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 had got their heads together and come up with a plan to show the hooligans up for what they were - a bunch of Tory-voting bastard Cockney scum anyway who had little regard for the common decency of other people. Much like Thatcher herself. With this event firmly in mind, Margaret Thatcher demanded that in future all games in this country must be played behind closed doors, with twenty-foot high electrified barbed wire fencing, guard dogs, gun turrets and a moat with sharks and crocodiles swimming in it. And piranhas. And with that she promptly spent several billion pounds of taxpayers' money on such plans, whilst putting up prescription charges, refusing the nurses a 4% rise, sucking Rupert Murdoch's cock and singlehandedly destroying the country that we live in.
And all because a few Millwall fans got a bit boisterous the night they lost to Luton in the f***ing Milk Cup.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE TRAGEDY OF MUNICH
Sadly, there have been many disasters which have, throughout history, sullied the otherwise unblemished countenance of The Beautiful Game: the Bolton disaster of 1946 in which 33 fans were end; the Bradford Fire, in which 55 fans got burned alive because they were too thick to know a blazing inferno when they saw one; Heysel, when some yellow-bellied Italians ran away rather than stand and fight like men; Hillsborough, when 96 drunken Scousers bought it trashing through an opened gate, at least that's what Brian Clough would have us think; the hilarious Protestant mbuttacres of the two Ibrox disasters; and when Iain Dowie finally retired from first clbutt football. Indeed, in the wider world there have also been great footballing disasters: in Peru 1953, when as many as 300 fans were trampled to rest after a league game; in Chile when hundreds of supporters died watching their national side take on El Salvador in 1956; and in South Africa, when 100 savages boiled each other in pots after their side had won the nation's cup final. But seeing as they're all foreigners, who really gives a poo?
In the old sense of the word, "great" disasters all. But there is one disaster which ranks as the most historical, earth-shattering, catastrophic and saddest of them all. The Munich disaster of February 1958, in which a few Manchester United players were end when their plane crashed on a snowbound runway. Surely the most tragic of them all.
The Manchester United team of the 1950's was to have been a great side. Styled and schooled by the great Sir Matt Busby, they were dubbed "The Busby Babes", mainly because they were all so young. Players such as Tommy Taylor, Duncan Edwards, Dave Pegg, Bill Whelan, a young Bobby Charlton (with hair), Bill Foulkes, Ray Wood and some others what I can't remember. Chosen for their footballing skill, flair and burgeoning potential, and nothing to do with the fact that Sir Matt liked them young. Very young. They had already won two league championships and reached a couple of Cup Finals, played in Europe and looked set to be invincible for many years to come. But Fate can be a cruel mistress, especially when it snows and your plane's about to land. And on that tragic February night, as their Glenn Miller Airways DC9 came in to land at Munich airport, Fate awaited them with tragic consequances.
Bobby Charlton, who survived the crash after miraculously running away and leaving the rest of his team mates for dead, still recalls how tragic a time it was. "It was tragic. I was never the same player after that, even though I did go on to win the World Cup and be capped 106 times for England. My hair fell out and I had terrible nightmares about dying myself. I mean, I know people died that night, but what about me? If I had died I would never of scored that brilliant goal against Portugal, and my daughter would never have gone on to be a weather girl at the BBC. I thought my number was up, but thankfully I survived and went on to prove that I was better than anyone else in the team back then."
Even though the tragedy claimed many young lives that night, manager Sir Matt Busby's life was spared. The jammy f***er. Other survivors included Nobby Stiles, Pat Crerand (though he really should have f***ing died, the biased Manc-supporting Scottish cunt), Shay Brennan and Buddy Holly. Though sadly Holly would die the following year when returning from the second leg of a tie in Hungary against Partisan Gene Vincent. Busby, undeterred by such catastrophe, went on to rebuild his team and probably created an even better one, because this second set of "Busby Baes", including George Best, Denis Law, Charlton and that f***ing Pat Crerand, would go on to lift the European Cup in 1968, exactly ten years after the horrific events of Munich.
One of the strangest things about the Munich disaster is the fact that the clock at Old Trafford stopped round about the precise same moment that the plane crashed. Amazingly, just three weeks after the event, the groundsman was sent up a ladder with a screwdriver and told to remove the mainspring, just so it would look as though the clock had stopped. But he forgot that Germany is an hour in front of us and got it wrong. He was later reprimanded by the club, and has spent the last forty-odd years knackering up their pooty pitch just to get his own back.
But how good would that team of "Busby Babes" have been, had they had a better pilot on that cold and snowy February night? Most people, mainly Manchester United fans, believe they would have been true world-beaters; others, mainly anyone but a Scum fan, believes they would have been poo. Sir Bobby Charlton believes they would have been alright, but not as good as the teams he later played in, naturally. Though one player in particular would, he maintains, have been sorely missed in the years to follow. "Duncan Edwards was an unbelievable player," he says. "He had everything - size, strength, two good feet, good in the air, good on the ground, good pbutting, an excellent reader of the game, great temperament. And what an athlete! As well as being being an immensely talented footballer, he also played cricket for Lancashire and had rowed for Cambridge in the Boat Race. He could run a mile in three minutes, swim the Channel in half an hour and jump a ten foot wall from a standing position. I once saw him fight Floyd Patterson at the Abert Hall and he beat the poo out of him. He could do anything he took his hand to. Pity he never took flying lessons, really. But there you go."
One thing is for certain: that those players who perished that night will never be forgotten. All you have to do is walk up to any Manchester United fan today, mention the name of Duncan Edwards or Tommy Taylor and he will smile and say: "Excuse me...no speak Eeengleesh. I coming all the way from Thailand to watching David Beckham...he nice he good player better than Ralph Milne and Mike Phelan...which way to Piccadilly please? I lost I never go to Old Traffic before thank you yes nice..."
f***ers.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE SCHUMACHER CHALLENGE
When you think of the World Cup Finals in Spain in 1982, only one thing springs to mind. The superb goalscoring exploits of Italy's Paulo Rossi? The smooth and brilliant football played by Socrates and a vibrant Brazil? The dashing exploits of Northern Ireland? The midfield majesty of Michel Platini, or the way England blitzed through the tournament without getting beat but still came home on the early plane because they were pooe? No. The one thing that springs to mind when you think of the 1982 World Cup Finals is that clash between German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher and France's Jean-Claude Buttiston. I think that was his name.
It was the semi-final, and these two great World Cup teams were battling it out. With nothing to separate them it was a free-for-all - not the most attractive football you will ever see, but riveting stuff all the same. France had the afore-mentioned Platini, with his mercurial skill and dazzling finesse. They also had Jean Tigana, who would later slum it in the English Premiership as manager of Cockney failures Fulham, Didier Six, someone else and loads of other fine players whose names I can't remember because it was ages ago. The Germans, for their part, had Pierre Littbarski, Karl-Heinz Roomenigger and afro-headed Paul Breitner, a veteran of two previous campaigns and owner of surely the finest love-star tash ever to grace the Beautiful Game (with the possible exception of Graeme Souness and Terry McDermott). They also had a few other players, but nobody of any real significance. But in goal they had the daunting figure of Harald Schumacher, a man who, by his own admission, would let nothing past him. No way. Not if he could help it.
A hopeful ball was played up through the middle by a French player, and substitute Jean-Claude Batistonta found himself in acres of space and with only the huge German 'keeper to beat. He ran full pelt and seemed certain to score. But then he stopped dead in his tracks, as if pole-axed by some mighty obstacle in his way. And he was pole-axed. The German 'keeper, unable to do anything else to stop this mediocre French striker, had done the only thing he could do - clatter the bastard with a full-on challenge that nearly separated poor Batistuton from his head. It was a certain penalty, and if not a penalty then at least a free-kick. French players rushed to the referee to complain, whilst their teammate lay unconscious on the ground. But the referee, Klaus Von Krautenmann, who wasn't German at all, refused to yield. All the cunt gave was a goal kick. In fact, he gave a free-kick to Germany for a foul by an almost banely-injured Battistun. Schumacher wasn't even booked or spoken to.
It was a turning-point in the game, for the injured French player had to be carried off on a stretcher, a dazed and unhappy man indeed. Germany, or West Germany as they were then known, went on to win the match on penalties, leaving many neutral observers claiming that France should of won.
Jean-Claude Buttistuto's injuries that day were terrible. He had a broken neck, a broken nose, a fractured skull, two broken legs, a dislocated arm, punctured lungs, seventeen broken ribs, a broken pelvis, severed jugular vein, a broken collarbone and a snapped clarinet. He was in hospital for six months and never played for France again. Harald Schumacher, meanwhile, suffered a bruised ego and was slightly winded. The French FA complained to FIFA and tried to get the game replayed, whilst the German FA said they were outraged because Bettistan or whatever his name was had not been punished for his, as they called it, "diabolical use of a raised elbow". After looking at the incident many times, FIFA decided to fine France several million Francs for being dirty bastards. They apologised to the Germans and awarded them a bye into the next World Cup Finals in four years' time.
The two players involved now look back on the incident with rather differing views. Battistan, who retired from the game soon after and now works as a punchbag in a Paris gym, still believes that he was the injured and innocent party back then. "I still have nightmares about that challenge," he said. In French. "It haunts me even now, all these years later. What people don't see on the action replays is the intent, the way Schumacher clearly wanted to injure me rather than go for the ball. If you look closely you will see that, just before he leaps into the air, he pulls a sledgehammer out of his shorts ready to twat me with it. Then afterwards, as I am lying on the ground, he hits me with a baseball bat. Right in the bollocks."
Schumacher, who still plays football and has just finished another successful season in South Africa with Winnie Mandela United, looks on it all rather differently. With typically Teutonic arrogance, he shrugs and says: "It was a fair tackle, that. No intent whatsoever. I went for the ball and I got it. Nothing wrong with that. So what if I used a bit of necessary force to do it? It's all part of the game. In fact, I didn't exactly come out of that challenge unscathed, you know. I had the marks of his teeth on my arm for weeks after, from where I'd knocked them down his bastard throat. And there was blood all over my kit. Have you ever tried getting blood out of a football kit without the colour running in the wash? You have to use a low temperature and a non-biological powder. Like Daz or something."
Despite claims to the contrary, Schumacher will always maintain that his challenge that day on France's Jean-Claude Bbuttiston was fair and within the rules of the game. This is something he has instilled into the minds of his two sons, Formula One drivers Michael and Ralf. "I have always told them that in any sport anything goes. This is why you see them winning all the time, especially Michael. Use whatever means you have to in order to succeed. My proudest moment came a few years ago when, halfway through the Canadian Grand Prix, Michael rammed that cunt Alain Prost off the f***ing track and went on the win the race. The French twat."
But justice was done in the final of 1982 as Italy, who for once didn't run away at the sight of a few Germans, lifted the trophy by stuffing the Krauts 3-1. But nothing from that 1982 tournament will ever be as memorable, controversial or, quite frankly, f***ing hilarious as that ball-breaking challenge by Germany's Harald Schumacher on France's Gabriel Batistuta. That's his name.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
MIGHTY MAGYARS STUFF ENGLAND
By the end of 1953, England, inventors of the game of football and surely the greatest nation on earth, had never suffered defeat on home soil at the hands of overseas opposition. Never. Not once. Apart from losing now and again to Scotland, Wales and the Irish, no-one else had ever dared come to Blighty and topple the might that was the England national side, though many had tried. The Krauts, the Eye-Ties, Wops, Dagoes, Coons, Spicks, and suffered humiliating setback. So when, in November of that momentous year of 1953, England played a friendly against the Eastern Bloc Squareheads from Hungary, no-one expected anything but a walkover for the home nation. Even though the Hungarians came into the game with something of a reputation, the newspapers over here gave them little chance.
ENGLAND WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST HUNGARY, proclaimed the back page of 'The Times'; A WIN FOR ENGLAND, read the 'Daily Express'; whilst 'The Sun' led with LET'S f*** THE HUN and the 'Sunday Sport', which hadn't been invented yet, would probably have said something like: STANLEY MATTHEWS'S LOVE CHILD FOUND ON MARS. There was much build up and hype before the match itself, with some of Hungary's star players threatening to defect to England and play over here if they lost. But on a grim, grey, dreary and miserable evening at Wembley Stadium, in front of 100,000 fans and millions watching on new television sets with only one channel and a big knob on the side for turning it on, no-one could have anticipated what would ensue...
By the time the game was 20 minutes old, Hungary were already 4-0 up, thanks to goals by their sensational striker Ferenc Puskas. Puskas was unknown in this country at the time, though he was a star back home. They called him "The Galloping Major", because he was a major in the Hunagrain army and because he always had the poos. In fifty previous games for his country he box. Some achievement when one considers that, for most of these games, he was in the changing rooms having a poo. He would come out for kick-off, score a couple of goals, go off for a dump, come back on again, score some more goals and go off again. Rarely did he ever play a full 90 minutes, and yet he seemed to dominate every game he played in. That night against England was to be his finest hour.
