ayrshire coalfields. But, contrary to popular belief, Bill was in fact no toughie but a big soft pooe.
"It's true," said successor Bob Paisley years later in his autobiography 'It Was Me Not Shanks'. "Bill was a big soft pooe. All that crap about him being dead hard...it was a myth. I've seen him cry rather than drop a player. Once, when he had to leave out Ian St John for a friendly against Luton Town, he took an overdoes of barbiturates rather than face the man. It was left to me to tell Ian he wasn't playing. Another time he had to choose between Gerry Byrne or Chris Lawler at right back, and Shanks went off with a piece of rope and hung himself from the main stand. Me and Joe Fagan had to cut him down."
Himself a fine player in his day, having won the FA Cup with Preston in 1938, Shankly would have gone on to greater things as a player had not World War Two intervened and taken away his peak years. But unlike most footballers of the time who went off to fight the Krauts, Shanks pissed off back to Scotland, where he spent most of the war years hiding in his mother's attic. Because he didn't like fighting. After hanging up his boots he turned to management, first, at Workington Town, then Huddersfield and somebody else before going to Anfield. Noted for his acute knack of finding the right player, he turned down both Dennis Law and Kenny Dalglish within a few years, saying that neither would make it as a pro footballer. The daft cunt.
There are many who believe that Shanks was not the man responsible for making Liverpool great, among them his widow Nessie. Now aged 128, Nessie believes that it was her what made Liverpool the club that it is today. In her controversial book, 'f*** Off Paisley', she claims that she made all the managerial decisions. "It was me alright," she says. "Bill was bloody hopeless. Kevin Keegan...I brought him to Anfield. Bill wanted to buy some other player but I told him to go for Kevin." However, contrary to what some believe, it was not his wife's influence that was the reason for Shankly's decision to quit. "It had f*** all to do with me," she says. "I wanted him to carry on and win the European Cup, but all he wanted to do was take the dog for walks and make model aeroplanes."
Whatever the reasons, the day Bill Shankly called it a day was one of the most momentous in the history of the game, if only for the fact that Brian Clough's gob would now seem so much f***ing bigger without him.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE BEST SAVE EVER MADE
The scene was set for the big game of the 1970 World Cup Finals in Mexico - reigning champions England versus red-hot favourites Brazil. Brazil were on fire with their dazzling array of fine players - Pele, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostao, Gerson and Carlos Alberto - whilst England had the likes of Brian Labone, Alan Mullery, an ever-balding Bobby Charlton and Colin f***ing Bell. The winners of this game would, everyone believed, go on to lift the trophy. It was that big a game. In the intense heat of Guadalaharararararara, both teams fought to gain the initiative. Pele hit the post in the second minute. Geoff Hurst hit the post in the fifth minute. Jairzinho hit the bar in the 20th minute and Jimmy Greaves hit the bar in the ITV studios because he wasn't playing again.
The game waxed and waned, waned and waxed and waxed and waned again just for the hell of it. Players went down in the heat and the game simmered nicely. Still no score and Brazil, now taking control, threatened to run away with it. Jeff Astle should have scored for England, but missed because his brain was probably so scrambled by then from constantly heading the ball that he thought he was playing down the local park. Which he f***ing should have been. Then, in the 55th minute, and with the score still level, came the moment that changed the course of the game. Or would have done if Brazil hadn't gone on to win 1-0 anyway.
A cross came in from Rivelino on the right wing, Pele rose mightily in the box, beating Jack Charlton, and headed the most powerful header ever recorded down towards England's open goal. Gordon Banks, distracted at the other end of the nets by trying to sell dodgy tickets to some fans, only saw the ball at the last second. "I only saw the ball at the last second," he said years later. "Out of the corner of one of my eyes, because I used to have two in them days. I think it was my right one, the one that I lost when I crashed that car. Anyway, I saw it and just threw myself towards it hoping for the best."
And the best is what we got as Banks, somehow propelling his fat gut across the goal, managed to paw the ball away for a corner. No-one could believe that it hadn't gone in, most of all Pele who was incredulous, having believed he had scored a certain goal. "It was great save," said the great Brazilian. "Very great save but also jammy bastard. I am thinking it is goal for me but it is not so. For goalkeeper to make save like that he is having three eyes, not two. Or even one."
Indeed, so surprised were the Brazilians with Gordon Banks's agility that day that they protesetd to FIFA in a pathetic half-baked attempt to have Pele's header retaken so that this time he could score. But all to no avail. In the end they had to resort to contagioning Banks later in the tournament so he couldn't do it again. The cheating half-breed set of bastards.
Sadly for Gordon Banks, his career would never be the same after this one landmark moment of goalkeeping supremacy. Two years later, following an argument with his wife over dodgy Cup Final tickets, he drove off in a temper and crashed into a brick wall. In the accident he sustained serious injuries and lost an eye. But at least he still had both his balls, unlike some World Cup winning England players I could mention. Banks never played again, though he did try his hand over in the States playing for Chicago Cyclops.
Now living in his native Sheffield, Gordon Banks makes a living selling black market Cup Final tickets to any cunt daft enough to buy them off him - a sad end for a man who gave us the greatest save of them all.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
WHEN DENNIS LAW SENT THE SCUM DOWN
Manchester United, surely one of the greatest and most successful clubs of all time. First English winners of the much-coveted European Cup and twelve times League Champions under the guidance of the inspirational Sir Matt Busby, they were the most supported and popular club in all the world. And then it all went wrong. Busby, fed up with being an old man, resigned and was sent packing upstairs to sit with the other fossils in the directors' box. After him came a succession of crap managers brought in to try and somehow recapture the glory days. There was Wilf McGuinness, a former Busby Babe who had survived the Munich air disaster. He was poo. Then came Frank O'Farrell from Leicester City, who had survived the Munich air disaster through not being there at the time. He was even worse.
Of the players, Bobby Charlton, tired of being labelled the "baldest player in Britain", had left to take up a managerial position at Preston, where his baldness wouldn't be quite so obvious. George Best had announced his retirement at the age of 22 to concentrate on drinking heavily, shagging Miss Worlds and going to prison. Pat Crerand, disgusted at being axed from the side after forty years' loyal service, had gone off to sulk in a corner where he would stay for the next two decades. Even Dennis Law had left, crossing the city to play in the sky blue colours of United's bitter local rivals at Maine Road. And it would be Dennis who would come back to haunt his former club.
In the season of 1973-74, United were, as the old saying goes, "too good to go down". They were, after all, Manchester United, the most famousest club in the world. It couldn't happen, surely. But in truth, by May of 1974, and before the fateful day in question, the damage to United's top flight status had already been done - their calamitous, catastrophic and disastrous season (the worst since 1958 when all that boring poo happened) having already put paid to that.
The afternoon of that May was indeed a defining moment in the history of the Old Trafford club, but just how poo were The Scum that year, the year that they hilariously fell from the old Division One and planted to the humiliating depths of Division Two football? Well, judge for yourselves with a few facts and statistics.
1. They were so poo that skipper Martin Buchan, who had never scored in his previous 300 games, was their leading scorer with one goal going into the New Year.
Taxi for Crouch! 750Moog agreed again. something like that, carew is a bit of a monster though, from several...
2. Even pooter, he was overtaken in the scoring stakes by goalkeeper Alex Stepney who, because the rest of the team were so unutterably poo, had become the club's reluctant penalty-taker and netted a couple of spot-kicks.
3. And how poo is this? Desperate to find a goalscoring touch, The Scum signed Jim McCalliog from Wolves, a journeyman striker of no fixed skill. He came on as a sub and scored on the Saturday, then the following Wednesday he came on again and scored twice, thus becoming United's leading marksman after only half an appearance.
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!
And so to that fateful Saturday afternoon. The last day of the season. United needed a draw to stay up and were facing...Manchester City. A defeat would send them crashing down, relegated, banished to pathetic life among the dregs of seventies soccer. They tried everything within their power to stay up - bribing City players, making rest threats against Francis Lee and Mike Summerbee, stringing up Joe Corrigan's cat from his washing line. Everything. Scum fans, at their whining whingeing best, pleaded and begged City fans to get behind them and save their team. But it wasn't to be. At 0-0, and with just one second of the season left, the ball was played into the United area and there was Dennis Law. Dennis, always eager to accept a scoring chance, lifted his leg and back-heeled the ball past a bemused Alex Stepney, who was on his knees at the time praying. One half of Manchester erupted; the other half cried, just like they've been doing ever f***ing since.
Manchester United were relegated.
Read that again: MANCHESTER UNITED WERE RELEGATED.
It was, agreed most pundits, as funny as f***. The funniest thing to happen since the last funny thing to happen to Manchester United. And that was funny.