"I remember it well," he said in his 1975 autobiography, 'Pbutt The Immodium'. "England thought they would hammer us, but we knew better. They played a pooty kind of football that was going out of fashion - eight forwards and two full-backs standing around picking their noses. Tactically we surprised them with our new approach. After my fourth goal, as I was sitting on the toilet, I decided to teach them a footballing lesson they would never forget." And he did. Hungary ran out 6-3 winners and left a stunned England wondering how it was that Johnny Foreigner could actually have the brbutt nerve to f***ing come over here and beat us at the game we invented. The cunts. Puskas, refusing to leave the pitch for any more sessions at the procelain, made good use of the huge Wembley pitch. Not only did he score all six of their goals, but he also found time to taunt England players and fans alike. "It was so easy," he laughs. "At one point I picked up a bog roll that someone had thrown from the crowd, pulled down my shorts and dropped a steamer of a log in the England goalmouth. Let's see you slide tackle in that, I thought. It really had their defence all over the place, let me tell you."
It was humiliating, embarrbutting, humbling, shameful and downright galling in the extreme. Critics were so dumbfounded that they all went out and bought a new thesaurus to find words to describe the utter...whatever of it all. At the FA there were calls to have the game replayed, because it wasn't fair. No-one should be allowed to come to England and beat us at our own game. But FIFA told us to f*** off. Tough poo. We were no longer masters of the footballing world in a wider global sense. We had been taught a lesson by the team that would be dubbed "The Mighty Magyars", though I have no f***ing idea why. Probably because their manager was called Magyar or something like that. Or Magyar is some pooty food that they eat over in Hungary.
Hungary later went on the appear in a World Cup final, where they were beaten by the Germans. England, meanwhile, decided that the only way forward was to try and play like the Hungarians had. New strategies were brought in. The old kick-and-rush style of play was dispensed with. Wingers became a thing of the past and "midfielder" became a new word, though a full-back was still someone who stood around doing f*** all and picking his nose till it was time to score a spectacular own goal. Like Phil Neville. With this new style of play, England faced Hungary again a few months later, determined to avange that November defeat. This time it was different. This time Hungary were put to the sword as England were gallantly battered 7-1.
But so much for Hungary and their swashbuckling, mercurial approach to the Beautiful Game. They've not done f*** all since while we won the World Cup just thirteen years later. Also, Hungary was invaded by Russia a couple of years after and we did nothing to help them. We just stood there and let the Soviet tanks plough through Budapest and everywhere else, laughing our bollocks off and going: "Serves you right for beating us at Wembley, you bastards." England have been beaten at home many times since, and by worse than the Hungary side of 1953, but no-one will ever forget that very first time. A bit like you'll never forget your first blow-job or the first time you were caught wanking in a public convenience. I know I never will.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
A HELL OF A BEATING
When England met Norway in a World Cup qualifier in Oslo in September 1981, it was to have been a formality. Favourites to win their group, and facing a Scandinavian side of little experience on the world stage, England would surely win handsomely, putting Norway to the sword with ruthless efficiency. A huge scoreline was forecast, with many bookmakers offering odds of 5-1 that England would triumph by at least a five goal margin. But such is the fickleness of Fate, a cruel mistress that she can sometimes be. Nothing in the game of football can be taken for granted - something which the England team that night were to realise in stunning fashion.
The Norwegian side was made up mostly of amateurs, part-timers who only played football when there were no whales to club or baby seals to bash over the head with a f***ing big stick. Apart from one professional, they lined up for the match with a mixture of sailors, mbutteurs, rally drivers, javelin throwers, sauna bath installation men and a centre forward whose only pbuttion in life was going to Sweden to buttbuttinate their prime ministers. But for England, naturally, it was a different story as they lined up with some of Europe's finest players: Terry "Crafty" Butcher, Paul "Ancient" Mariner, Glenn "Spazz-Basher" Hoddle, skipper Bryan "Mine's A Double" Robson and Russell Osmond, Ipswich Town centre half and brother of singers Donny and Marie. They couldn't lose - England, that is - against a team of Scandinavian scumbags who had only been playing the game for a few years. Never in a million years. Yet lose they most certainly did.
The Norwegian players were, as they say, "up for it" right from the kick-off, as indeed were their fans. In the first minute they threw smoke plants onto the pitch and blinded England 'keeper Ray Clemence. Clemence, who for once wasn't somewhere else flogging dodgy black market tickets he'd got off Gordon Banks, was kept busy in the first fifteen minutes as shots rained in on his goal. The Norwegians ran through England's defence like a knife through butter, like a priest through a choirboy. And after twenty minutes they finally broke the deadlock. Midfielder Lars Olaf Albertsen raced onto a long ball, leaving Phil Neal for dead (pity he wasn't dead, really), before hammering the ball into the net. Norway were one up and Albertsen could hardly believe it. "I could hardly believe it," he said afterwards. "Only a week earlier I am serving in the merchant navy and the next thing I am scoring goal against England in World Cup game...hurdy gurdy...I am thinking this is great. It is only second game of football in my life and I am so happy I go home and shag my wife, drink lots of beer and perform unnatural acts of perverted incest on my three young children. But it's allowed over here, you know."
For Lars Olaf Albertsen, a walrus-gutter by trade, it was to be his finest moment. His subsequent footballing career was short-lived. After this game he only represented Norway one more time, and that was in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest with a tune called 'Higge Digge Skygg Da!' ('Bang Bang A Bong'). He got twelve votes each from Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, f*** all from anyone else, and finished last. Even behind Sonia G or whatever her f***ing name was.
After going a goal down in such unlikely circumstances, England rallied. Then, when the rallying didn't work, they had a go at moto-cross, speedway and BMX. Nevertheless they were soon level - "on terms", as they tend to say, though I don't know why - thanks to the ever-dependable Captain Marvel, Bryan Robson. Sadly, due to his ever-undependable right shoulder, he had to leave the pitch shortly after when it got dislocated for the eighth time during the first half an hour. But Norway came right back, and not even the frightening curly perms of Phil Neal, Phil Thompson, Kevin Keegan and Terry McDermott, nor the bald slap of Mick Mills, could help their cause. The Norwegians took control and were soon back in front ("doubling their lead", as they tend to say) courtesy of a spectacular diving header from centre back Thore Hird Thoresen. It was 2-1 to Norway and an upset was, as they tend to say, "on the cards".
In the second half England came out with guns blazing, firing on all cylinders and desperate for another metaphor to sum up just how much they needed to win this one. Then, having found one, they threw everything they had at the Norwegians. International flop Trevor Francis did his usual nothing up front, Kevin Keegan missed open goal headers for fun, Paul Mariner stood around with his hands on his hips looking like the Fifth Monkee, and even Peter Withe - a man noted for coming on as a sub and doing f*** all - couldn't salvage the game. At the final whistle England were distraught; the Norwegians ecstatic. And while the home fans basked in their moment of euphoria, the England fans - ever gracious and magnanimous in defeat - showed their appreciation by smashing up the stand and kicking f*** out of police and stewards.
The result prompted an astonishing outburst from one delighted Norwegian fan, Telenorge's most prominent and unbiased commentator, Jonas Thern Pearce (no relation). As the teams left the pitch and the fans celebrated, he positively roared with xenophbic fervour into the microphone: "Winston Churchill! Queen Elizabeth! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher! Ken Dodd! Sooty & Sweep! Paul McCartney! The Krankies...oh, no, they were Scottish...er...Isaac Newton! Isambard Kingdom Brunel! Her off Coronation Street! Can you hear me?! Your boys took a hell of a beating! Hurdy gurdy!! A hell of a beating etc etc!!!"
Unfortunately for Norway, we qualified for the World Cup Finals while they f***ing didn't. So there. And ever since that memorable night Norwegian football has been in something of a decline. Even the Faroe Islands are better than them now. So they went back to more traditional national sports such as running around naked, committing dissolution, bumming children and butchering large ocean-going mammals with long spears. That result against England was a flash in the pan, a one-off, a fluke. But it just goes to show that one shower of poo can beat another shower of poo if the desire to win is strong enough.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
HODDLE SLAMS THE SPAZZES
When, after the dismal failure of Euro '96, England boss Terry Venables decided to hang up his brown envelope...er, I mean his tracksuit, the FA needed to get a new man in as soon as possible. They needed a man with immense managerial experience, potential, knowledge of the game and a man who would lead the national side to greatness once again. Only one man could do the job: Kevin Keegan. But he didn't want it, so only one other man could then do it: Steve Coppell. He didn't want it, either, so only one name sprang to mind: Bryan Robson. He was too drunk to accept the job, so only one man was now the obvious choice: Frank Clark. He had too big a bottom lip and anyway no-one outside of Nottingham had heard of him. So only one man now had all the necessary credentials: Joe Royle. He refused the job, and that left the FA with the only option they had left: Glenn Hoddle. So, after much bickering and bargaining, dithering and spending lots of money on pointless interviews at Lancaster Gate, the England manager's job was offered to the then Chelsea boss.
As a player, Glenn Hoddle was a mercurial talent, able to land the ball on a sixpence with either foot from fifty yards. As a manager he would prove to be equally adept, able to land either foot in his big fat gob time after time, and with incredible accuracy. The FA had no regrets about their appointment, and had chosen Hoddle because of his squeaky-clean image and the fact that he was less likely then his predecessor to go around trying to attract players by bunging them wads of used bank notes left behind the radiators at FA HQ. Afgter a glittering career with Tottenham, where he won...er...the FA Cup and f*** all else a couple of times, then with Marseilles, Hoddle decided on a new venture - as a pop star. Alongisde fellow Spurs players and England flop, Chris Waddle, he recorded a duet and headed for the charts with a song called 'Diamond Lights'. Diamond pooes, more like, as the record bubbled at about number fifty for a couple of weeks and then pissed off into obscurity.
Hoddle needed a new challenge, and set about trying to find religion. After much searching, he eventually found it and became a born-again God-botherer of extreme smugness, forever preaching about his faith and how good a bloke he was whilst leaving his first wife and kids and buggering off with some blonde slut or other. Hoddle then went into management, taking God along teaching of Christianity into my management career," said Hoddle at the time, "but nobody was interested. Least of all at Swindon, where all they wanted to do was get promotion by fiddling the wage bills and blaming it on Ossie Ardiles." A couple of seasons later saw Hoddle take charge at Chelsea, where once again his belief system was severely put to the test. "That was difficult, too," said the mullet-headed, adulterous, former Tottenham midfielder in his autobiography, 'The Cliff Richard Of Soccer'. "At first things went well at Stanford Bridge, but as soon as I realised that the chairman was sending people off to away matches in dangerous helicopters, I decided to move on. That was when England came in for me."
England did indeed, and Hoddle was determined not to let the national side down. But football apart, some areas of Hoddle's life were causing concern among fellow professionals. Not only had Glenn become a bible-basher, but he had also been making some very peculiar friends and buttociates. Among these were Reading chairman, spoon-bender and bum-chum of Michael Jackson, Uri Geller, magician the Amazing Randi, Doris Stokes, fat queer astrologer Russell Grant and, most peculiar of all, a medium by the name of Eileen Durie, mother of the former Spurs and Chelsea goal-hanger, Gordon. It was Hoddle's buttociation with Mrs Durie that would eventually lead to his downfall as England manager.
Eileen Durie believed in reincarnation. That's when you think people what have died have come back as somebody else, but it's always Alexander the Great, Julius Casear, Napoloen or Joan of Arc. Never anybody ordinary like Joe Bloggs. Also, people who believe in reincarnation reckon that spazzes and that, people with no legs and menks in wheelchairs, are disabled because they were once bad people in other lives, and that's why they're spazzes now. They've come back and had to be spackers as some kind of punishment. Eileen Durie, because she's a nutty old bastard, managed to persuade Hoddle that all that poo was true. And it was in an interview with the Daily Cunt in 1997 that Hoddle was to make his now infamous statements...
"These people," he said, "are like they are because they've been right cunts in previous lives. It's not my fault. I've got nothing against spazzes, but the way I see it is that they must of been evil people and have come back to be punished. By God. Take that Stephen Hawking bloke...he must have been one right little twat to come back like that. I'd say he must of been Hitler or Atilla The Hun. Maybe even Vlad the Impaler, him what Dracula's based on."
Immediately there was an outcry. Granted, it was mainly from disabled rights groups, dwarfs and f***ing cripples with nothing better to do, but an outcry it was. His resignation was called for, with some even demanding that Hoddle be forced to become a spazz just to see how he liked it. As usual, the FA dithered some more and urged Hoddle to make some form of apology. This he did. At a crowded press conference, Glenn Hoddle explained what he had really meant to say: "I'm sorry it sounded like it did. If it sounded as though I was having a go at spazzes, I wasn't. Honest. I was just saying that, according to what I believe, they're alright but they must of been bad in previous lives. We've all been here before and we'll all be here again. I could come back as a spazz myself and then you'll see what I mean. I'm not a nutter, you know. I like spazzes. I think they're funny. You only have to look at them at our home matches...sitting there in their little wheelchairs , slavering down their chins and trying to applaud with their stubby little arms. They're great."