The Old Trafford club, so disgusted with Dennis Law's goal that day, formally removed any trace from their record books of Law ever having played for them - a ten-year career which took in four hundred appearances and five hundred goals. No-one would speak about him and the words "Dennis Law" were punishable at Manchester United by immediate sacking. Indeed, in his 1978 autobiography entitled 'Dennis Law Never Played For Us At All', Sir Matt Busby made such ludicrous denials himself: 'Dennis Law never played for us at all. Not once. And the proof is there for all to see on the team sheet for the 1968 European Cup Final. There's Charlton, Best, Kidd, Crerard and all the rest. But no Dennis Law. If he had played for us don't you think I'd have bloody well picked him? We did have a Dick Law on our books once, but he got blew up at Munich. No Dennis Law, though. Never.'
Manchester United player or not, Dennis Law's finest, and funniest, moment came when he sent The Scum plummeting from the Top Flight on that memorable May afternoon.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
WHEN THE YANKS STUFFED ENGLAND
England's qualification for the 1950 World Cup Finals had been a piss easy one - dissolutioning Portugal, a win over Belgium and a walk-over bye against the Isle Of Man when the Manxmen failed to turn up at Wembley stadium. As usual, because we're a bunch of let's-stuff-the-foreigner types in this country, the press and football experts had us down at 1-4 favourites to lift the Jules Rimet Trophy in Rio when we finally got there. Yet no-one, not even the most xenophobic and fanatical follower, could have foreseen the nightmare which was to ensue.
In the first game we faced Chile, a team full of moustached villains like extras from The Magnificent Seven, and beat them 2-0. The next game was to be a formality - against the football novices of the USA in Belo Horizontal a fortnight later. With a team filled with superstars of the game - Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Tom Finney, Wilf Mannion and Stan "The Bullet" Mortensen - surely we couldn't lose. A trouncing of the Yanks would send us through to the next phase and onto certain glory in the later knock-out rounds. But football is a cruel and fickle mistress, full of unpredictability and surprises. A bit like a real woman on blob. And the fates were not to be on our side.
The American team that day was full of nobodies - rejects from baseball, American Football, basketball, ice hockey, all-in wrestling and even a bloke at left-half with a wooden leg and a glbutt eye who had once been the World Tiddlywink Champion. Most of them had never even seen a game of football before, let alone actually played in the final stages of the greatest cup competition of them all. So when England took to the field in their starched white shirts, neat blue shorts and centre-parted hairdos, a right good f***ing pasting was anticipated by all.
Hank Buzzberger, who played in goal for the USA that day, recalls it with stark clarity. "The English were bigger than us, stronger than us, more accomplished than us, more skillful than us and had nicer shirts. But we weren't to be intimidatalised by that. We knew what we had to do and stuck to the task at hand. We sure kicked butt, buddy."
Wolves's Billy Wright, winning his 278th cap and playing his 250th consecutive game as England captain, was normally a trusty and reliable servant. However, he had a rare bad game and failed to make a single tackle as the Yanks got stuck in in typical gung-ho fashion. He failed to make a telling challenge on the American winger Bubba Sawtooth in the fifty-first minute. The American crossed and there was centre-forward Wizz Bumsucker to score an easy tap-in. At 1-0 to the Americans, the English believed it to be a temporary setback. They would seize the initiative and take the game by the scruff of the neck, and go on to show these New World upstarts how to play the game that they alone had invented. But not to be. The jammy f***ing Yanks held on to win and claim the biggest upset in the history of the game.
Stanley Matthews, who didn't play that day, believes that, had he played, the result would have been different. "If I'd of played we'd have f***ing battered them. But I was dropped because I'd been poo leading up to the finals and they played Tom Finney instead. The little cunt. I was brilliant, me. I should have been in the team but I wasn't. And it wasn't fair."
The footballing establishment in this country was dumbfounded. How could this happen? How could a team of bums from America turn over England, who had invented the game of football in the first place? Was there no respect any more? What a f***ing cheek! Questions were asked, suggestions made and, above all else, excuses made. One excuse put forward was that England were tired after fighting in the war five years earlier. Football buttociation chief Sir Henry Wadbottom emphasised this in his official report some months after the humiliating reverse. "It's obvious why we lost. We started the war in 1939 and fought for six years. Them bastards only started in 1941, so they were naturally fresher than us. If they'd of been fighting since 1939 like us, they'd of been knackered like us. Then we'd have dissolutioned 'em. That's what I think, anyway."
Whatever, the fact remains that we lost. To the Yanks. And it was dead embarrbutting. And while we were dejected after that result, losing our next game to Spain 1-0, the Yanks went home because, having beaten England, they saw ne reason to stay and play out the rest of the tournament. Back home in New York there was a tickertape reception for their gallant heroes, and President Trumanhower declared "Team USA" as the new "World Series Soccer Champions Of The World Cup Soccer Series Of The World". A title they have held ever since because they don't give a f*** about anyone else.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
CLOUGH TWATTING THEM FANS
It was an otherwise inauspicious cup game at the City Ground back in 1986 - Nottingham Forest playing some other bums, probably Queen's Park Rangers or somebody like that - and Forest manager Brian Clough, that notoious drunken big mouthed cunt, should have been a man full of celebration. His side had just won through to the next round to face Arsenal, his players were delighted and fans of this fine old club had spilled onto the pitch to join in the jubilant scenes.
At the time football hooliganism was still in its heyday, as much a part of the Beautiful Game as the throw-in, the free-kick, two-footed winger and the unbribed ref who never gave The Scum a penalty in the last minute to allow them a cheap and scrappy win. They were happy times for the fans. Your average football supporter could do what he liked without fear of reproach. He could boo, jeer, hurl abuse, make monkey noises at coons as they ran down the wing, stab a rival fan outside the ground after the match or throw a sharpened fifty-pence piece at the opposing goalkeeper. All in the sound knowledge that he was only doing what he had paid to do - enjoy himself as he followed his beloved team. So what happened to a pair of decent fooball fans that day came as something of a surprise, both to them and to the watching football world.
Lifelong Forest supporters Ken Frampton and his gay lover, Simon Bender, had run onto the pitch at the final whistle to congratulate their players. But as they, along with thousands more like them, made their way over to the near touchline, Brian Clough was waiting for them. Clough, never a man to be backward at coming forward, and certainly a man to know a pair of queers when he saw them, charged at both fans and proceeded to slap them about the head, much in the manner of a schoolgirl of nine or ten.
"I couldn't believe it," recalls Ken. "One minute we were enjoying the scenes, the next Cloughie was twatting us. First he slapped me, then Simon. Then he went to scratch Simon's face, but I stopped him and he pulled my hair. When he pinched me and told us he'd tell his mum, we both knew it was time to get out of there as fast as we could. It was a scary moment, and one I will never forget."
"Me neither," says Simon, dabbing his eyes.
The press had a field day. FOREST MANAGER TAKES ON THE THUGS, proclaimed 'The Times'. BRIAN CLOUGH IN FAN buttAULT, boomed 'The Independent'. While 'The Sun' went with CLOUGHIE TWATS FANS and 'The Star' just had a picture of a woman showing her tits and the caption: COME AND SLAP THESE CLOUGHIE. No-one had ever seen anything like it before - a manager belting a couple of his own supporters for doing nothing other than running onto the pitch at the end of an important game. But the red-faced pickled Forest manager was adamant. "I just lashed out," he wrote in his autobiography, the one that called Liverpool fans a bunch of mindless thugs who end each other at cup semi-finals. "All I saw was a pair of bummers on our pitch. I wasn't having it so I twatted them. I didn't sell that faggot Justin Fashanu just so I could have bent bastards out there with my lads. No way. I showed them."
He did indeed. Some observers ventured that perhaps Mr Clough was in the wrong sport, that maybe he should try his hand at boxing. At which suggestion Clough, always ready for a fresh challenge, went into training and vowed to take on then British heavyweight champion Frank Bruno in a fifteen-round title bout. Sadly for sporting fans, the big black twat was too busy punching f*** out of his wife to bother, and Clough retired from boxing without ever landing a blow.
The Forest manager refused to apologise to Ken and Simon for his attack, yet they did make peace in front of the cameras to show there was no lasting ill-feeling. Clough, who isn't queer honest, gave both fans a big hug and kissed them on the mouth. Like he was always doing to everybody and like he probably did loads of times to former sidekick Peter Taylor (no relation). "It was great," said both fans. "The way he hugged us and kissed us like that, even though he's not queer honest. And he doesn't drink loads to hide the fact that he bums blokes. It was just nice having him make up with us like that. A fine man and a hero of ours who isn't queer."