Nevertheless, Hoddle was forced to resign and ended up having to manage Spurs, which is a bit of a come-down. Mind you, managing Spurs is a bit of a come-down from managing Halifax Town or Rushden & Diamonds...but there you go. Despite the controversy surrounding Hoddle's statements, he remains firmly to his beliefs, yet is trying to make amends by doing as much work for spastics charities as he can. One look at the Tottenham squad will tell you that. Darren Anderon, a Spurs player under Hoddle and himself a spastic of spectacular ineptitititude, sums it up: "Glenn was a good manager and he didn't hate spazzes at all. In fact, he's brought loads of them to White Hart Lane in his time, though he did get rid of Les f***ing Ferdinand."
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
VILLA SCORES FOR SPURS
The game of football throws up some unusual statistics, bizarre coincidences and curious oddities. Strange things and peculiar scenarios have for a long time punctuated the history of the game. How, for instance, prior to 1974, no team appearing at a Wembley Cup Final had ever been beaten playing in striped shirts. It's true. You can check with the Rothmans if you like. I wouldn't make such a thing up. That particular hoodoo was broken when Liverpool thrashed the arses off Newcastle, and it happened again a couple more times, again to the Geordie scum, many years later in successive Cup Finals. Load of bollocks, really. Then there was the myth about the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff - how no team playing from a certain end of the ground had ever lost there. That was broken a couple of years back when, in an audacious attempt to tamper with fate, Steve McMahon's Blackpool paid a firm of builders to go in two days before the match and physically move the stadium ends, brick by brick.
But perhaps the strangest, most curious and fascinating oddity of them all is the one about Tottenham Hotspur, and how they have never lost a Cup Final in a year ending in 1. "Spurs always win the Cup in a year ending in 1," say the pundits. "My life, already, we'll win the Cup this year," boast Spurs fans, "because the year ends in a 1...oy vay!" True it is that Spurs have won the FA Cup in 1901, 1921, 1961, 1981 and 1991. That's five years what end in a 1. But, possibly even more curiously, Spurs never won it in 1881, 1891, 1911, 1931, 1951, 1971 or 2001. Nor did they win it in 1941, because there was a war going on. And anyway most Spurs players and fans would have been getting gbutted in concentration camps, so they wouldn't have won it even if there had been a Cup Final that year. The fact is that Spurs have won the Cup in five years ending in 1, and not f***ing won it in the other eight.
So that pisses on that theory.
Nevertheless, every time the f***ing year ends in a 1, the Spurs fans all start banging on about it, how they'll win the Cup because history says so, even though the mathematics argue that they probably f***ing won't. And so it was in 1981, when Spurs got to the final and faced the might of John Bond's Manchester City at Wembley. They couldn't f***ing lose. The first game was a dour affair, brought to life only by a spectacular own goal by City's 94-year-old Scottish midfielder Tommy Hutchison. It was to have been a showcase match for Spurs's two Argentine players, Ossie Ardiles and Roberto "Ricky" Villa. Sadly, Villa was substituted for being poo; only in the replay, a few days later at Wembley, would he be able to redeem himself. As indeed he did.
Spurs won the game 3-2, but it was for Ricky Villa's second goal that the game would be forever remembered. With the City team completely knackered, Villa picked up the ball at his own corner flag and set off on a mazy run. He cruised past two City strikers, eased his way through four midfielders, refusing to pbutt to Glenn Hoddle because knowing that daft cunt he would have given the ball away, then set about tangling the City defenders up in a knot of hither and thither that scared the life out of them. Then, with his finger on the trigger in front of an open goal, he went back down the pitch for a laugh and beat them all again. Inside the penalty area a second time, he now had only the huge Joe Corrigan to beat in the City goal. With the deftness and expertise of...well, of a bearded Argentinian has-been, he calmly slid the ball into the net and that was that. Spurs had won the Cup, maintaining their ludicrously misguided apprehension that they always win the Cup in a year ending in 1.
That goal was much talked about, mainly because it was the best goal ever scored in the history of the FA Cup Final, though, frankly, it wasn't even the best goal in the match. The Steve McKenzie first-time volley from twenty yards out pissed all over it, if you want my opinion. But you never hear about that one, do you? Oh no. It's always "Ricky Villa's magnificent goal blah blah blah..." Another load of bollocks.
Sadly for Ricky Villa, it was to be his finest moment. A year later Britain was at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Villa, a staunch nationalist, immediately went back home and was shot down in a planter over Buenos Aires. He spent the next six months stranded in the Andes eating dead bodies and growing the biggest beard ever. He never played football again.
But there are those who view that memorable replay, and indeed Villa's remarkable goal, with rather a different attitude. John Bond, Manchester City manager that day, recalls how the "Spurs Winning The Cup In A Year Ending In 1" theory played a large part in the proceedings. "What a lot of people don't realise," he says, "is just how much pressure we were under to lose that game, just because Spurs thought they had a right to win the Cup because the year ended in a 1. Everybody was on at us, from the Spurs players, their manager, the board, the fans, even the FA. About two days before the match I had a visit from Sir Bert Microchip, the FA president, and he told me we'd better not win because it would f*** up the theory about Spurs winning the Cup every time the year ended in a 1. We wanted to win it because City are pooe and hadn't won f*** all for years, but in the end we decided it would be best to go along with it."
The goalkeeper beaten that day, Joe Corrigan, now a pointless goalkeeping coach at Liverpool (which is a bit like teaching crabs to hang-glide), backs up the claims of his then manager Bond. "I was told that I'd best not save that second goal of Ricky Villa's," he says, shaking his head. "One night I had a few heavies round at my house, saying they were Spurs fans and if I knew what was good for me I'd best not save Ricky Villa's second goal, otherwise they'd slit my throat and liquidate my kids. They meant business, and the way they were dressed in their long black clothes, their top hats and them curly bits of hair dangling down, showed me just how serious they were. Jewish cunts."
Whatever the actual truth of the actuality of that Ricky Villa goal, nothing can be taken away from it, because it was just so brilliant. No-one can argue that it was the best goal ever scored in a Wembley Cup Final by a bearded Spurs player called Ricky Villa in a year ending in 1. And that's all you can say about it, really.
- Arthur Thacker 2003
THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER...
The words are legendary, the way they were imparted as immortal now and as much a part of the history of the Beautiful Game as the match itself...
"...and Hurst...he's got...some people are on the pitch, they think it's all over...it is now!"
Who will ever forget that moment when, as rotten-toothed England hero Sir Geoff Hurst crashed in his third and England's fourth goal, commentator Kenneth Woolstenholme uttered that famous phrase? It was the most defining moment in England football history, if not the world; it would also go on to become the most famous piece of commentating of all-time. But what was it that inspired Kenneth Woolstenholme to impart such a memorable line? Many have suggested that it was an off-the-cuff remark, one borne out of the sheer ecstasy of the moment; there are others who believe it was a well-rehearsed and well-practised piece of commentary.
One man who believes that Woolstenholme's famous phrase was indeed something he had prepared earlier is David Coleman. Coleman was at the time the country's leading commentator, though he had been denied the glory of commentating on England's finest footballing moment because, as BBC chiefs believed, he was far too biased. "I should have had that game," insists Coleman, now retired and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, gout, sciatica and over-exposure to Linford Christie's lunchbox. "I'd done the commentary on all the other games before that, and the final should of been mine as well. That cunt Woolstenholme only got it because he was up their arses at the BBC. And I know for a fact that he had that line well rehearsed a long time before the finals even began in 1966." Woolstenholme, claims Coleman, not only had his celebrated quote finely prepared before the final, but he also stole it from Coleman's own sparkling repertoire of one-liners.
"It's true," says the former Leeds-cock-sucking seventies commentator. "I remember it well. I had written some lines down on a piece of paper one day in the commentary box, when Woolstenholme came in and asked me to get him a cup of tea. I went out and he must of stole them from me because the piece of paper had vanished. There were some belters in there. As well as my 'They think it's all over' one, there was another which I was keeping for when Leeds won the League. I called it 'It's up for grabs now'. But it went missing that day, and I think Woolstenholme stole it when I wasn't looking." Coleman, who claims to have single-handedly invented football commentating in the early 'sixties, believes that the now dead Woolstenholme made off with several clbuttic quotes which would later be used in major football matches. Among these were: John Motson's "The Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club"; Brian Moore's "He's gonna flick one now...he's gonna flick one now!" from when England went out of the World Cup against Holland; Barry Davies's "Look at his face! Just look at his face!" and even Ron Atkinson's bizarre utterance of "Here's a big spongy one from Beckham."
These are allegations that Woolstenholme refuted shortly before his rest a couple of years ago, in his autobiography 'f*** off, Coleman'. 'To suggest that I pinched that quote from David Coleman, frankly, is a load of old bollocks. It was mine. I made it up on the spur of the moment. I didn't even think about it because I was so wrapped up in the excitement of it all. He's just jealous because I got to commentate on the match and he had to do the third-place play-off between Portugal and whoever else it was. As for his scandalous claims that I pinched all his words and sold them on to other commentators, well you can see my lawyers about that.'
But there is evidence to back up the outrageous allegations made by David Coleman. Clive Tyldesley, himself a useless piece of biased poo who couldn't commentate on wiping his own arse, recently admitted that, during the eighties, he regularly met with Woolstenholme. And it was in these meetings that pieces of paper were exchanged. "Whenever I was stuck for something clever to say, which was f***ing all the time," says the thick-lipped, arse-faced ITV frontman, "I used to go to Ken's house and he'd sell me some phrases. I got some corkers off him, and his prices were very reasonable. I remember taking Alan Parry with me one day and he bought a couple of dozen off him for about two grand. He later used them in a Nationwide game between Stoke and Barnsley, but they were edited out and the baldy cunt wasn't best pleased."
Even after all these years, the arguments continue, with Coleman recently issuing a court order to sue Woolstenholme's estate (rumoured to be in the region of several million pounds) for damages and the royalty rights to his stolen pieces of commentary. "I want them back, all of them," slobbers the former BBC commentator, who is surely not the least bit miffed that he didn't get knighted while Woolstenholme f***ing did. "I won't rest until justice is done. But I think what hurts me most is that, as well as stealing that quote, he actually had the gall to change the words around to make it sound better. My original quote was: 'And Hurst...he's going to score a hat-trick and get knighted...some people have invaded the pitch...they must be Germans...it would appear that they think the game has finished...it has now!"
It is very sad that controversy still surrounds this most clbuttic snippet of football narration, yet let no-one deny Woolstenholme his place in commentating history, even though he was a Nazi war criminal, bigot, National Front supporter, xenophobe and all-round nasty little poo. He thinks it's all over...it is for him. And good f***ing riddance.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
ALDO COMES OUT WITH THE BEEF
As one might expect in a game played by tough, hardened, working clbutt, hairy-arsed men (apart from Graeme Le Saux), swearing is an accepted part of modern-day football. Seldom can one watch a match without hearing or seeing someone come out with profanity of the most obscene kind: Paul Ince telling the ref to f*** off; Lee Dixon calling someone a cunt; Ian Rush famously being seen to mouth to Crystal Palace's half-caste Chris Coleman the oath-riddled "f*** off, you f***ing big soft black twat!" Swearing, just like players diving, trying to get another player sent off, going home from World Cup Finals in shame and wearing the wife's frilly underwear, is just another ingredient in the ever-changing recipe of the dish that is British football. In a manner of speaking.
But this hasn't always been the case. Back in the old days - of baggy shorts, black and white film and spectacular plane crashes on snowbound runways - any foul language on the field of play was frowned upon, with transgressors facing severe punishment. Once, whilst playing against Notts County at Deepdale, even the great Tom Finney was rebuked when he was heard to say: "I say, Mr Referee, sir...that was a blooming awful decision. I was flipping well onside by a mile. You fat cunt." Finney was fined a year's wages (about twenty quid) and banned for twelve months. In earlier days such obscene displays of verbal vitriol were regarded with even more disdain. In 1874, after calling Old Etonian 'keeper Lord Kinnaird a "baldy old boss-eyed buffoon", Royal Engineers full-back Captain Horace Wank was publicly flogged, then had his tongue pulled out and was transported to New Zealand.
Back then the FA were determined to clamp down on such behaviour. One has to remember that these were Victorian times, days of purity, innocence, piety and the deepest of reverence. Women in the crowd, on having their sanctified lugholes battered by even the mildest of blasphemy, would be most insulted. They would swoon, put their hands to their heads, faint and even come in their knickers. Possibly. It would not do. So, in 1875, the FA issued a statement which read: "Any man, be he player, manager, trainer or official, found to be effing and blinding, cursing, swearing, coming out with the beef or in any way uttering profanity of any kind, shall be henceforthwith and heretofore severely punished with utmostest exactitude. And no saying 'f***' neither."
winning at Sunderland 748On 7 Dec 2005 13:46:08 -0800, "Art Vanderlay" But that isn't what you said is it Art? If you'd said that then that would...
And so it was. Players were banned from swearing and, in the main, the directive was strictly adhered to.
And so to the World Cup Finals in the USA in 1994. The Republic of Ireland were up against tough opposition in the shape of Mexico City United. Time was running out for Irish manager and long-necked person of small animals, Sir Jack Charlton. His team were a goal down and defeat would mean elimination for his gallant collection of English, Welsh and Scottish rejects who had Irish grandparents. And Tony Cascarino, who qualified because he had once seen a Guinness advert on telly. He needed to make changes, and fast. The ace up his sleeve was substitute John Aldridge, a man who had never before uttered a single swear word in his life.
"It's true," says Aldridge, now looking back on that day with some regret. "I'd never swore in my life before then, but I was so annoyed that I just couldn't help myself. All I did was have a quiet word with the fourth official and the rest is history. When I look back at it now I'm ashamed, especially as my grandmother - who is really Irish, honest - was watching at the time. Of course, I've done loads of f***ing swearing since. I'm a cunt for it now. But not until then."
Unable to get onto the pitch, Aldridge tore into the FIFA official with the now legendary words: "You f***ing twat. Let me on, you f***ing twat. What the f*** are you f***ing doing, you f***ing twat? f***ing twat. Twat. f***ing twat. You f***ing twat!" The whole world was watching, including Aldo's own dear grandmother, back on her farm in Limerick. Or a flat in Bootle. Whatever. Aldridge finally got onto the pitch, but the damage was done. No-one would ever look at him the same ever again.
For the watching Americans there was some outrage. They had never heard such language before. Always keen to show people being liquidateed, disabled, end, butchered and dismembered on their television screens on a nightly basis, the people of the good old US of A have never liked swearing. And yet, being the hosts of the world's greatest footballing competition, they had to be seen to show the game in its entirety. There was nothing they could do about the fact that Aldridge's outburst had been broadcast live, but for their highlights coverage (seen by an estimated four people and a dog in Providence, Rhode Island) they had to act quickly. And so, when the game was shown later in the evening on ABC's 'Soccer Match Of The World Cups', Aldo's savage verbal tantrum was somewhat less spectacular, his words having been replaced by those of a professional voice-over actor.
"Hot diggety dog, you goddam motherloving slime. Let me on the doggone pitch. Gee whizz, man! Let me on the freakin' pitch, you twit. You freakin' twit. Holy heck and Jiminy Cricket!"
Didn't have quite the same ring to it. On his return home to Liverpool...er, I mean Ireland, Aldridge was greeted as a hero. He was immediately voted Foulmouthed Mick Of The Year, a title held for the previous decade by Bob Geldof, and even offered a part in the next Quentin Tarantino film, 'Reservoir Mouth'. "It opened up loads of new opportunities for me," reflects Aldridge all these years on, "but football has always been my first love. So why I went off and managed Tranmere Rovers is any f***er's guess. You f***ing twat."
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
A NATION HOLDS ITS BREATH
Last summer, the World Cup Finals in Japan and Korea - the southern bit and not them slitty eyed cunts who've got all the weapons of mbutt destruction - and once again England came face to face with the old enemy, Argentina. Argentina had long since taken over as the old enemy from Germany, ever since, four years earlier, they had dumped us out of the World Cup in glorious fashion. And they will continue to be the old enemy for a long time to come - or at least until we get the Krauts again and it's their turn to beat us. Only one game mattered during that memorable tournament in the far-East - the group game between England and Argentina. Sod the fact that there were far better teams there, and bollocks to the fact that no-one outside this country could have given a f***. It was the big game, the only game that counted.
In the first game England had been poo and only managed a draw against Sweden, who have never been an old enemy because we've never kicked their arses in a war. Even though they did beat us in numerous Eurovision Song Contests. And with the next opponents the Argies, England really needed a win to get things back on track again. A draw would of been no good; a defeat unthinkable; a damn good thrashing, although hilarious, the worst possible case scenario. But this game was more than just about England versus Argentina, more than just about qualification and about national pride; it was about one man. One man whose heart had been shattered and torn apart by those same cheating Argentinians only four years earlier. That man was national hero David Beckham of Manchester United. Without him there would have been no game at all, such was the agreement between his agent and the Japanese-Korean footballing authorities; without him there would certainly have been no drama, tension and almost ubearable excitement...
Unbelievably, the game was poo. And, even more unbelievably, an England player went down under an innocculous challenge by a dirty cheating Argy defender. Four years earlier it had been Michael Owen who had been pole-axed by an invisible defender's foot; now it was Michael Owen again. The nation cried out in unison, that it was a penalty. Not one man dared suggest otherwise, such was the ferocity and xenophobic fervour of England's followers that day. Well, there was one man. In a pub in South London, Arthur Crompton actually had the audacity to suggest that "maybe he took a dive then, you know". He was promptly arrested and subsequently jailed for twenty years, for daring to question a dive by an England player. But a penalty was awarded by the referee, and it had absolutely nothing to do with media-tournament organisation to make sure England and Beckham proceeded into the next round. Honest.
A nation held its breath as Beckham, taking time to arrange his hair before the watching billions, then hitched up his shorts to make sure everyone got some good photos of his sparrow bandy legs, spotted the ball and took a few hesitant steps back. Yes indeed, the nation really did hold its breath. The nation held its breath so much, and for so long, that the consequences were devastating. With so many people (an estimated 56 million) holding their breath all at once, the country's fauna and plants and stuff suffered horrifying results. Plants, needing precious carbon monoxide to live, were starved as no-one breathed out for an agonising two minutes. With no vital carbon monoxide to breah in and turn to hydrogen, plant life all over the UK died in their millions. "I couldn't believe it," said Reg Bloomfontein of the Royal Horticultural Society. "When Beckham prepared to take that poenalty, nobody was breathing. I stood and watched as entire forests tumbled to the ground. Bushes wilted and died, petals fell off flowers and my mother's prize begonia was beyond repair."
Meanwhile, as the nation still held its breath, and with Beckham taking his first steps of his run-up, asthmatics collapsed and died on the spot. People with emphysema, acute brochitis, pneumoconiosis and other lung-rotten diseases were taken seriously ill, and all because they had to hold their breath while the penalty kick was taken. Home Office Minister Paul Umwateng said: "When the penalty was awarded, we considered rushing a bill through parliament to force people to hold their breath, but there wouldn't of been time. And anyway I wanted Argentina to win."
Then Beckham, with the whole of the world behind him, ran up and smashed the ball into the back of the net. One-nil, and England were ahead and off to the next round for sure. But then came the release of all that breath what had been stored up. The effects, as 56 million people all exhaled at once, were even more devastating. One pub in Grimsby, where the game was being shown on a large screen, exploded, with people being injured by flying glbutt and taken to hospital with wind burns. "It was crazy," said landlord Ian Prick. "It was something out of a Soho gay bar, only nowhere near as funny."
And as the exhalation of breath made its way up into the atmosphere, where it would be blown around by other winds and stuff, the pandemic knock-on effects would prove catastrophic. A week later there was a whirlwind in North Carolina, with weather experts and other people with nothing better to do claiming that the post-Beckham penalty conversion was to blame. A tornado hit southern India, a typhoon swept through Indonesia, a tidal wave engulfed parts of Barbados and a butterly flapped its wings halfway up Mount Everest. Plants came back to life and the world, suddenly imbued with this saturation of carbon monoxide, was saved from the Greenhouse Effect and global warming in a matter of a few short months.
Thos who say that football is only a game played by 22 men, and that its greater significance matters little, should remember this in future. When the nation held its breath, and when David Beckham took that penalty and f***ed the Argies, he did it for the world. And for that he should always be remembered and revered.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
It's the biggest job in the world of football, the ultimate achievement and the biggest endorsement of a manager's ability - to be given the task of managing the England football team. Following the sad and unfortunate sacking of Sir Alf Ramsey, England needed a top-clbutt manager, one who could carry on Ramsey's good work, one who would bring the glory days back to the nation. In the end, and after much deliberation, the FA opted for Leeds United boss Don Revie, because no-one else wanted it.
As a player with Manchester City in the fifties, and himself an England international, Revie had earned a reputation as a footballer of considerable skill, reading of the game, mastery of technique and vision. He also possessed a unique ability to bribe opposing players to throw matches and let him win. It wasn't long before this narrow-mouthed, long-headed Geordie was being labelled "The Fixer" by rival footballers and the media. Before the FA Cup Final of 1955, Revie had unsuccessfully tried to bribe several Newcastle United players, before being reported to the referee and being told not to do it any more.
As a manager Revie needed a club that would match his desire to win at all costs, even if it meant dipping into petty cash to pay opposition players off, so it was no surprise when, in 1961, he was appointed manager of mediocre second division outfit, Yorkshire scumbags Leeds United. He quickly learned the managerial reins, and soon had the club into the first division.
"The kind of football we played in those days was breath-taking," recalls Jack "The Giraffe" Charlton. "Before Don came we were all over the place. We couldn't win a game for love nor money. We were terrible, and then Revie changed all that. He threw out our old training regime, got rid of all the running, sit-ups, press-ups, five-a-side and all the rest, and brought in a whole new attitude to playing football at the highest level. One time, before an important FA Cup clash with Spurs, Revie told Peter Lorimer to stick to Dave Mackay like a leech, and said he wanted Paul Madeley to man-mark Terry Venables, whilst Johnny Giles would follow Jimmy Greaves and Alan Gilzean to unsettle them. And if that didn't work, me and Billy Bremner would go round their house and threaten them with baseball bats. Revie was that kind of manager - unorthodox, but dedicated."
In probably the dirtiest, most uncompromising, nastiest and downright brutal period of any team's history, Leeds United under Revie took almost every honour in the game. They won the League twice, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Fairs Cup twice and nearly won the European Cup as well. And they only lost that because they were out-bribed by the Bayern Munich board in the final.
So Revie, needing a new challenge, took charge of the England team, the greatest accolade and most esteemedest position in the whole of football. Great names had gone before him - the aforementioned Ramsey...er...Walter Winterbottom...er...that other bloke. But it was now up to Revie to do the business, to bring the greatness back to England. But sadly, it was not to be.
Whereas in the domestic game Revie had found it easy to blackmail and cajole the opposition into throwing matches by way of monetary lure, the world of international football proved far more difficult. Successes were rare as foreign sides came to Wembley and, with their greater wealth, were able to bribe our players far more easily. Whilst Revie's outrageous plans to try and buy Billy Bremner and Eddie Gray from Scotland, Johnny Giles from Eire, Gary Sprake from Wales and Franz Beckenbauer from West Germany were scuppered by the constraints of international football law. f***ing spoilsports.
Then, in 1976, came the shock to end all shocks. Whilst preparing for an important World Cup qualifier against Malta, Don Revie announced that he had tragically taken up a coaching post in Saudi Arabia. He would be leaving England henceforthwith and not coming back. But it wasn't the money, honest. "It wasn't the money, honest," said Revie in his autobiography 'A Tenner And We Won't Break Your f***ing Legs'. "A lot of people think I went to Saudi for the money, but I didn't. I went there for the challenge, and because I had been thinking more and more at that time about the faith of Islam.'
This is something which is to this day endorsed by his widow, Alice Revie, now 85 and living in a luxury appartment in Riyadh, or however it's spellt. "Don took a lot of flak over his decision to move to Saudi and manage them instead of England, but it wasn't for the money. He did it because he had become a devout Moslem. At Leeds he learned many things about race relations and not hating niggers and wogs and that. It's that kind of place - peaceful, harmonious and accepting of all races and creeds of every description. He bought Paul Reaney and that cunt's black as the ace of spades."
But Don Revie became an outcast. Jimmy Hill, who himself had once accepted a lucrative post as a coach in the middle east rather than manage Coventry City, immediately attacked the former Leeds and England cheat. "It's disgusting that Revie should do this to England. Absolutely disgusting, especially when you consider that he's earning twice as much as Saudi were paying me. The bastard."
Revie never returned from his stint in the sandal-bashing wog wilderness. He tried, but no-one wanted to know him. Even in Leeds, the city which he had helped make great as a footballing force, they didn't want to know him. That their former manager should give up the England job to manage coons and ragheads in the desert, rather than good old white men, was unacceptable. All records of him ever managing the Elland Road club were erased, and his name taken down from the plaques in their trophy rooms, though no-one's been in there for a while to see. Don Revie was a disgrace, a shame and a pariah. "Don Revie? Never heard of him," says former Leeds chairman Peter Rimsdale. "Oh, you mean that bastard who used to win us all those trophies by bribing the opposition...well, anyone who puts money before football wants stringing up, if you ask me. But I've got to go...there's a shareholders' meeting in half an hour and I have to get out the back door sharpish..."
In 1991, Revie was diagnosed as suffering from the deadly motorised neurotic disease, which he had unfortunately contracted at a charity bash from black-toothed midget nuclear physicist Professor Stephen Hawking. He was a ruined man, but a very rich one thanks to his many dodgy deals and the millions paid to him by sweaty Arabs for running out on the England national side. But despite all of this, there are still some who hold in high regard. Himself a dead cheat, former Leeds skipper Billy Bremner has this to say: "Revie was one of the best. There will only ever be one Don Revie. Whatever his reasons for turning his back on England - money, deceit, cheatingness, underhanded back-stabbing or the fact that he knew he might end up a spazz one day and need to pay mbuttive private hospital bills - you can never take away from him that he was a great manager."