Clough, who retired from management because he couldn't win anything any more, went on to drink lots of whisky at his Nottinghamshire mansion. He then drank some more, bought shares in Oddbins, Thresher and Shipstones Brewery before his liver also retired last year. He now hits his grandchildren every day and can be seen hanging around groups of young men kicking a ball around. But he's not after their arses at all.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THAT f***ING WHITE HORSE
Question: which is the only animal, apart from Vinnie Jones, to win an FA Cup winners medal? Answer: A white horse. The famous white horse which made its appearance at the first ever Wembley Cup Final of 1923. It's one of football's most endearing, enduring and, frankly, f***ing boring stories.
The FA Cup Final had, before 1923, been staged at various grounds - Kennington Oval, Crystal Palace, Goodison Park, Old Trafford and a patch of spare ground just outside Birmingham where there's an Asda now. And Carpetland and a B&Q. In 1920 work started on a new stadium for the home of the world's oldest and most wondrous sporting event. Wembley Stadium, built at a cost of only four thousand pounds, was completed in 1922 and ready for the Cup Final of the following year. It would house some 100,000 fans and create a unique atmosphere for this fine old competition's finale. But organisers, keen to entice fans to the stadium for its opening game, fixed ticket prices too low. At only fourpence ha'penny to get in, hundreds of thousands of fans streamed towards the new football Mecca for the chance to bask in the limelight and soak in this memorable occasion.
When the turnstiles closed on that May afternoon, some 150,000 fans had already managed to cram themselves inside, with another 200,000 (most of them probably Scousers) trying to batter down the gates outside. Eventually, with only five minutes before kick-off, there were nearly a million people in the ground, many of them spilling onto the pitch. There was no way that the match could go ahead, and players of Bolton and West Ham, the finalists that day, were anxious that their moment of glory would be curtailed.
But then, as if by magic, there appeared a white horse. The police horse, ridden by PC Charlie "Chuck" Charles, was a fifteen-year-old gelding called Stan what would go on in the next few immortal minutes to become the most famous horse in history. More famous than Red Rum, Shergar and the one that threw Christopher Reeve off its back and broke his f***ing neck. As Stan galloped among the fans, the throng scattered in all directions. This was mainly because, coming from Bolton and the East End of London, most of them had never seen a horse before. As many as twenty supporters were trampled to rest in the ensuing melee as Stan did his stuff, spurred on by his rider PC Charles. "I just dug my heels in, whipped him a couple of times and he was off," said PC Charles (retired), now 107 and living on a drip in a Suslove rest home. "It was bloody great. But for Stan there would never of been a Cup Final that day."
No-one could argue with that statement. With nearly a million fans on the pitch and just a minute till kick-off, there was no other way of clearing the playing area for the match to go ahead. These days they would use a water cannon, or a threatening sign that said something like: IT IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE TO RUN ONTO THE PITCH. That might have worked back then, but no such ludicrous things existed in those embryonic days of a Wembley Cup Final. Nevertheless, the magical white horse that was Stan cleared the pitch and the game went ahead. Bolton beat soft southern puffs West Ham 2-0, but the game itself was academic. At the final whistle Stan was ridden up the Wembley steps to receive the Cup from King Edward XVXI. Afterwards he became the first horse to be awarded the Victoria Cross and was given a bye into the following year's Two Thousand Guineas.
Stan went on to win that race, then the Derby, the Oaks, St Leger and came third in the 1948 Grand National. Hollywood beckoned and Stan made several appearances in westerns alongside Roy Rogers and Trigger, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood. Indeed, it was Stan who pulled the chariot ridden by Charlton Heston in the clbuttic 'Ben Hur'. He had a brand of whisky named after him and was feted everywhere he went. But after all his glory and fame, there was a sad end for this great and trusty steed. Whilst riding through Hyde Park at the grand old age of 73, Stan, the hero of the 1923 Cup Final, was blown up by the IRA and had to be destroyed. What was left of his body was sold to Spillers and turned into Winalot. It was canned, marketed as "Cup Final Tripe" and sold in supermarkets at two quid a tin. They sold out in hours as fans queued for days to get their hands on a piece of Wembley history. The Queen herself, always a keen football fan, bought a dozen tins and fed it to her corgis for a laugh.
A fitting end for Stan, that f***ing White Horse Of Wembley.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
GAZZA THE BIG SOFT pooE
Professional football is a hard game. A hard game for hard men, and there is no place in it for big soft pooes and puffs, women and people who cry just because they've been booked in an important World Cup semi-final. Yet when Paul Gascoigne, the fat little Spurs player of the nineties, burst into tears at one such time, he was incongruously feted the world over as a hero to the cause. Indeed, even given his considerable playing skill and prowess, it was this one act of sheer soft bastardness that won him the accolade of BBC Sports Personality Of The Year.
The World Cup semi-final of Italia 90 was no place for soft bastards - England facing the old enemy Germany (then known as West Germany because the Munich Wall hadn't come down yet) and a place in the final against the other old enemy Argentina (then known as Them Cunts Who Burned Simon Weston's Face) awaiting the eventual winners. It was a night of high drama, high tension and high anxiety. Though no High Chaparral because that was on the other side being watched by the few people who didn't like football. Personally I preferred Alias Smith & Jones, but never mind.
England took the lead through everyone's favourite little goody-goody nice boy, Gary "I'm not half caste" Lineker - a splendid goal that foxed the German defence and was rifled powerfully into the net from almost two yards out. It looked as though England would win through and get to appear in their first final since 1966. Germany rallied and, spurred on by their influential midfield supremo Luther Matthauauaes, took control of the game. Commentators were unbiased, never once calling England "we" or "us", or referring to the Germans as "them", "they" or simply "them f***ing Krauts again". This was before the days of Jonathan Pearce.
Then, in the second half, Germany equalised. A half-hearted punt from left-back Andy "How Did A German Get A Name Like Andy" Brehme was bobbling towards the goal, several England defenders there to surely clear it. But not to be. The ball whipped up and somehow beat Peter "Shagging In The Back Of An Escort" Shilton to creep inexplicably over the goal line. 1-1 and the tension mounted even higher. England stayed firm, but one man who couldn't take the strain was young Paul Gascoigne. Gascoigne, known as "Gazza" because of his on-the-field antics like having his balls squeezed by Wimbledon players, had been booked in an earlier round. Another booking would see him suspended for the final and thereby missing out on the greatest moment ever in any footballer's career. Yet in the seventy-fifth minute, with a foreign referee who wasn't at all biased towards the Germans, fate stepped in and changed the face of football history forever.
Gascoigne made an innocuous challenge on German Jurgen Klinsmann. The challenge, no more than a two-footed affair at knee-height, from behind and with fists and elbows flying, would have made little impression on any other player. But Klinsmann, that diving cheating two-faced German cunt, went down as though someone had caught him in the balls with a scud missile. Gascoigne was apologetic, distraught as he pleaded with the referee to let him off with a few sage words; but the referee was having none of it. He reached for his pocket and pulled out a yellow card, which probably should have been red, let's be honest. Gascoigne was booked, which now meant that he would miss out on the final against Argentina and a chance to avenge the Falklands War and get them back for what they did to Simon Weston. The bastards.
The words of the song go: "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" and Gazza, that lovable fat twat who was everyone's favourite footballing clown, could hold back the tears no longer. The thought of not being able to play against the Argies, whose sudden declaration of war eight years earlier had caused him to flunk his GCSE's, was too much for the amiable Geordie wife-beater and drunk. Tears streamed down his piggy little face as his lachrymal glands went into overdrive...boo hoo hoo! And a nation wept with him. He was immediately substituted by England manager Sir Graham Taylor and that was the end of Gazza's World Cup dream.
Gazza later said that this was the turning point of his career. "It was terrible," he said. "Crying like that made me realise what a big soft pooe I was. I vowed never again to cry during a football match...except in that Cup Final the following year when I nearly broke that bloke's leg. And when I was dropped by Glenn Hoddle for the World Cup in France. Oh, and when my wife left me and pissed off with the kids. And when I went on telly and admitted what a drunken twat I am. Then there was the time I lost my car keys..."
Indeed, it was a turning point. Had Gazza not got booked and cried like a big soft kid, England might well have gone on and won the World Cup of Italia 90. In the final we would of beat Argentina and probably won it again in four years' time. If only we hadn't lost on penalties and then not had to qualify for USA '94. And it's all the fault of Paul Gascoigne for being a big soft pooe.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
WHEN THE FA CUP GOT NICKED
Not many people know this, but the FA Cup, as presented at the final each year to the winning captain, is not the original trophy, as first won by Sir Charles Alcock's "The Wanderers" back in 1872. That FA Cup - known as "the Little Tin Idol" - was a very different one indeed. Indeed, indeed, the modern FA Cup, first played for in 1992, is the fourth in the old trophy's long and colourful history. This cup replaced one that had been used since 1911, because that one was knackered. It had fell off so many open-topped buses, been used so many times as an impromptu champagne glbutt, been left in so many taxis by drunken Chelsea and other Cockney players, that by 1991 it was well f***ed.