Indeed. It wasn't the funniest departure of an England manager - not as funny as those of Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan, Graham Taylor, Terry Venables, etc., etc. - but it was certainly the most controversial and spectacular. And for all his achievements, no-one will ever forget what a cheating bastard Don Revie was.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
CANTONA GOES CANTONESE
Life as a professional footballer is never an easy one, let no-one deny that. With their multi-million-pound contracts, their flash cars, big houses, private swimming pools, villas in the South of France, big-titted women on each arm and as much booze and clbutt A narcotics as they can cram inside their bodies, theirs is a troubled and unhappy lot. Compare this to the life of your average football fan, whose life is free of strife and all the mayhem and unpleasantries of the footballers they so blindly follow. A football fan has it easy. His job is, more often than not, a menial one requiring little in the way of real hard work. Whilst the footballer must train for a couple of hours every morning, going home by twelve and putting his feet up to relax, then playing once a week if he's lucky, the bone idle layabout football fan does nothing other than graft for forty hours a week, safe in the knowledge that his pitiful salary is going straight into the deep pockets of his footballing heroes.
One of the more arduous aspects of the professional footballer's lot is that he must run around for an hour and a half on Saturday afternoons - sometimes on a Wednesday night, too - and suffer the tortuous barracking from football supporters. For the most part, footballers get used to this and take it all in good heart. They might occasionally spit at rival supporters, challenge them on the touchline or act dead brave because they know that any conflict would be under the supervision of dozens of police and stewards; in the main, however, footballers are impeccably behaved on the field of play when receiving insults from a baying mob of a crowd.
But not always.
It was during an otherwise dull midweek match in 1995, between Crystal Palace and Manchester United, that the ribald comments of a certain supporter became too much for one highly-paid and spoilt brat of a professional footballer by the name of Eric Cantona. Cantona had been barracked throughout the game - throughout the season, come to that. In fact, the cunt had been barracked throughout his career in this country, mainly because he was French. And them bastards want barracking just for running away in two World Wars and letting the Krauts get my grandad at Dunkirk. The cunts. As Cantona was loitering about on the left side of the pitch, he astonished everyone by suddenly leaping into the crowd to aim a wild kung-fu style kick at a Crystal Palace supporter. Fortunately, being French, his kick missed and he ended up flat on his arse, which elicited further barracking and abuse from the crowd. Funny as f***.
But it didn't end there. Cantona was sent off and, in the ensuing days, cowardly French", was how the FA put it. The fan, a certain Matthew Wanker of no fixed brain cells, received a life ban from Crystal Palace, though many believed his punishment was far too severe. It was sensational stuff, and very funny when you think that it probably cost The Scum the League title and the FA Cup.
But what caused this otherwise calm, serene, affable, decent, honest and charming Frenchman to go suddenly mental like he did? Well, the truth lies in what the fan actually said to him on that memorable night at Selhurst Park. "I never said nothing," insists Mr Wanker, now 35 and living off dole and incapacity benefit. "Not a word. It seems Cantona got angry because of something he heard me say. But I didn't say anything to him. All I was doing was practising for a French exam I had the following morning at college." But Cantona's version was very different...
"He was calling me names all through the game," said Cantona at the time. "At first he is calling me 'little penis head', then he is saying things like 'You are smelly woman's parts who is masturbating over dead sheep'. That is really making me very angry. But when he is starting to say things about my mother, I was how you say, losing it big time."
But Mr Wanker still maintains that he said nothing offensive, and certainly nothing directed at the volatile Frenchman. "He's talking a load of bollocks, that Cantona. I was practising French phrases and he just happened to hear a couple of them. Alright, so I was shouting them at the top of my voice. That's just my way of memorising them. I might have said something like 'Tu es merde, Cuntona', 'Ta mere souffle les coques des elephants'...or even something like 'Je crois que tu le prends par la derriere!' But they were harmless French phrases. If he misunderstood them or took offence in any way, that's his problem."
But why did Cantona opt for the kung-fu style attack that made him look so downright ludicrous? Why didn't he use hif fists instead, and fight like a man? The answer is, according to Cantona, now retired and trying to launch a film career, that fighting just isn't in his nature. "It isn't in my nature," he says. "I've never been one to stand and fight. I'm French. Have you ever seen a French boxer, or a French soldier, come to that? Fighting is not in the nature of any Frenchman. This is why every time there is war we are running away, hiding in cellars, up trees, in ditches. Anywhere rather than stand up to any sort of confrontation. But when he called my mother a cunt I just went for him. I'd seen a Bruce Lee film the night before and that inspired me to do the kung fu type thing. It's a good job I hadn't been watching 'Prisoner Cell Block H', otherwise I might have scratched him or pulled his hair instead. He was very lucky."
While there were, inevitably, calls for Cantona to be more severely punished, with some suggesting that he be deported or even thrown in jail, the Manchester United fans, as you'd expect, defended his action virtually to a man. The president of the Manchester United Fan Club flew in immediately from Bangkok to offer his support, whilst satellite link-ups with other Scum supporters were set up to allow them to air their views from all over the globe. Former Manchester United player and biased cunt, Paddy Crerand, was perhaps the most vociferous in his defence of Cantona's violent attack. "I was sitting right behind where it happened at the time," he says, "and I saw nothing. Well, I saw what could have been Eric Cantona leaping into the crowd to kick a supporter up the arse, but it could have been a trick of the light. And anyway, even if he did kick him, and it was Cantona, which it wasn't, he would have been in order, because he plays for Manchester United and as such isn't capable of ever doing anything wrong either on or off the pitch. If you want my opinion."
No-one did, because Paddy Crerand is a cunt. Meanwhile, Sir Bobby Charlton was equally supportive of the beleaguered French star. "As everyone knows, I don't like anything like this on the field of play. I played for England loads of times and never got booked in my entire career. Never. Not once. Bobby Moore did. And Geoff Hurst. And Pele, George Best, Maradona, Cruyff. They all did, but not me. And I scored lots of goals as well, me. I was known for being clean and honest, not like that dirty cunt our Jack. He was always a bastard. Sorry, what were you saying? Oh yes...about my goal against Portugal in 1966...well, I got the ball in my own half blah blah blah..."
Cantona has no regrets about the incident, no more than he has about the countless times he kicked opposition players when they lay on the ground, stamped on them, punched, elbowed, kneed and physically abused them in any way he saw fit. But it is fitting that he will always be best remembered for buttaulting a fan and getting away with it just because he happened to play for The Scum. As for the victim of Cantona's unprecedented buttault, Matthew Wanker, he now looks back on it and regards it as a defining moment in his life. "It made me famous overnight. As TV chef and avante-garde artist Antony Warhol-Thompson would have said, it made me famous for twenty minutes. At first it was difficult, what with people coming up and kicking me in the face, but you get used to that being a Crystal Palace fan. I might now be on the dole and a scrounging little Cockney f***ing layabout, but I'll always be remembered for the Cantona kung-fu style kick."
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
THE SCUM DISGRACE WEMBLEY
In the history of the FA Cup Final, going back over a hundred years, no player had ever been sent off in this showcase footballing extravaganza. The thought was unthinkable, so unthinkable that no-one, not even the dirtiest of Leeds players, had ever even contemplated the idea of getting sent off. It's amazing to think that, with all the filthy cheating players who had appeared in an FA Cup Final, none of them had ever been sent for what commentators humorously call "an early bath". Billy Bremner, Dave Mackay, Alan Mullery, Peter Storey of Arsenal (surely the dirtiest player ever), Tommy Smith, Norman Hunter...all had played in FA Cup Finals in their time without ever being sent off.
The night before the FA Cup Final of 1985 between Manchester United - that perennial shower of dirty cheating bastards - and Everton, who were also not arsed about kicking players all over the pitch, match referee Peter Willis appeared on ITV's celebrity quiz show, 'What's My Line?'. On this show he was questioned by Eamonn Andrews as to how he might referee the game. "I'm looking forward to it," he said, with all the smugness you might expected of a football referee. Then, when asked what he thought the chances were of a player getting sent off, Willis replied: "It's never happened before, so I don't see why it should happen on Saturday. I've never sent a player off in my life. Nobody's going to get sent off in a Cup Final, let's face it. If I send someone off I'll eat my own arse."
Load of bollocks. He was just trying to make people believe that referees are ordinary people, and not jumped up little fascists with a Hitler complex.
The game itself was a nasty, dirty, cheating affair, as both The Scum and Everton's team of gyppoes and bums sought to kick lumps off each other. There was some speculation - that perhaps both teams had been watching Willis's performance on TV the night before, and that they were just trying to see who could get sent off. Bryan Robson, as usual, was kicking everything that moved, whilst Kevin Ratcliffe, that notably lawless and dirty Welsh bastard, was having the game of his life as he lashed out at Norman Whiteside, trying to retire him before he could join Everton a few years later a sorry and broken man.
But referee Willis was having none of it. "I was having none of it," he said afterwards. "I could see they were trying to goad me, get me to send someone off and become the first referee in the history of the FA Cup to send someone off in a final. No way. I wasn't having it. At one point, United's Mark Hughes walked right up to me and asked outright if I was going to send him off. He kept saying 'go on, why don't you send me off, you cunt?' He called me all the names under the sun, but I still wasn't going to do it."
It became so bad, about halfway through the first half, that Willis was considering abandoning the game. TV pictures back up his claims that players were indeed trying to get themselves sent off, rather than each other, as is ofetn the case when Manchester United play. Frank Stapleton was seen to spit in Willis' eye, then elbow him in the stomach as he walked past. Everton's Pat Van Den Hauwe called Willis' wife an old slut and tripped him up four times, but the referee stood firm.
Then, in the second half, and with the score at a riveting 0-0, came the moment that everyone had been waiting for. Peter Reid, Everton's deadly striker, set off on a run towards goal. Only forty yards out, he seemed certain to score. If he hadn't of shot from there and scored, he would of almost certainly gone through and rounded the keeper before calmly slotting the ball into an empty net. It was that obviously going to be a goal. But as he raced goalwards, Reid was upended by United's Kevin Moran, who probably thought he was still playing Gaelic football. The crowd fell silent as Reid's slimline figure soared through the air and landed in a heap just outside the box. Reid, probably for the first and only time in his prolific career of 400 games and 3 goals, had been the last man and certain to score. The referee had no option but to discipline Moran.
"He's going to send him off!" cried BBC commentator John Motson, quickly rifling through a Rothman's to quote some obscure statistic or other. "This could be the first ever sending off in an FA Cup Final. Would you believe it...blah blah blah..."
The referee reached for his red card and showed it to Moran, and that was that. Bryan Robson was furious as he wrestled Willis to the ground and pleaded with him not to send Moran off. Whilst Paul McGrath, United's half-nigger centre back, protested violently by kicking the referee about the groin area. But Moran was off, gone from the field of play, a disgrace as the first player ever to be sent off in an FA Cup Final.
United went on to win the game and rob Everton of a glorious League and Cup double. Moran, who should have gone to the changing rooms for that infamous "early bath", stayed on the touchline. When the medals were presented, however, he was told to f*** off because he wasn't getting one. But, being a Manchester United player, the rules were bent especially for him and he was later awarded the gong anyway. Wouldn't you just f***ing know it. Manchester United fans, to this day, refuse to accept that it happened, which is just like them.
"Moran never got sent off in an FA Cup Final," they say. "He decided to go off because he was tired and we'd already used our substitute." That's what they say, though if it had been a player of any other club, they'd make sure you f***ing knew about it. Because they are cunts, every one of them.
But there is an interesting postscript to this tale. Peter Willis, not wanting to be seen as the first and so far only man to send a player off in a Cup Final, insists that it was all a big mistake, and it wasn't his fault. After that memorable match, the FA banned Willis from doing any more big games, saying they couldn't trust him not to bollocks them up. Willis, now 89 and living in the South of France, has a different tale to tell. "I only meant to book Moran," he says. "It was a fair tackle and, let's be honest, it could have been an open goal and would Peter Reid have scored? Would he f***. I meant to show Moran the yellow card, but I got the wrong one. That's it, I got the wrong card. I'm probably colour blind, or something like that, and the red one came out instead of the yellow one. Aye, that's it...colour blind."
In 1998 Mr Willis wrote to the FA and asked them to look at video evidence to back up his claims, but they wrote back saying he could get stuffed. The decision would stand. So Kevin Moran became the first, and still the only, player ever to get sent off in an FA Cup Final. Strangely, just a few years later, The Scum also had the first man to be sent off in a League Cup final, when Andrej Kanchelskis was ordered off against Aston Villa. Funny, that.
It's only a matter of time before it happens to another player, and probably a Scum one at that, but Kevin Moran, that dirty cheating black bog-trotting bastard, will always be remembered as the first.
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Genius 2003
KEEGAN LASHES OUT
The Premiership run-in of 1995-96 was one of the most tense, tight, nerve-wracking and exciting of all. Manchester United, going for their third title in four seasons, were pitted against the might of Kevin Keegan's revitalised Newcastle United. Scum fans wanted United to win, obviously; Newcastle fans were desperate for their side to lift the Championship for the first time since 1927, back in the days of baggy shorts, black and white film and Malcolm MacDonald. With both teams neck and neck, and with the Magpies having hilariously thrown away a twelve-point lead at the top, tension mounted with each game that was played. But it wasn't just a battle on the field of play; both managers were keen to gain psychological advantage by out-smarting each other in a vicious war of words.
Keegan, a devout Roman Catholic teetotaller, used calm rhetoric and well-chosen words to fire up his squad and undermine the opposition. Alex Ferguson of Manchester United, a devout protestant wanker and drunken twat, used slurred bollocks and incomprehensible nonsense to try and do the same. Keegan, who had sold Andy Cole to The Scum the year before and brought in Columbian failure Faustino Sasparilla, wanted the title more than anything. Ferguson just wanted to get to the bar before they closed.
Sky Sports did all they could to remain impartial as they urged the nation the get behind Keegan's Newcastle. They even resorted to dragging out some old fossil of a pensioner and paid for him to be at every match, as a way of cajoling the viewers and adding tension to the proceedings. "There he is," went bear-arsed hairy freak Richard Keys. "Good old Sammy Charlton, as he walks to his seat in the stand. He was there the last time Newcastle won the title in 1927. Back then he was just a lad of 15, and he still remembers it to this day. How great it would be to have him here to see his side claim the title after all these years. But we're not biased or anything, you understand. Honest."
Indeed not.
Sammy Charlton, at 108, was said to be Newcastle United's oldest surviving fan and, as with lots of Newcastle supporters, hadn't seen a game since about 1948. But this didn't stop him going to every game of that momentous run-in, mainly because Sky had paid for his tickets. "It was great," he said, "going to see the laaaaads again after aaaaall them years, bonnie lad. They looked so much smaller on the pitch than I remembered, and they was in colour an' aaaaalll, yer knaaa. Howay the lads and all that pooe. I've just pissed meself, man."
Sadly, like generations of Magpies supporters, Sammy Charlton died before he could see his beloved Newcastle United win the League, or any other trophy for that matter. And there'll be a lot more, too.
But more than anything else - more than Newcastle's pathetic form, more than Faustino Sasparilla's ludicrous displays of selfishness, more than Sky shifting games about to make it all more exciting - the run-in of 1995-96 will be remembered for Kevin Keegan's unexpected and, frankly, stupid outburst on live television. In a post-match interview, with microphone in hand and daft headphones ruining his curly perm, Keegan unleashed a vitriolic attack upon Manchester United and, in particular, the mind games being played by their manager, Alex Ferguson.
"There's a lot of things been said," he fumed, "about this club and about the run-in, and whether or not we're up to it. But I can tell you that we are up to it. We will fight them on the beaches, in the skies...er...somewhere else. We're not finished yet, and if that drunken bastard thinks we are, then I've got news for him. I love my wife and I love my kids, and I love horse-riding and Chinese food as well, but nothing will give me greater pleasure than beating them. I will love it, LOVE IT, if we beat them. Love it. Absolutely love it. Love it. Do you hear me? Love it. Love it."
Back in the Sky studio, Richard Keys and fellow smart-arsed Sky lip-service payer Andy Gray were astonished at Keegan's ferocious outburst...
"Love it! Love it!"
...as they tried to calm him down. "It was amazing," says Keys, platting his arm hairs. "I've never seen anything like it. We kept the cameras rolling because here was something special - a manager losing it live on national telly. Well, on Sky anyway, which is much better than national telly, and I'm not just saying that."
People were surprised that Keegan, a normally calm, serene and clean-mouthed individual, could be coming out with such things about a rival team and fellow manager, even if it was The Scum and Alex Ferguson...
"Love it! Love if we beat...!"
...with some saying that perhaps the tension had got to him, that he couldn't take the fact that he had thrown away a twelve-point lead at the top of the table. Alex Ferguson, who had been watching the incident from behind a wall and taunting Keegan by pulling his tongue out and making funny faces (an easy task for him), was immediately asked for his opinions. "What time is it?" he said, trying to focus on his watch. "Are they open yet? Er...obviously Kevin has lost it. He can't take it like I can. Perhaps if he spent a bit more time drinking and not going to church, perming his hair and such, he might make a better football manager. Like me."
The last laugh was with Ferguson and Manchester United, as they took the title and also the FA Cup in a hilarious farce of a match against great rivals Liverpool. Keegan had indeed blown it, as indeed indeed had Newcastle United. They would have to wait another year to have a crack at that title that had eluded them for over fifty years. As for Sammy Charlton, their oldest surviving fan, he went to Sky the following year to see if he could have some more tickets, but they told him to f*** off because they weren't interested any more, and anyway Newcastle were crap now. So off they went to find an ancient Liverpool, Arsenal or Blackburn supporter.
Tension is a big thing in the lives of football managers. It can ruin them and it can send them off for heart surgery before they snuff it. It can make them crawl the kerbs of North London for prostitutes, or it can make them shag their coach's wives or go out and rape underage girls. Like Graham Rix. Some managers can take it, because they are in such a constant state of intoxication with strong alcohol that nothing matters to them any more. And it can turn a seasoned professional like Kevin Keegan into an unforgettable fugure of ridicule.
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Genius 2003
THE DOC EATS HIS WORDS
The FA Cup semi-finals of 1976 were two entirely different affairs. In the one game, an all-division one affair, 3rd-placed Manchester United faced 4th-placed Derby County, a game of two giants of the seventies. The other game pitched together Southampton of the old second division against third division Cockney bums Crystal Palace. The winners of the Scum-Derby clash, everyone said, would be the winners of the Cup come the final in May. Manchester United boss and all-round loudmouthed cunt Sir Tommy Docherty did not mince his words when asked about the games.
"This one might as well be the final," he said in his familiar drunken Scottish brogue. "I don't know why they're bothering with the other match. This is the Cup Final everyone would have wanted to see. What happens in the other game is academic because whoever wins this has got the cup."
But football has an uncanny knack of taking the words of such know-all Scottish cunts and ramming them right back down their fat f***ing throats. Manchester United beat Derby County and, in the other game (the one that didn't matter because they were playing for runners-up spot), Southampton overcame Crystal Palace. The final, in a few weeks' time, would be between the mighty Manchester United, pride of their own minds and the biggest club in the world, and little Southampton, those also-rans from the dump of the South Coast. No-one expected anything other than a romp for United, with bookies refusing to take any more bets on the outcome. Only three years earlier, 2nd division Sunderland had beaten Don Revie's mighty Leeds United and shocked a watching world - something the bookies might have done well to remember. But they didn't.
On the day of the game Sir Tommy Docherty was unable to contain his glee. He had already booked the banquet room at the hotel and had banners printed saying MANCHESTER UNITED CUP WINNERS 1976. As a no-good player himself, he had been on the losing side in the 1954 Cup Final with Preston, and again as a hopeless manager of Chelsea in 1967. He was determined to make it third time lucky, as they say. But one thing you cannot predict about football is its unpredictability, being the totally unpredictable game that it is. And only a fool would dare to buttume or presuppose. Such a fool - and there have been fewer bigger fools - was Sir Tommy Docherty that day as he led his team onto the Wembley pitch.
United had some world clbutt players...alright, one or two. They had the Greenhoff brothers, Brian and Johnny, as well as flying wingers Steve Coppell and Graham Hill. In defence they had the rock of Martin Buchan, Alex Forsyth and, in midfield, a midget freak half-Chinese Bruce Lee lookalike called Lou McCari. In goal was Alex Stepney and, at centre forward, perhaps the slowest-speaking player of his age - Stuart Pearson. Southampton, for their part, had no-one. Peter Osgood, who was years past his drinking best, Peter Rodrigues, a loser with Leicester City in 1969 and already looking all of his 54 years, and of course, Mike Channon, who would rather have been at Haydock Park watching his horses lose, but there you go.
Manchester United, as you might expect, threw everything at little Southampton, but all to no avail. They tried every trick in the book - kicking, punching, elbowing, diving, tackles from behind, tackles from in front, tackles from above. But nothing would work. And then, totally against the run of play, Bobby Stokes, Southampton's little winger, found himself free thirty yards out. He let fly and it bobbled past Stepney into the net. Stepney, who had once, laughably, been United's top scorer halfway through their relegation season with two penalties, was no great 'keeper. All he could do was watch hopelessly as the ball sped past him at about three miles per hour. Southampton were 1-0 up.
United tried to come back, but they couldn't, because they were poo. Southampton held firm and onto their lead and, as the final whistle went, drink-driving ban manager Lawrie McMenemy ran onto the pitch to congratulate his players. They had achieved the impossible and beaten The Scum. At Wembley. In the FA Cup Final.
Scum manager Sir Tommy Docherty was magnanimous in defeat. "Without taking anything away from Southampton," he said afterwards, "they were poo and we were by far the better team. It's not fair. We beat Derby in the semi-final and they only had to beat Crystal Palace. Where's the justice in that? I demand a rematch so that we can play Palace and they can play Derby. I'm not having this, me. I'm off to shag the coach's wife and get sacked."
As indeed he did.
Southampton boss McMenemy was overjoyed, but gracious of United in their efforts. "Hahahahaah!!!" he roared. "So theirs was the only semi-final that mattered, was it? Shows what that drunken Scottish cunt knows. I'm off to advertise Barbican alcohol free lager and then drink loads of proper beer and get pulled up for drunk driving. Again."
As indeed he did.
Docherty was undaunted. He said that his United team was the best that the club had ever had...or the second best, after the Busby Babes, of course...or perhaps the third best...after the one that Matt Busby won the European Cup with in 1968...or the fourth best...after the post-war one that won the Championship. Come to think of it, conceded Sir Tommy, it wasn't one of the best Manchester United teams at all. It was one of the worst. So, after winning the Cup the following year, he took the coach's wife, left his own and f***ed off from football never to be seen again. Although he does occasionally pop up from time to time when there's something to say about The Scum and they can't afford Bobby Charlton, or Paddy Crerard is busy sucking Alex Ferguson's dick.
As for Bobby Stokes, the little left winger who scored the goal that sank United that day, he has little to say about it all. This is mainly because he died of cancer a couple of years ago and wasn't available for comment. Nor is he ever likely to be, neither.
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Genius 2003
PETER THE TWAT
Four years after England's World Cup triumph at Wembley, and England were again favourites to lift the Jules Rimmer Trophy. In the group phase they had eased their way through - beating Czechoslovakia, Romania and losing to Brazil thanks to a stunning Jeff Astle open-goal miss that even a child of four would have scored. In the quarter-finals we faced West Germany, the vanquished team from four years before. Once again we had to overcome the might of such players as Uwe Seeler, Franz Beckenbauer and the tiny goal-machine of Gerd Muller. It wouldn't be easy, but we would surely do it.
But Fate, and a dose of dodgy food-contagioning, would play its part in the proceedings. In goal we had the tremendous Gordon Banks, playing in his fourth World Cup Finals and still performing great heroics at the age of 45. There was Bobby Moore, the Charlton brothers, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, Francis Lee, Colin Bell and someone called Keith Newton. None of the other quarter-finals mattered; this was the big one, the old enemies brought face-to-face once again. The memories of their Wembley tussle were still fresh in the minds, as indeed were those of the two World Wars in which we had kicked the Hun's arses all the way back to Berlin and beyond. All bets were off, no holds were barred, anything was fair in the love and war that was the World Cup quarter-final.
But there was controversy and consternation even before the game kicked off. The night before the game, England's two-eyed 'keeper Gordon Banks, surely the greatest 'keeper in the history of the game, had complained of a tummy ache. After spending all night on the poohouse, following a supper of tinned salmon, Banks would not be fit to play. The severe bout of diarrhoea and vomiting had caused him to lose three stone in weight, and his fitness was in serious doubt. England's only other World clbutt goalkeeper was David Seaman, but he was only seven-years-old at the time and couldn't be flown out to Mexico because he had school in the morning. So we had to call upon our reserve 'keeper, Chelsea's Peter Bonetti.
Peter Bonetti was a fine 'keeper who was known as "the cat". People thought he was known as this because of his cat-like acrobatic skills, and the fact that he would spring for a ball and paw it out of the air and to safety, saving a certain goal. But this was not so. Bonetti was nicknamed the cat because he used to poo in his goalmouth and cover it up with sand. And lick his own balls. But he was all we had to draw upon, and at such a late hour. He could only do his best.
As it happened, England went two goals up before half-time, through Spurs loudmouth Alan Mullery and West Ham's goofy-teethed Martin Peters. The game was all over bar the shouting, though there was plenty of shout left in the Krauts, as we were to discover in the second half.
"We are needing to beat ze English pig-dogs," said German captain Uwe Seeler, "und so we are giving present night before game to Gordon Banks in recognition of his great save against Brazil. We are giving him tin of dodgy salmon vot is being left open in fridge for three weeks before. Mit Banks contagioned und out of ze game, it is ours for ze takink. Also, we are accusing Bobby Moore of stealing jewellery from shop, because he is thieving Cockney wide boy who is friends mit der Kray Twins. This is putting them off their game I am thinking probably, yes?"