The original FA Cup was crap, nothing like the glittering prize we see today. But that didn't stop it getting robbed one dark September night from a Birmingham cobblers in 1895. Aston Villa, who had just won it, decided to display it in a shop window. f*** knows why, but they did. And as we all know, anything that gets displayed in a Birmingham shop window is liable to get pinched. And pinched it did indeed get. The Cup vanished, the robbing Brummie bastards leaving only a hole in the roof and a couple of footprints behind. Staggered, the gentlemen of the FA immediately issued a statement...
"It is with regret and dismay that we must reveal that the fine old trophy has been pilfered by scoundrels unknown, taken from its place and thence despatched, probably to some hooligan's den at which wretches' paradise it has no doubt already been melted down and turned into counterfeit money. Or jewellery or something like that. May God have mercy on the heinous perpetrators of this truly fiendish act, and you can bet that when we catch the bastards we'll string them up by the balls."
The FA offered a reward of ten shillings - a princely sum in those days - for the safe return of their flagship trophy. But to no avail. The old Cup was never seen again, this despite the best efforts of Scotland Yard's finest. Led by Chief Superintendent Ken "Plodder" Plodsworth, the investigation faltered. And so, out of sheer desperation, were enlisted the services of Victorian England's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. But even the old deerstalker-wearing, pipe-smoking, violin-playing, injection-injecting sleuth could find no clues. "If you were to ask me who I believe stole the great old trophy, I would have to say that I haven't got a f***ing clue," he said as he fell off a waterfall with the evil Professor Moriarty.
But who did steal the FA Cup? Which degraded, depraved and larcenous blackguard would have done such a thing? Someone who loved football, or perhaps someone who really f***ing hated it? Someone whose team hadn't managed to win it yet, like a Birmingham City fan, because that's the kind of thing they'd do. Sadly, we may never know, though there have been many theories put forward as to who was, as the newspapers of the time called him, "That Thieving Cunt".
One theory was that the crime was the evil deed of a certain man by the name of Bob "Leather Apron" Smedley, a well-known stealer of knock-out competition trophies. He was rumoured to have run off with the Scottish Cup in 1886, then the Welsh Cup the following year, the Irish Cup two years later and needed only the English Cup to complete the set. But Bob was quickly ruled out because he had the perfect alibi - he didn't exist and was only made up to pan out this piece of crap. Another suspect was a respected surgeon of the time - Dr Henry Spunker. Dr Spunker had, in 1894, been struck off for unnecessarily amputating footballers' legs following calf strains and pulled hamstrings. Many believed he had good reason to wreak havoc on football's governing body. And what better way than to creep into a Birmingham shop and steal the FA Cup from the window display?
Other notables who came under suspicion were: The Prince Of Wales who, it was said, had got the winning Villa captain's wife pregnant and would sell the cup for an illegal end; Victorian mbutt liquidateer Jack The Ripper because why not; the Freemasons because they believed the competition to be anti-Masonic; composer Richard Wager; and Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Perhaps the most surprising theory of all is that the Cup was stolen by the artist Vincent Van Gogh. Unbelievable, you might think; though not when the evidence is closely scrutinised. Van Gogh, on holiday in England at the time and a keen fan of PSV Eindhoven, had been seen at the Cup Final that year. He then vanished and so did the Cup. There are many who point to clues of the lunatic artist's guilt in some of his paintings. In his famous "Starry Night" you can see, if you look closely enough, a thrush sitting on a brick wall. It's no coincidence that West Bromwich Albion, the team who lost the Cup Final that year, have a thrush on their shirts. Whilst in his epic painting "A Field" there are some "lillywhites" - this being the nickname of Preston North End, Cup winners of 1889. Some have even suggested that in his best-known picture "Sunflowers" you can see Nigel Kennedy, an Aston Villa fan and smug cunt, playing the violin. But frankly that's f***ing absurd.
Whoever did steal the old trophy on that infamous night all those years ago, it would be a huge surprise if it wasn't some Scousers or a couple of Geordies. Because they'd pinch anything, the shower of bastards.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
BRUCE GIVES THEM THE WOBBLES
The European Cup Final of 1984 was one of the greatest, most triumphant moments ever in the history of the game, and rightly appears here if only for the fact that it still proves to Scum fans everywhere that we won it four times while they've only managed to win it twice. So f***ing there, you cunts.
Liverpool had won through to the final, hammering every opposition placed in front of them - the big guns of Spain, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Iceland. In the final, staged in Rome's glorious Olympic Stadium (where Liverpool had thrashed Moenchengladbach of Denmark seven years earlier), Liverpool would be the away team, paired as they were with AS Roma who were playing on the ground where they played their home games every week. The Roma line-up was studded with stars of the game: Poland's Ziggy Boniek, Brazil's Falcao, complete with flowing blond half-bred hair and that famous wide-mouthed goal celebration, and of course, a defensive partnership that featured two Italians whose names I can't remember. But they were good.
The game itself was to be a dull affair. Liverpool took the lead through defender Phil Neal, who thus became the only English player ever to score in two different European Cup Finals. The Italians equalised and the game looked to be going towards extra-time. But Reds manager Joe Fagan, always a shrewd man and a long-time admirer of the penalty shoot-out method of settling big games, had already had words with his players. "I had already had words with my players," he said in his autobiography, 'The Man Behind Shanks, Paisley and Dalglish Come To That'. "I thought what a good advert it would be for a big high profile game like this to be settled on penalties, so I told my lads to play for a draw and hope the Eye-Ties didn't score another. I desperately wanted the game to go to penalties because I had shares in a company called Penalty Kicks Ltd, which sponsored the spot-kick at the time."
Fagan's plan worked like a charm, though back then he never admitted what reasoning was behind his methods. The game finished 1-1 and a barren extra time period followed. Still goalless after that, the game then went to penalties. First up from twelve yards was young Steve Nicol, who blasted his shot high and wide over the bar. "I did that on purpose," said Nicol in an interview years later, "to give them a chance. The gaffer told me to just belt it into the crowd because he knew we'd win anyway. So I did." Roma's skipper, Guacomole Tagliatelli, scored and the home team were a goal up. Then Phil Neal scored and one of the Italians missed.
Now it was upto Liverpool 'keeper Bruce Grobbelaar to do his stuff. Grobbelaar who, contrary to popular belief, didn't have a large wad riding on Roma, had a special tactic up his sleeve. Well, more in his socks, actually. "I'd thought of loads of ways I could put the Itailans off," he said after the game, "and the best I could think of was to wobble my legs. I'd wobbled my legs in a few first team games earlier in the season, but it hadn't put anybody off. Not really. So what I did before the Roma final was go into hospital a week before and have all the bones removed from both legs - tibias, fibulas, kneecaps, femurs, lemurs and primulas. The whole lot went. I was hard walking at first, but I soon got used to it. Come the final I was ready to do my stuff."
Indeed he was. Grobbelaar (which in Afrikaans means "the goalkeeper who doesn't throw matches honest") faced the lethal Graziano Graziani who, in a fifteen-year career had taken seventy-nine penalties and scored every one. Bruce's legs went to work. They wobbled this way, that way, the other way and back again. It was hilarious as the LIverpool joker did an excellent impression of Brian Clough coming back from the off-licence. Graziani, unable to control his laughter, shot and skied the ball high into the banked terraces of Italian fans, who promptly ran away and fell over a wall. Oh, no...that was next year.
Liverpool were victorious, proving yet again that, even allowing foreign opposition to get to a penalty shoot-out, English football was still the best in Europe. If not the world. It always was, and it always will be.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE McCARTHY WHINGE-HUNT
2002, the World Cup in Japan and Korea, and the Republic of Ireland had once again somehow managed to inexplicably qualify for the final stages. Led by grey-haired true Irishman honest Mick McCarthy, they had a solid set of players, a determined attitude, a smattering of skill and several world clbutt performers in their squad. Among these were...erm...erm...let me think...erm...Jason McAteer, er...Paul McGrath, Liam Brady, Robbie Keane and his controversial older brother Roy of Manchester United.
Preparation for the finals had gone well, with friendly wins against some stiff opposition - North Vietnam, South Vietnam, East Vietnam and West Vietnam - and the "little people" back home in the "Enerald Isle" were hoping for another excellent tournament like they'd had under Jack Charlton in Italia 90. But controversy is never far from the fiery Irish, which is why they keep going out and blowing pubs up and planting MP's. Nor, for that matter, is racism, because they hate everybody who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool bog-trotting peat-cutting Mick. But not all Micks, apparently.
One Mick who found this out to his cost was Mick McCarthy, a softy-spoken, quiet family man of no fixed nationality. Following a routine training session, the atmosphere in the dressing room became suddenly uneasy as he laid down his plans to some of his senior players. In particular, Manchester United's temperamental and irascible skipper Roy "Don't Kick Him If He's Bigger Than You" Keane.
"f*** off!" shouted Keane at the top of his voice, certainly loud enough for the press lingering outside to hear. "I'm not listening to you! You're not even Irish, you cunt!"
But Mick McCarthy, himself a former hard man of the game, could give as he got, and retorted angrily: "'Ey up, lad. There's no need for that kind o' talk. I am Irish, you know. A bit. I played for Ireland loads of times, me."
But something - we may never know what - had pissed Roy Keane off. Perhaps it was the fact that The Scum hadn't won anything that season. Maybe it was because, being a player of only mediocre ability and unfathomable wealth and fame, he knew he would be pitted against true world clbutt players, many of whom would show him up for the short-arsed little dirty moaning cheating little black bastard that he was. And twatted him. Like that big Argentine a couple of years ago when Keane openly poo his pants in a Champions League semi-final. Or it could simply have been that Keane always has, and always will be, a foul-mouthed talentless little piece of turd. Whatever, the United captain became even angrier and continued his vitriolic verbal volley. "f*** off, you English cunt! You cunting f***ing cunty cunt. You're not cunt even a proper English cunt. You f***ing Yorkshire cunt! Cunt!"
Many players who witnessed this astonishing war of words believed that McCarthy would lose his temper and give Keane a good old battering. Steve Staunton of Aston Villa, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Aston Villa again, recalls it vividly. "I vividly recall watching it and wondering what the boss was going to do. I thought he'd kick his f***ing head in, but he didn't. Some of the lads were standing round chanting 'Fight! Fight!'. But nothing happened."
Indeed, McCarthy kept his cool throughout, proving that he's either the calmest manager around, or a great big soft pooe. However, he did take a very firm hand with his irate squad captain. "Chuffin' 'eck, lad. Tha'll get me gander up in a bit if yer carry on like that. Why don't we have a cup o' tea an' talk about it, eh?"
But Keane, intent on leaving his mark on the tournament because, let's face it, he wouldn't have done it on the f***ing pitch, became even more abusive. In a dummy-spitting, foot-stamping tantrum lasting all of three minutes, he bravely called McCarthy's wife a slag, his mother an old whore who did it for ten bob up against the wall with sailors, boldly labelled his granny a piss-riddled spunkbag and courageously suggested that his daughter's pet hamster wasn't good enough for shoving up a leprechaun's arse. And you don't want to know what he said about his Aunty Gladys.
The result was that Keane was sent home immediately. He returned to Ireland on the very next flight, vowing not to break his silence about the episode. That's why he spent the next fortnight selling his side of the story to every paper that would listen to his self-righteous bollocks. He walked his dog, walked his dog a bit more and said he wished Ireland well, whilst secretly hoping they did poo and came home before the week was up. The Irish, meanwhile, proved how little they needed this whingeing little sawn-off cunt, and actually did very well. Keane's younger brother Robbie played out of his skin, though he had few regrets that big brother Roy wasn't there to join in the glory. "Our Roy always was a f***ing gobpooe," he said. "Me dad'll kill him for this when he gets home. I wouldn't surprised if he gets sent to bed. With a good hiding and no tea neither."
Will Roy Keane ever play for Ireland again after this bust-up? Well, now that they've got a nameless manager who won't challange the moaning Scummer's self-appointed authority within the dressing room, you can bet your f***ing balls on it.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
BOBBY MOORE'S TACKLE
I don't mean that tackle, his bollocks, like. Well, bollock, to be more precise, because he only had one. I would never write something about Bobby Moore's wedding tackle, especially as he was fifty percent deficient in that department. And anyway it would be dead tight. What I mean is that legendary tackle he made on that Brazilian in the World Cup Finals in Mexico in 1970, the one that saved a certain goal for the South American half-breeds and eventual winners.
Bobby Moore, England skipper and the man who had singlebollockly, I mean singlehandedly, led us to glory four years earlier, was always known for his tackling. A man of true positional sense and impeccable timing, it wasn't just for knowing the Kray Twins and stealing jewellery that this blond plantshell of an East End Cockney wide boy was known. A superb tackler, great pbutter of the ball and a setter-up of great goals, he was a man not to be taken on lightly during a vital World Cup game. Many a striker had shaken in his boots at the very thought of having to play against him, and more than one has actually retired from football rather than be marked by him in an important game. Once, before a League game against West Ham, a certain Chelsea centre-forward slashed his wrists when he found out he was on the teamsheet and had to face the insurmountable defensive obstacle that was Bobby Moore. He was that good.
Known to his team mates as "Mooro", because of his habit of always trying to steal more jewellery, Bobby was at his peak during the Mexico 70 campaign. He had already won more caps than anyone else and was pivotal to England's continued success on the world stage. So when, during that memorable game against the mighty Brazilians, Jairzihno went down the right flank and was only twenty yards from goal with only Bobby and several other England defenders to beat, his famous tackle was of the utmostest importance.
With his leg drawn back to fire through the crowded penalty area, certain to score a second goal as it somehow flew straight through Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter, Colin Bell, Terry Cooper, Keith Newton and Gordon Banks, Jairzihno suddenly found himself kicking thin air. Bobby Moore had taken the ball off him as though it was nothing. Indeed, so surprised was the Brazilian forward that he carried on running, kicking nothing into the net and even celebrating because he thought he still had the f***ing ball. But the ball was up the other end of the pitch, having been stroked forward by Moore without so much as the minimum of effort. It was the tackle that never was, the ghost tackle. A bit like that punch of Muhammad Ali's when he twatted Sonny Liston.
The tackle has been shown many times on television replays, slowed down and analysed, and still experts are dumbfounded, at a loss to know just how Bobby Moore made that all-important second-goal-saving challenge. In one experiment, the tackle was slowed down to 1,000th of its actual speed and scrutinised in a laboratory. By blokes in white coats who had never seen a game of football in their lives. "We can find no explanation for the tackle," concluded Professor Theobold Tripe of the London College Of Photography And Looking At Stuff. "One second the ball was about to be shot at goal, the next Bobby Moore was booting it up to Franny Lee on the wing. Extraordinary."
Magicians and other paranormal types also took a close look. They too could find no logical reason for Moore's great tackle. The Amazing Randi, an American illusionist of some repute, was sceptical, however. "I've seen that tackle a thousand times," he said, "and I could do it. There's no trick to it. All you need is a ball, a Brazilian striker, a hanky, couple of doves and some paper flowers to pull out your sleeve just in case."
Sadly for England, they lost the f***ing game 1-0, so the tackle was academic anyway. Even sadder for Moore, he never quite made another tackle like it, though he tried to reproduce it many times throughout the remainder of his career. But he went poo and West Ham sold him to Fulham, where he teamed up with that incorrigible wanker Alan Mullery.
Perhaps saddest of all for Bobby Moore, he snuffed it a few years back and never got knighted like Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst. But he will always be remembered as the man who made The Tackle That Saved A Certain Goal But It Didn't Matter Because The Cunts Won Anyway.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
WHEN JOCK STEIN GOT IT WRONG
In a managerial career spanning almost thirty years, legendary Celtic and ScotLand manager Jock Stein had seldom made a bad call. In fact, there are those who knew him closely who say he never made a wrong decision where football and management were concerned. Always tactically astute, ever perceptive regarding his players' performances, never fearful of making brave decisions or overstepping the boundaries of conventionality. In other words, he was a right f***ing know-all. "He was always right," says former Celtic star and chimpanzee-lookalike Kenny Dalglish, himself a bit of a smart-arse in his day. "I don't recall him ever making a bad call or a wrong decision. Before the Cup Final of 1972 he told us we would beat Hibs 6-1, and he was right. If only he'd been a betting man."
But sadly for "Big Jock", as he was affectionately known, there was one occasion on which he got it tragically wrong.
Jock Stein - real name Joachim Lowenstein - was born into a family of poor Jewish immigrants in the tiny Ayrshire village which had also spawned Bill Shankly and Matt Busby. But unlike Shanks and Sir Matt, who would both go on to conquer Europe and win titles and cups by the truckload, Big Jock would remain north of the border and piss the Scottish League every year. When he did come south to manage Leeds United, he made such an utter shambles of it that he was immediately installed as Scotland manager, because he couldn't get any lower, let's face it.