Indeed, with Gordon Banks on the sidelines, still throwing up and pooting in his shorts, and with skipper Bobby Moore worrying about going to jail for stealing that jewellery, England were not their usual selves. Bonetti did his best in goal; sadly, Peter Bonetti's best was never good enough for England. Germany fought back and scored through Beckenbauer, then equalised through Muller and, eventually, in extra-time, grabbed a jammy winner because we had a crap defence.
So England went out of the World Cup, and it was left to Gordon Banks to procure some dodgy tickets - the only way the England players would ever manage to get to the final in Mexico City. Back home, fans who were watching and waiting when they were far away...back home, where the fans were watching and waiting with every single game they played, there was stunned astonishment. We were out, dumped out by those bastard Germans, and it wasn't f***ing fair. That cup was ours, and should have remained ours. We had won it fair and square at Wembley and we should have brought it back with us from Mexico. But the England players hadn't finished just yet...
So keen were England to bring the Jules Rimmer Trophy back with them, that Alf Ramsey tried to persuade Bobby Moore to steal it and stick it down his shorts. No-one would notice. We'd be halfway across the Atlantic before FIFA realised it was gone. And anyway, what with Moore only having one ball, there'd be plenty of room down there to hide it. Unfortunately, as Moore and the rest of the team pbutted through customs, they were stopped by a couple of moustached Dago customs officers, and the trophy was returned back to its rightful place.
Instead of returning home as heroes, the England team came back to Blighty as disgraced also-rans, losers, jewel-thieving nobodies and chokers, missers of open goals and not a very good team at all. And it's all the fault of those bastard Germans.
Peter Bonetti never played for England again. Someone pointed out that he had an Italian name, and the FA immediately investigated. It was discovered that he was indeed half Italian on his father's side, and with this in mind he was deported and told to f*** off. People said he had let those three goals in on purpose, just to let West Germany go through and lose to Italy in the semi-finals, which they did. Had we won and got to the semi-finals, we would of surely hammered the Eye-ties and then stuffed Brazil in the final. But it was not to be. And it's all the fault of Peter Bonetti. And the Germans again.
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Genius 2003
THE CRAZY GANG f*** THE REDS
The Liverpool side of 1987-88 was a well-oiled machine. Crafted like a fine Swiss watch of the finest parts, and with all those finest parts working in perfect unison, it ran like a Rolls Royce, positively purred, cat-like, as it cruised along the highway that was the League season. Apart from the occasional misfiring, when it lost to Everton or Nottingham Forest, it eased its way through game after game. With the mercurial, if incongruously fat-arsed, John Barnes, the waif-like ugly bastard of Peter Beardsley, the goal-poaching foul-mouthed goal-hanger that was John Aldridge, and that other little bloke called Houghton or something, they seemed unbeatable. The League season was over by Christmas, with some observers saying that they were playing the best football ever seen.
"They're playing the best football I've ever seen," said ageing "Preston Plumber" and former England international, Tom Finney, "and that's saying something. I've seen more football than most, though not as much as Bobby Charlton, and I know good football when I see it." Praise came from even further afield, from such luminaries of the game as Michel Platini. He said, in French, that Liverpool were better than any other team in the history of football. Better than Real Madrid of the fifties, better than Brazil of 1970, and tons better than the Busby Babes who died in that plane crash, because they were poo.
In one game against Nottingham Forest at Anfield, Liverpool hammered them 5-1. It would have been 25-1 had Steve McMahon pbutted the ball a bit more often, and if Craig Johnston had been playing instead of that spazz Nigel Spackman. In that memorable game, Liverpool notched up a record 78 shots on goal, 76 of them on target. They also forced 117 corners - also a record - to Forest's 2. It was, some observers said, the most complete performance of any side in the entire history of modern sport.
As with the League campaign, Liverpool cruised through to the final of the FA Cup. Again they battered hapless Forest 2-1 in the semi-final, and would face either Wimbledon or Luton Town at Wembley. It seemed a formality, as with many other games at Wembley which had also seemed formalities. Just like The Scum against Southampton in 1976, and Sunderland against Leeds in 1973 blah blah blah...
It was Wimbledon who won through, and would go on to meet the invincible, mighty, unbeatable, world-dominating Liverpool in the final. No-one gave them a hope in hell.
Wimbledon were a hotchpotch mixture of old has-beens, rejects, bums, former amateurs, going-nowhere nobodies and niggers who only got in the side because they were big and willing to kick f*** out of anything that moved. Labelled the "Crazy Gang", after the old forties Ealing comedy music hall act of the same name, and because of their willingness to kick f*** out of anything that moved, they had a style of play which some found unattractive. The method was simple, their adage simpler still: If it's the ball, kick it; if it isn't the ball, kick it anyway and hope for the best. In the Wimbledon squad were players like: Dennis Wise, a sawn-off midget ponse who got his kicks by beating up taxi-drivers; Terry Gibson, and even shorter sawn-off midget ponse who supplemented his meagre footballer's wage by appearing in panto as one of the Seven Dwarfs; John Fashanu, known as "Fash The Bash" because of his habit of bashing people who called his suicidal brother a puff; and, most notorious of all, Vinnie Jones, a former kindergarten teacher whose wife had loads of heart attacks and who was most famous for squeezing Paul Gascoigne's balls, though he wasn't queer.
Before the game (for which Liverpool were an astonishing 25-1 on favourites, and Wimbledon 5,000-1 longshots), as the teams lined up in the tunnel, the Wimbledon players realised that, if they were to overcome the mighty reds of Liverpool, they would have to resort to tactics other than those normally found on the football pitch. They would have, in the words of team manager Bobby "Loser" Gould, to psyche the opposition out of their game.
"It was easy," says Jones, now a plank of an actor famous for such roles as a hardman in a couple of Guy Ritchie films, but f*** all else because no-one else thinks he's any good, which he isn't. "All we had to do was put them off. Some of the lads were shouting and playing loud music to unsettle them. I remember Terry Phelan going up to Gary Gillespie and telling him he was crap. John Scales tripped Steve Nicol up and Eric Young said Gary Ablett's mother was a silly old bag. I knew I had to get to their main midfield playmaker, Steve McMahon, who was a hardman. So, just before we went out, I threatened him under a sunbed and slammed the lid on the cunt's face, looking very convincing, even if I say so myself. That seemed to do the trick."
As the game got underway, it soon became apparent that Liverpool were not their usual self-buttured, skilful and smooth-running best, whilst Wimbledon seemed to settle into things more easily. "The pitch suited us better," says Dons substitute Laurie Cunningham, who later died in a car crash and it served him right. "Some of the lads had told Barnes and Beardsley to watch out, because we had planted landmines under the turf the night before. We said we knew the groundsman and Vinny had put the frighteners on him. That seemed to throw them. The other thing we had in our favour, of course, was the betting syndicate run by John Fashanu, of which Bruce Grobbelaar was a member. That was the trump card."
Wimbledon got a corner out on the left wing, and over went little Dennis Wise to take it. With Grobbelaar waiting in the Liverpool goal, it was a formality. The ball came over and there was Chink-faced half-dago half-gook Lawrie Sanchez to head Wimbledon into the lead. Amazingly, or perhaps not, Grobbelaar appeared not to try and save the ball. And with the odds on Wimbledon winning a mbuttive 5,000-1, who could f***ing blame him? Not that he would of done anything like that, of course. Never.
Liverpool rallied, and threw everything at Wimbledon. They should have had a penalty when Beardsley was brought down in the box, and a perfectly good goal was disallowed because of a ludicrous refereeing decision that was pathetic, frankly. Then, in the second half, came the moment which, many believe, turned the match in Wimbledon's favour. John Aldridge was brought down in the box by one of the dirty cheating bastard Wimbledon players, and a penalty was awarded. No goalkeeper in the history of the FA Cup Final had ever saved a penalty, nor had any player ever missed a spot-kick. The odds were stacked against Dons 'keeper, the ageless Dave Beasant, as Aldridge himself stepped up to take the kick.
"There was a lot of tension," says Beasant, now 58 and still playing professional football with any cunt that will have him on loan for a couple of weeks. "I'd watched Aldridge taking penalties all season, and I knew which way he was going to place it. I knew he was going to place it to my right, so I dived to my left because I'm f***ing thick. Fortunately, I was wrong and he placed it to my left, which meant all I had to do was put out my hand and turn it away. The fact that it would of gone wide anyway will never take away from the fact that it was the first ever penalty save in an FA Cup Final. That save won us the game, and I've never shut up about it since."
It did indeed, for Wimbledon held on and eventually won the game by that flooky Lawrie Sanchez glancing header, which was probably a mis-fired shot from Wise so it shouldn't have counted anyway. And the fact that it was such a shock, and that Liverpool's Grobbelaar and Wimbledon's Fashanu would later be accused of fixing matches between them had nothing to do with it. The Crazy Gang, to quote football anorak and pie-faced moron John Motson, had beaten the Culture Club. Though I'm buggered if I know what Boy George had to do with it...as indeed was John Fashanu's brother Justin.
Dave Beasant went up to collect the Cup from some old fart in the directors' box, whilst Liverpool pondered yet another double well and truly bollocksed up. It was one of Wembley's greatest days, and one that won't never be forgotten about. Winning manager Bobby Gould summed it up in his autobiography a few years later...
'I was proud to have been honoured to have been connected with Wimbledon FC then at that time of the period that was then. It was a great moment both for me, me, myself, my family, fans and friends and people that I know as well. No-one will ever take that achievement way from me, or remove it neither. It was an achievement I achieved through achieving the goal of my aims of managing management and I was dead happy both with it, about it and everything to do with it. We did it because we did it, and in doing it we did it the doing way, that was both well done and good did at the same time. Pity everything else I did was a pile of wank.'
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Genius 2003
f*** OFF, YOU GERMAN BASTARDS
When one thinks of the intense and bitter rivalry between those two great footballing nations, England and Germany, one's mind goes back through the mists of time...to Euro 2000, to Italia '90, to Mexico 1970 and, of course, to that fateful day at Wembley in 1966 when we thrashed their arses and they stole the ball. Magnificent clashes all, and never to be forgotten about. But the rivalry goes back even farther than this. Right back, in fact, to the dark and dreary days of post-Victorian days of the days of the Great War days.
The World War Cup of 1914-18 was to be the greatest footballing competition anywhere, and the Germans, keen to show that they were better than us because we had invented football some forty years before, wanted to win the greatest prize of them all - World footballing supremacy. Under the leadership of their captain, "Kaiser" Wilhelm Beckenbauer, they had already swept through most of Europe. Starting with a difficult away win against Yugoslavia in Sarajevo (a game in which Yugoslav skipper Archduke Rio Ferdinand III was shot through the head in injury time), they had gone on to overcome Austria, Hungary, the Sudetenland, Italy and France in the group stages. Their march towards the final was unrelentingless as they displayed their superior style of football in every department.
England, on the other hand, had had an easy pbuttages through the group phase - a couple of byes against Sweden and Norway, and an away pact with the Russians saw to it that they would go through to face Germany in the final at the Somme Stadium in 1918. Led by their master tactician of a manager, Sir Alf Kitchener, all they had to so was beat the Krauts, and the World War Cup was theirs for the taking. It was the Big One, the most important game in the then youthful history of buttociation Football.
Corporal Tommy "Tommy" Thompson, now 108 and living in sheltered accommodation just outside Stafford, an inside left with the Royal Engineers and winning his third cap in that memorable final, still recalls it vividly. "It was a hard game. The Germans came out and lined up, ready for kick-off, and when we saw them they looked so big. So what we did was shoot a couple of them just to bring them down to size, sort of put them in their place. Let them know we meant business. But it was a great occasion - the lads going over the top, someone playing the national anthem on a mouth organ, people covered in poo and being shot for cowardice when they were only suffering shell shock. Unforgettable, and one I will never ever forget."
And so, at midnight on Christmas Day of 1917, all the fighting stopped as the two teams kicked off. The pitch, it has to be said, left a little to be desired, though it was no worse than Old Trafford about halfway through November. The Germans took an early lead when a gas plant went off and end several English poets, among them 19-year-old Siegfried Bbuttoon. Fortunately, he just about had the time to write about it shortly before he died. His words are preserved for all eternity at the National Museum Of Football Poetry in Preston...
How sweetly sings the lark of freedom How brightly shines the moon How beautifully comes the twilight Oh, hang on...a plant's just gone off
Marvellous stuff.
With the Germans coming forward, England had to defend manfully. Several defenders had to leave the field with legs missing, some of them screaming and holding their eyes saying they were blind as well. Like you see in films. But on the break there came, after half an hour, a scoring opportunity. Private Geoffrey "Rotten Tooth" Hurst, a centre forward with the Royal Fusiliers, suddenly found himself in no man's land. He broke free of his German marker and scored with a perfectly placed lob of hand grenade into the depths of a German trench. Er...I mean the nets. The Germans protested that Hurst was offside, but to no avail. The referee, after consulting his linesman, signalled to say that the hand grenade had indeed crossed the line, and the score was 1-1.