As Scotland boss Stein was in his element as he failed season in season out to achieve anything whatsoever, not even qualifying for the World Cup Finals, which even bums like Ally McLeod and Willie Ormond had managed to do. That's how crap he was. Rather than filling the team with Scotland's best - namely quality players from the English league like Souness, Law, Dalglish, Jordan, Macari and McQueen - he would remain faithful to players who earned their living in the Scottish League. It was Big Jock who, in 1984, instead of picking Daglish and Charlie Nicholas up front for a vital qualifier against Italy, opted for the deadly duo of Raith's Hamish Stott and Stirling Albion's Hughie McUseless.
But Jock Stein's greatest moment, the one he will always be remembered for (in our house, anyway), was the night he croaked of a heart attack at a vital World Cup qualifier against Wales at Ninian Park, Cardiff. With the score at 1-1, it was too much for Stein, who had earlier been complaining of chest pains which doctors had put down to the fact that he had eaten everything on the team bus on the way to the match. The big fat twat. Then, with only a few minutes left, there was a commotion on the touchline in front of the dug-outs. Big Jock had collapsed and the game was halted, mainly because people thought it must be an earthquake or something. But this was no earthquake, apart from being an earthquake that would shake Scottish football to its roots and foundations.
Fourteen men carried Big Jock from the field on a stretcher - well, five stretchers tied together, actually. And as he was being bundled off down the tunnel came the moment when, finally, Jock Stein, the man who never made a wrong call, got it f***ing wrong.
"Don't worry," he waved away anxious fans and officials, "I'm fine. I'll be alright. Gimme a wee dram an' I'll be right as rain in a while. Och aye the noo."
Five minutes later he was brown bread, and a tannoy anouncement was made as if to prove how wrong he had got it. The football world was in shock as the shock of the shock reverberated around the football world. At FA headquarters there was a minute's silence held in his honour; at Celtic Park there was a five minute silence; and at Ibrox there was a party that lasted for four days. Big Jock was gone. He had got it wrong. He thought he was going to be alright but he wasn't.
Scotland captain Willie Miller and the rest of the squad said they would qualify for the World Cup Finals in his name, and vowed to bring the Jules Rimet Trophy back on his behalf. They did indeed qualify, but as usual in the finals they were pooe and came home from Mexico with a few straw donkeys and a sombrero each.
But Jock Stein, that mild-mannered fat bastard and a true giant of the game, left a legacy that lived on long after his sad and untimely dissolution. His illegitimate sons Brian and Mark went on to play for Luton Town and Chelsea, whilst another son Mal, from an affair with a Kenyan prostitute, later owned Birmingham City and became a money-grabbing agent who would fleece some of Britain's finest footballers.
And at Cardiff City's Ninian Park ground there is a statue of the man and a plaque which reads: "In memory of Jock Stein, who thought he was always right, but he f***ing wasn't."
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
BECKHAM SEES RED
When a player gets sent off it's always something to get wound up about. When the player is one of your own it's an insult, a deliberate attempt by the referee to make you lose the game and a source of anger and torment. When it's a player from the other side, it's the source of much hilarity and a call for immediate ridicule aimed at the stricken player. When the player happens to be a so-called world clbutt superstar, a ponse who wears women's knickers, talks in a squeaky voice and is married to some talentless bimbo slapper of an alleged popstar, it's absolutely gut-bustingly f***ing priceless. So when, during the vital World Cup clash between England and old enemies Argentina in France 98, that player was a certain David Beckham, it was perhaps the funniest thing in the history of this fine old game.
England, already down to ten men because Gary Neville is a bag of wank, didn't need to have their number further reduced for such a heated encounter, yet when Danish referee Morten Olsen Stig Van Olsen reached for his yellow card that night, this is precisely what happened.
An innocuous challenge by an Argetinian player Simeone Dago ( though it could have been any of them because they all look like f***ing bandits from an episode of 'Bonanza') ended up with Beckham on the floor, as you might expect. Beckham, angered at the behaviour of some of the Argies and probably peeved because he was playing poo like the rest of the England team, suddenly lashed out. He swung his left foot and deliberately kicked the Argentine full in the face, then in the head, neck, arms, stomach, back and bollocks before pretending he hadn't done anything and holding out his arms as if to say: "What have I done?" The Argentine player stood firm, unmoved by such a ferocious and uncalled for attack. Commentators made little of it, refusing to believe what they had seen with their own eyes. John Motson said: "I don't know what the fuss is about. I thought we were allowed to kick the Argies all over the park...that's if he did kick him, which he obviously didn't. I've seen the replay a hundred times and I still can't see anything. The referee obviously has got it in for us, Trevor."
But the referee clearly saw the incident and reached straight for his red card. In a flick of the wrist Beckham was sent from the field a humiliated man. He had let down himself, his team mates, his manager, his fans, the Queen, the Pope, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, his lovely wife and that kid who follows them round everywhere with tubes up her f***ing nose. There was no hiding place. He was a national disgrace, a humiliation, a blight on the English and everything the proud nation stood for. David Beckham, rising star of the game and a feted millionaire and advertising man's dream come true, was in shame. With their star player off the pitch, how were England going to now lift the World Cup? It was as though Michael Owen's wonder goal and everything else that had gone before it had not even happened. The game was surely lost and once again the Argies would piss all over us and that would be it for another four years.
But England stood firm and bravely went out on penalties. Again.
In the aftermath, however, and as England's travelling heroes returned, one man was to be the subject of endless ridicule, abuse and ritual humiliation. When he got back to his luxury mansion in Moss Side, Beckham discovered that angry England fans had broken into his house and wrecked the place. They had stolen his medals, ripped up his carpet, daubed slogans on the walls and poo in Posh Spice's knicker drawer. Not long after, Beckham was the subject of rest threats, one of which read: YOU'RE f***ED YOU ARE BECKHAM YOU AND YOUR SLAGGY f***ING WIFE AND IF YOU HAVE ANY KIDS THEY ARE f***ED AS WELL. Beckham, in a pathetic attempt to mollify the fans, made a public apology. Written specially for him by Lord Melvyn Bragg, he read it aloud from the doorstep of his luxury fifty-bedroom castle in Whalley Range:
"I w...er...www...would just like to...er...ap...er...apol...er...say sorry for not kicking that Arg...Arg...what does that say, Victoria? Er...Argentininian and...er...being...the one what got us knocked out of the W...World Cup on pen...er...penalties again. It wasn't my fault. It was Gary Neville's because he made me do it. Sorry and I won't never not do it no more."
Back in Argentina, meanwhile, the Argentinians were furious. They believed that in kicking their star player, Beckham had single-handedly staked a claim for Britain over the Falkland Islands. They retaliated by saying they would invade if the Manchester United midfielder wasn't dealt with more severely. They demanded a public end and subsequent dismemberment, after which Beckham's balls should be packed off to Buenos Aires where they would be dangled from the town hall steps to set an example. Otherwise they would invade the Falklands and set fire to Simon Weston's head again.
Even Baroness Thatcher, never one to keep her f***ing trap shut, entered the debate. "I say we plant the bastards," she said. "plant the bastards and let me be Prime Minister again. The lady's not for turning...peace in our time...the pound in your pocket...we've never had it so good...is that you, General Pinochet? Is it time for tea yet, matron? I like custard creams with mine, I do...eee, look at the muck in here...blah blah blah..."
But the final, cruel, irony for Beckham came a year or so later when the player he kicked, Simeone Dago-Wop, admitted that he had never touched him. "He never touched me," he told stuffed shirt farty football reporter Brian Glanville. "I just pretended he touched me to get him sent off. My dad lost both his testicles on the Belgrano, you know. That cunt had it coming for that...eees true, senor...you like titties? My wife she got nice big titties, you want to see them?"
Whatever did happen that day we may never know, nor may we give a poo. The fact remains that, because David Beckham booted some greasy spick Dago up the arse, he ended up captaining the national side, and because everybody felt sorry for him. And we'll never win f*** all with him wearing the nastard armband.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
A COON PLAYING FOR ENGLAND
Not so very long ago, when political correctness was a phrase what nobody had ever heard of, when a mobile phone was a kiosk that got robbed in some grotty Liverpool sidestreet, and when the Royal Family were all alive and married and none of them were queer, the England national football side proudly boasted eleven white players for every match. Great days. In fact, for a good hundred years after the game was invented, only white people were allowed to play for England. It's a little known and highly hushed up fact, and one that the FA tried to keep secret for the best part of a century.
Despite their obvious absence on old black and white images of the game, there were actually quite a few black - or "coloured" - footballers playing in Britain, even as long ago as the late 1890's. And although among them there were some fine and very skillful artisans of the beautiful game back then, they were barred from playing for the national side purely because they happened to be the wrong colour.
The first great black player in this country was Albert Stubshaw of Preston North End. He graced the Deepdale club for fifteen seasons and was the first nigger to be touted as a possible England international. Yet the FA, unwilling to be seen as encouraging the "sambos", as they affectionately called them, put paid to any plans by black players to gain full international honours. With this in mind they drew up plans and made special rules at Lancaster Gate so that black players would never pull on the famous white of England. Perish the thought. These rules, which were a closely guarded secret for some time, read:
'No player shall be deemed fit for England selection if he is in any way in possession of any of the following: frizzy hair, a big flat nose, thick lips, a BMW, fourteen kids by different women all of whom he calls his "unpleasant woman", an album by Shaggy and-or a f***ing big dick.'
So that was that.
However, in the 1960's one black player - Michael Jackson of Sheffield Wednesday - decided to try and fool the football authorities into thinking he was white when he clearly f***ing wasn't. He painted his face white, had his hair straightened, cut off half of his nose, had his lips reduced, became friends with Paul McCartney and had some white kids with blond hair. But his plan went wildy astray when, just before he was about to gain his first cap in a friendly against Poland at Wembley, he inadvertently bummed a young boy. The young boy went to the police and told them he had a black knob, and the rest is history.
But in the 1970's, and with people's attitudes moving on from the good old days of racial disharmony, with 'Love Thy Neighbour' off the telly and the Black & White Minstels banned from theatres everywhere exept on the Isle Of Man, it was finally agreed that coons be allowed to play for the national side. At first there weren't any good ones - just Cyrille Regis and a few other West Brom spear-chuckers of little skill - so the FA decided to go looking for a black player who would fit the bill. Former secretary of the FA Sir Stanley Grouse recalls the time well. "It was difficult. We had a very difficult decision to make. It's not that we wanted wogs playing for England, though we never had anything against them as such; it was that pressure was mounting from people who did want them playing for the national side. We needed somebody who was clearly not one of us...er...I mean white, and yet it had to be someone who looked black when he pulled on that white shirt. We did consider Laurie Cunningham, but he f***ed off to play in Spain after years of being trained here. The ungrateful black twat. So it couldn't be him."
In the end the man who won the vote was Nottingham Forest defender Viv Anderson. He narrowly defeated Arsenal's Brendon Batson and Watford's Luther Blissett and, in 1978, became the first black player to appear in an England shirt. There was some confusion at first, when Cockneys at Wembley Stadium, who hadn't ever been north of Luton, thought he must have been some schizophrenic who had escaped and was pretending to play for England. They hurled abuse at him, threw bananas onto the pitch and made monkey noises all through the first half. And off the field of play there was much debate about such a revolutionary trend being set. Questions were asked in Parliament where, during one heated argument, Tory MP Enoch Powell's brain exploded on the back benches.
Nevertheless, black players went on to play for England time and time again in the ensuing years, often proving that they can play just as well as us sometimes. Apart from John Barnes and Carlton f***ing Palmer. And nowadays you can't watch an England game without there being at least four of the bastards out there, which is no bad thing.
But one player who would argue with the achievement of Viv Anderson is the former Leeds United defender Paul Reaney. Paul Reaney played for England back in the early seventies, even going to Mexico with the World Cup party of 1970. He insists that he was black then, just as much as he still is now, and yet he never received any acclaim whatsoever. "It's not fair," he says, speaking from his luxury cardboard box up a grimy back alley in Chapeltown. "I was the first black player to play for England and that cunt Anderson got all the credit. How much blacker I had to be I don't know. Look at my nose, for f***'s sake. And this hair...if I'm not a nigger I don't know what is."
Times have certainly changed. It only remains to be seen as to how long it will be before there are Pakis out there as well - though not if Lee Bowyer has anything to do with it.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE GOAL THAT WAS THAT NEVER WAS
The World Cup Final of 1966 took place on a typically miserable and rainy Saturday afternoon at Wembley Stadium, between England, the host nation, favourites for the trophy and surely the most deserving winners ever, and West Germany, the enemy, the Krauts, bullnecks, sausage-munchers, towel-robbers and general all-round invaders of small European nations and perennial losers of world wars. It was a game full of excitement, high theatre, nail-biting tension and, not least of all, controversy.
With the game poised beautifully at 2-2, and in the heat and drama of extra-time, came one of those defining moments of footballing history. England, having suffered the shock of a controversial and fluky offside German equaliser in the closing seconds of normal play, suddenly seized the initiative. Until then the initiative had been with Hun midfielder Franz Beckenbauer. He had kept it down the front of his shorts for most of the game. But Alan Ball took it off him in a tussle and sped off with it down the right flank. With his socks rolled down and running out of breath, there then occurred probably the most controversialest moment in the history of the World Cup Finals, if not the history of the world as a whole.
Alan Ball, his squeaky little chest wheezing away, crossed the ball. It was met on the edge of the box by rotten-toothed Sir Geoff Hurst who let fly with a tremendous right foot shot. With Jerry defenders all over the place, and with their keeper Tilkowski stranded, the ball smashed against the bar and rebounded to the ground. England players immediately celebrated a goal, whilst the Germans, still annoyed over getting dissolutioned in two world wars, protested to the referee that the ball had not crossed the line. The referee that day, Vladimir Brupooov, consulted with his linesman, an illiterate Ukranian peasant who spoke only Turkish and a smattering of French.
Was it a goal? Everyone held their breath.
After some twenty minutes of deep debate between the two officials, the referee turned away and signalled a goal. The English fans went wild, whilst the Germans hung their heads and promised to go home and gas some more Jews for this, you see if they didn't. The rest is history - England went on to win the match and lift the Jules Rimet Trophy; yet still, nearly forty years later, the question lingers...
Was it a goal or was it f***?
One man who has always remained adamant that the ball had crossed the line is that illiterate Ukranian peasant who ran the line that day. Now 87 and living in a one-bedroom flat in Kiev, Yuriy Dementko insists that he made the right call. "When referee is asking me if is goal first I am saying no, but when Bobby Charlton is telling me he pay my overdraft off and give me new Ford Anglia, I changing my mind. German captain Uwe Seeler is offering me two cars and a Lambretta scooter like one in Quadrophenia. Then I am tempted to say it is no goal. But I know goal when I see one."
Roger Hunt, who was the closest England player to the action at the time, also never had any doubts about the goal's validity. "I saw the ball cross the line in front of me by a good yard. In fact, I saw it hit the back of the net. The pictures show that it hits the line, but I blame that on poo replays we had in them days. It was definitely a goal."
The Germans, as you might expect, hold rather differing views. Helmut Haller, who ran off with the ball and kept it for thirty years just to prove that it never crossed the line, still maintains that it wasn't a goal. "Did it cross the line? Did it f***. I was up the other end of the pitch having a rest, and even I could see from there that it never crossed the line. The into the crowd. There's no way it was a goal."
With the advent of more technologicalised advancements, the goal has been scrutinised, analysed and closely examined in the closest analytical detail. Using modern computerised imaging, each individual pixie of the frozen moment when the ball hit the line has been put to the most rigorous testing. And the results are interesting, to say the least. One man who believes it was a goal is Professor Sir Henry Crouch of the Royal College Of The Germans Are Bastards, in Croydon. Professor Crouch, whose entire family was gbutted to f*** at Ausschwitz and who himself lost a testicle at Dunkirk, has spent ages looking at the findings. "It was a goal. I've got nothing against the Krauts, you understand, but it was a goal and they can f*** off."
In Germany, though, there is conflicting scientific evidence to the contrary. At the Adolf Hitler Institute For Ruling The World, in Berlin, Professor Hans Koch believes it was never a goal. "I've got nothing against the English," he said, "even though they blew my dad up in 1943 and kept escaping from our POW camps on motorbikes and stuff. But I still believe it wasn't a goal. The slow-motion pictures show that it didn't cross the line...just like our great Fuehrer never invaded Poland or annexed the Sudetenland. It's all propaganda by that scum, just because they won the war. But we'll show them one day, just you wait and see, We will rise again..."
Whether the ball crossed the line that or whether it didn't, it's academic now. England won the match because we scored another anyway. So there. Mind you, if Geoff Hurst had been a bit more accurate and not hit the bar that day we wouldn't have all this poo even now. Then again if he'd skied the cunt over the bar he wouldn't of scored a hat-trick and been knighted by the queen. What a jammy cunt.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
UP FOR GRABS FOR ARSENAL
The run-in to the 1988-89 season was one of the closest ever, if not the closest ever, in fact. In fact, actually, it was so close that by the end of May two teams were level on points, and even level on goal difference. It was that f***ing close. Arsenal, who had led the championship race for as long as anyone could remember, had been overtaken by a revitalised Liverpool. Three points separated them going into the very last and final ultimate game of the season. It was to be a titanic affair - Liverpool versus Arsenal at Anfield on a fine Friday evening in May. Liverpool, having already won the FA Cup by beating Everton, and it wasn't fixed honest, were rampant, unbeaten since a 3-1 thrashing by The Scum on New Year's Day and seemingly invincible at home. Arsenal came into the game knowing that they had to beat Liverpool in their own thieving Scouse backyard, and beat them by two clear goals in order just to get level on goal difference, and even then they would only lift the trophy by having scored more goals.
Due to the unfortunate events at Hillsborough some weeks earlier, opposing teams had been forced to let Liverpool win every game, just so they could win everything as a tribute to their fans. But would Arsenal roll over and die like all those other teams, or would they make a game of it? Speculation was rife that such a straight, honest, untouched-by-scandal manager like George Graham, who had never done a dodgy deal in his career, and who had never coerced players from other teams by handing them wads of cash in plain brown envelopes hidden behind the radiator at the training ground, would do the decent thing and make a fight of it. Others believed that Arsenal should allow Liverpool to win, just like all the other teams had done.
"If they beat Liverpool and spoil it," said soccer pundit and pissed up Scottish cunt Ian St John, "then they're nothing but a shower of bastards. And the fact that I used to play for Liverpool me has got nothing to do with it. I'm not biased at all."
"Neither am I," said sidekick and fellow piss artist Jimmy Greaves, "and the fact that I hate Arsenal because I used to play for Spurs has got nothing to do with it either."
So the game began, and Arsenal knew what they had to do. The first half was poo, because first halves of such all-important matches often are. Arsenal were cautious and Liverpool played their usual brand of free-flowing football - a ball out from Grobbelaar to a defender, then to Alan Hansen who would ease the ball through to Steve McMahon in midfield, who then would play the ball to Barnes on the wing, who would beat three defenders, pbutt it to Aldridge in the box in front of an open goal. Then, instead of shooting, he would play the ball back to Houghton, who then gave it back to Hansen who would return the ball to Grobbelaar in goal to a chorus of cheers from the Anfield faithful. Wonderful stuff to watch.
The neutrals wanted Liverpool to win - all except Scum fans, Everton fans, Villa fans, Chelsea fans and fans of all the other clubs in the league. Come to think of it, no-one wanted Liverpool to win. Apart from Spurs fans who, being a bunch of Jew-boy oven-dodgers and haters of their bitter North London rivals, would rather see a Hitler Youth XI win the title than the Gunners.
But no matter. At the end of the first half, with the score still poised beautifully at 0-0, Arsenal got a free-kick on the halfway line. Liverpool players protested that it wasn't a foul, but then they f***ing would. It was taken by that player, the one whose name I forget, the black one who died of cancer - Roy Castle. He crossed and there was Alan Smith to head the ball. Well, he didn't head it. He missed it completely. But Grobbelaar, who had surely not been bribed, was fooled, the ball went into the net and it was 1-0 to The Arse. The Liverpool players complained, mainly because they thought it was an indirect free-kick, and because spazzy Alan Smith had missed the ball the goal shouldn't count, because you can't score direct from an indirect free-kick, you know. It's in the rules. I've seen it. The referee conferred with his linesman and there were a few tense moments before he turned away and signalled a goal. 1-0 to The Arse.
Now all they needed to do was score a second and that was it.
The second half began much as the same - Alan Hansen strolling about like he had all day, Steve McMahon kicking everything that moved, Peter Beardsley dashing through the middle like Quasimodo at a bell-ringers convention. And for the next forty-five agonising minutes they managed to shut out the Gunners. It was stirring stuff. Dead commentator Brian Moore was beside himself, at times referring to Arsenal as "The Arsenal", as he had done during the sixties and seventies, and as if to cajole his favourite team into grabbing that winner. "This is more than I can stand," he said at one point to co-commentator David Pleat. "What do you make of it, David?" But there was no reply because, being in Liverpool for the night, Mr Pleat had gone off to Toxteth kerb-crawling after prostitutes.
Probably.
With only two seconds of normal time remaining it looked all over. "You have to say that justice has been done," said David Pleat, who had come back to the commentary box with relish. And a dose of crabs, too, I shouldn't f***ing wonder. "Liverpool have deserved to win this because they have managed to shut Arsenal out all night."
But the wavy-headed, soliciting, Spurs-managerial flop had spoken too soon. With just two seconds left Arsenal midfielder Kevin Richardson went down injured. Time was added on and Arsenal got the ball. It was played up through the field and eventually came to Michael Thomas on the edge of the area. "It's up for grabs now!" screamed the soon-to-snuff-it Brian Moore as Thomas caught a jammy deflection off Steve Nicol. Then there was pandemonium as Thomas deftly flicked the ball over a non-bribed Grobbelaar and Arsenal took a 2-0 lead. Liverpool complained again - probably that it was offside, a foul, handball, against some UN resolution, anything - but the goal stood. The final whistle sounded and that was it. It was all over.
Arsenal Football Club had done the unthinkable - they had gone into the lion's den, the thieves' own backyard, and out-robbed the robbing Scousers. They had stolen the Championship trophy from under their noses, and it didn't go down too well. After the match, Arsenal fans would rejoice in the city of Liverpool - at least until they got back to their cars that were up on breeze blocks, had no radio and turds in the glove compartment. But it would all be worth it.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
MILLWALL FANS WRECK LUTON'S NEW STAND
By 1985 the problem of football hooliganism in this country had reached a peak, and whereas before most people had accepted it as part of the game, they now saw it as some kind of manifestation of civil unrest. This was due in part to the Miners' Strike of that year, when money-grabbing cunts like Arthur Scargill had forced his men to take illegal action and go on strike, causing trouble and throwing concrete posts off motorway bridges onto pbutting lorry drivers. Funny though this indeed was, the Prime Minister of the time was keen to crack down on any form of public disorder and sedition.
Margaret Thatcher, then only a half-demented old unpleasant woman, knew little about the Beautiful Game. Indeed, after attending the 1978 Cup Final between Ipswich Town and Arsenal, when asked if she had enjoyed it, she replied: "Yes, very much. And I thought Whymark played exceptionally well at number 9." Little did the insensate old bastard know that Ipswich striker Trevor Whymark, whose name only appeared in the programme, had missed the game through injury. The f***ing stupid mental old cow. But Thatcher, keen to show that she wanted to eradicate the blight of hooliganism from our national game, decided to put some of her cronies into football as a way of doing this.
One such crony was the new Luton Town chairman David Evans, who also, by an astonishing coincidence, happened to be a prospective Tory candidate and huge donator to Conservative Party funds. And it was at Luton - and this had nothing to do with Thatcher, honest - that the first anti-hooligan programme was put in place. Chairman Evans, always mindful of needing to shove his nose further up Thatcher's arse, put in an all-seater stand and introduced new measures such as Identity Cards and CCTV cameras to catch any offending fans. And when Luton met Millwall in a vital Milk Cup clash at Kenilworth Road, it was to be the first big test of the chairman's revolutionary new offensive.
Millwall, whose fans have always been cunts, replied to Luton's requests not to send many supporters to the game by sending f***ing thousands, all tooled up and ready for bother of the most fiendish kind. Once at the ground they were herded in by hundreds of police officers on horseback, then goaded, abused and generally treated like the scum that they are, just to make them feel at home. If Millwall had won, there wouldn't of been a problem. But Millwall didn't win. They were, in fact, beaten by Luton. And that was when the trouble started.
The first sign of unrest in the crowd was when a seat was thrown from the stand, hurtled through the air and twatted Luton 'keeper Les Sealey in the f***ing face. Sealey went down and was never the same player again. Come to think of it, didn't he die last year? I think he did, and it was probably that bang on the head that did it. More seats were thrown as angry Millwall fans became more aggressive and frustrated by their side's inability to beat a poo Luton outfit containing such greats as Tim Braecker, Ricky Hill and the f***ing Stein brothers. Soon there were no seats left in the stand as Luton's new multi-million pound complex was torn apart by rampaging Cockney bastards who should have been in a zoo. Fans spilled onto the pitch and fought with police. And each time a copper went down with a broken bottle in his face or boots flying into his fat gut, there were cheers from the Millwall supporters. And rightly so.
It was the worst crowd trouble at an English game for many years, decades even. Actually, it was only the worst since Birmingham a few months earlier, when a couple of Brummies got knifed and a f***ing wall fell down, but that doesn't sound as good. No fewer than 4,000 Millwall fans were arrested and thrown in jail, which meant that their next home crowd would be about 46, but there you go.
Many cynics at the time suggested that this pitch invasion had been somehow engineered by both Luton chairman David Evans and premier Margaret Thatcher. It was, they claimed, almost as if they ha