The Germans regrouped and came back strongly, but England stood firm and were soon two goals ahead through Private Martin "Insignificant" Peters. It looked as though England would win, but in the dying seconds of the war, the bastards equalised again. Wouldn't you know it, the cunts. And so, for the first and only time in history, a World War went into extra time. But that extra time belonged, quite rightly, to England. The Krauts, knackered, f***ed and unable to play on because they are Germans and couldn't win a war if you paid them, gave in as England ran riot. Hurst scored again and then, in the dying seconds, grabbed a third machine gun trench for his hat-trick. A fine individual performance that would later see him with some new teeth and a knighthood from the king.
It was then up to England captain, Bobby "Jewel Thief" Moore, who had earlier lost a testicle in a bayonet attack, to collect the World War Cup from Her Majesty King George V. The Germans, being Germans, promised revenge twenty years later in World War Cup II, but it would be the same old story. Because they are Germans.
Of course, since then the Germans have gone on to win three World Cups while we've only won one, and a few European Championships as well. But they'll never beat us in World Wars.
-- Arthur Thacker 2003
GEORGE BEST'S LIVER RETIRES
Love him or loathe him, no-one could ever deny the sheer skill, virtuosity, flamboyance and total command of the game what George Best had in his hey-day. Nor could one ever deny the impact what he had on the game of football, both in this country and on the continent. Though they never heard of him anywhere else because he was from Northern Ireland and never played in a World Cup. So he probably wasn't that good, really. Nevertheless, for a short period of time during the heady days of the 1960's, he was the biggest, most bankable, most exciting and drunkest footballer in Britain. Apart from Jimmy Greaves.
Born in the tough streets of Belfast, young George learned to kick a football long before he could walk. "You had to be quick on your feet back in those days," he said in an early interview with bumming commentator Gerald Sinstadt. "You had to be able to move sharpish, so you had, otherwise you'd of got planted...no, not bummed, planted, as you went about your business. I remember one time when my younger brother nearly got blown up, but it rarely happened to us because we was Protestants. Not like them Catholic cunts."
At the tender age of twelve, Best came to Britain for a trial with the then mediocre poo team of Manchester United, who hadn't won f*** all for ages. He impressed so much that, just before his 13th birthday, he was given a run-out in the reserves against Burnley. Matt Busby, a man always impressed by the sight of young boys kicking a football around, had total faith in him. This faith was rewarded when George scored eight goals in that reserve debut game. So much so that, come the following Saturday, Busby pitched him into the first team at the age of only 13. By the time he was 14 Best was already a regular in the United line-up, alongside such greats as Sir Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Johnny Giles and big-mouthed arse-licking pundit Not Sir Paddy Crerand. By the time he was 15, Best was appearing as a full international, albeit for Northern Ireland, so it didn't really count.
As United swept through Europe, foreign fans soon latched onto George Best's penchant for style and sixties fashion sense. The Spaniards, after a terrific performance against Real Madrid, dubbed him "El Beatle", after the popular beat combo of the time, whilst in France he was called "Le Rolling Stone", and the German fans, also seeing the true potential of the precocious youngster with the mop-hair and Amos Brearley sideburns, nicknamed him "Der Monkee". None of this fan adulation ever detracted from Best's stirring performances on the field. Blessed with incredible ball-control, tremendous balance, natural flair and a powerful shot, he would at times appear to have the ball tied to his feet. In fact, during one game against Stoke City at Old Trafford, the ball was found to be tied to his feet. Best, not for the last time in his illustrious career, was sent off and subsequently suspended.
"I watched him once at St James's Park," said baggy-arsed stuttering old prick, David Coleman, "and he was mesmerising. He got the ball on his own goal line, beat twenty men, then ran back towards his own goal line and beat another twenty as he ran towards goal. Then, from thirty yards out, he played keep-up in front of a Newcastle defender for ten minutes before flicking up the ball, doing a treble somersault and bicycle kicking the ball into the stand. It was unbelievable. When he was substituted after fifteen minutes, there were girls fainting in the crowd, chanting his name and poo like that."
But Best, like a lot of geniuses, had his demons. As well as being a fine footballer, prolific goalscorer and f***ing big all-round show-off bastard, he liked the high life, the good times that so often accompany the lot of a highly-paid sporting superstar. He would relax after games, not by being a tedious twat like Bobby Charlton, but by going off to night clubs, picking up loose women, drinking lots of beer and falling over. His particular favourite hobby, as listed in an April 1968 interview with 'Shoot' magazine, was "getting pissed and shagging Miss Worlds". Something he did with alarming regularity and astonishing success. The jammy cunt.
"He loved it," recalls fellow beauty contest judge Sir Bruce Forsyth. "During the finals of the 1969 Miss World, he went off for a piss and when he came back he had this big smile on his face. It was only afterwards that we discovered that, in a five-minute interval, he had managed to drink fourteen double vodkas and shaft the entire African quota of Miss World contestants. Some of them up the pooter, I wouldn't be surprised."
But it was the drink that really hit Best where it hurt. In an effort to overcome the depression brought about by playing in a pooe Manchester United team that hadn't won f*** all for years, he took to downing three bottles of Scotch a day. And not bothering to turn up for training. United boss Sir Matt Busby disciplined him several times, and on three occasions the United superstar threatened to hang up his boots if he wasn't allowed to get pissed and not bother training. In the end, tragically, United told him to f*** off when Sir Matt was replaced by Sir Tommy Docherty, a man who would never stand for such nonsense from one of his players. So Best, at the still-young age of 23, retired from the game and became a sad, lonely figure as he basked on beaches, drank lots of free alcohol, shagged loads of Miss Worlds and generally did what the f*** he wanted for the next ten years.
In several attempts to recapture the glories of his youth, Best played in the Scottish Division Two, the League Cup with Stockport County and, most famously, in the North American Soccer League with Tampax Bay Roadies. But he was poo. Then, in 1982, came the second funniest thing that ever happened to George Best. After a heavy drinking and shagging session at tripe-headed night-club owner Peter Stringfellow's house, Best drove his luxury Morris Marina into a brick wall at fifteen miles per hour. The police caught him and he was breathalysed, arrested and subsequently found to be 7,000 times over the legal limit of alcohol. At his trial, the Honourable Justice Watt-Justis said of him: "You are a disgrace to sportsmen the nation over in the way you have conducted yourself. And I've never forgot the hat-trick you scored against City a few years back. You will go to prison for six months and I hope you f***ing rot. Next!"
an overbloated sense of his own importance into an even drunker it. Vowing never to drink again, Best was admitted to hospital for revolutionary surgery, having an implant implanted into his stomach to force him to quit boozing. If he did drink, said the doctors, the implant would react with the alcohol and cause his brain to explode. Two hours after leaving hospital, Best entered a wine bar in Harley Street and, tragically, necked down the entire contents of four optics, a barrel of Guinness and a tin of hairspray.
Best then moved to America, married one of the Miss Worlds he had shagged and began drinking again. No-one knew him over there, so it didn't matter. Then, after years of being nobody, and after being booted out by his lovely sack-faced wife, he returned to Britain. Sky offered him a pundit job and everything seemed to be going rosy. "I gave up drinking when I realised that no-one would take me on if I carried on being pissed all the time," said Best. "But once I got the job and had fooled Sky into thinking I was sober, I started on the hard stuff again. It was great. No-one watched Sky in those days, so I could turn up for work as ripped to the f***ing tis as I liked. And working alongside the likes of Rodney Marsh, Alan Mullery and Frank McLintock, no-one noticed how steamed I was, anyway."
But then, just a couple of years ago, the funniest thing ever happened to George Best - his liver, after many decades of pickling and bubbling with bacchanalian over-indulgence, finally waved a white flag and said "no more". Whilst buttembling a new MFI drinks cabinet at his luxury Maida Vale flat, he collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital. At hospital George was given the news that he had dreaded all his drinking life: either he gave up drinking for good, or he would die within a few short weeks. Naturally, this shook Best to the core. He was so shaken to the core that, after listening to doctors' advice for three minutes, he discharged himself and made straight for Booze Busters where he purchased a jeroboam of bacardi and half a dozen bottles of White Lightning. And still he didn't f***ing learn, the drunken black Irish bastard. His liver packed in again and this time there would be no second chance. Doctors said that if he ever looked at a drink again he would die on the spot. Very painfully.
The only thing that would save Best now was a liver transplant. Many livers were sought, mainly from decent-living people who had died in horrible ways and left their good organs to the likes of drunken cunts who ought to know better. Best had his liver transplant in the summer of 2001 and has never looked back since. "It's great," he says, smiling. "Now that I've got some poor bastard's liver who never drank in his life, I can drink as much as I like again. I can start all over. Of course, people say I shouldn't drink after the chances I've had, but f*** them. There's no proof that all that drinking had anything to do with my liver packing in."
Whether it did or not, George Best's liver did indeed pack in, and spectacularly so. You only have to look at his withered, pathetic yellow jaundiced face to realise that. But then, there's no f***ing telling some people. Nor is there any denying his great standing as one of the greatest footballers ever. "He was good," says bitter and twisted Sir Bobby Charlton, a former team mate of Best's and a man who isn't the least bit jealous about George's continued adulation. "There's no doubt that he was a great footballer, even though he wasn't as good as the Busby Babes. Or David Beckham, Ryan Giggs or any of the others who play for us...I mean Manchester United now. And he certainly wasn't as good as me. He never won the World Cup and he never scored a goal like the one I got against Portugal in 1966, the way I beat three men, got the ball in midfield and ran towards goal before boring everyone about it for the next forty f***ing years..."
Just f*** off.
-- Arthur Thacker Man Of Predictability 2003
HEART OF GLbutt
Great footballing moments are reserved for great football matches, games involving great players and in great competitions, at the very highest level and with the highest stakes possible at stake. Bollocks. You can keep your World Cup Final penalty shoot-outs, where some overpaid international star makes a cunt of himself by skying the ball into the crowd; you can have your European Cup Final last-gasp winners scored by bum Norwegian substitutes; and you can stuff your FA Cup Final last-minute-of-extra-time headers scored by has-been baldy centre-backs who shouldn't even be on the field. You can keep them all, because they're all crap.
A true great footballing moment came just a couple of years ago, involving two sides not known for their clbutt, fame, fortune, wealth and international standing. In fact, it involved two sides hardly known apart from by their own loyal fans. When Carlisle United met Scarborough on the very last day of the season, the only thing resting on the result was which of the two clubs would have the honour of staying in the Football League. The winners would stay up; the losers would go down. Tough tits for one of them; unbridled glory for the other. Probably. Actually, a draw would of been good enough for Scarborough, the Yorkshire bastards. But a win for Carlisle would of kept them in the Football League.
The tension was unbearable. I can't remember what score it was, but all I remember is that, with just a couple of minutes left, Carlisle needed a goal to save their sorry arses from slipping into the inglorious oblivion of the Conference. Scarborough had defended manfully, with every one of their players performing heroics and keeping the poo Cumbrian side at bay. Carlisle, realising that they must score to secure League football for another season at...er...wherever it is they play these days, threw everything forward. At one point, with just a minute to go, even their manager came onto the pitch and went up for a late corner. So did the buttistant manager, coach, trainer, ball boys and even the bloke with the bucket and sponge. When Carlisle's money-grabbing spoiler of a chairman Michael Knighton came on kitted out and tried to take on the Scarborough defence single-handed, the referee ordered them all off and added on twelve minutes for time-wasting. It was this twelve minutes that would prove to be crucial for the future of Carlisle UNited Football Club.
Jimmy Glbutt was a crap goalkeeper. A graduate of the Dave Beasant Goalkeeping Academy, he had for years tried in vain to earn a crust playing for any old piece of pooe team that would have him. In desperation, and because their five other first-team 'keepers had all been injured in a freak waterfalling accident, Carlisle had signed Glbutt on a three-month loan period. "When the call came for me to join Carlisle," says Glbutt, 34, "I was made up. I'd always been a fan of the back-country border club that everyone thinks is in Scotland. It was a dream come true for me, so I snatched their hands off. Naturally, I only thought I'd be playing the odd game. I never thought I would have a starring role in one of the most astonishing football moments ever. If someone had told me then that I'd be Number 4 in Arthur Thacker's Great Footballing Moments, I'd have pissed myself."
But football is, as some drunken baggy-arsed Cockney pundit once said, a funny old game. Its heroes are not always the great and fine, the skilful and the majestically artistic; sometimes, just sometimes, a football hero can be some washed-up cunt that no-one has ever heard of before. And so it came to be on that memorable May Afternoon of about three years ago.
For almost half an hour Scarborough, the bastards, had played keep-ball in an attempt to defy Carlisle. They pbutted the ball around as if in a practice match, taking the ball upfield and then back down again, finally to the goalkeeper, in a manner that would have shamed even the great LIverpool sides of the past. Like when Alan Hansen used to do it constantly for ninety minutes amid cheers from an appreciative Kop. But then, eleven minutes deep into added time, Carlisle got a corner when a Scarborough defender fell on his arse and kicked the ball behind. They had to score. They had to throw everything forward in one last, desperate attempt on goal.
Jimmy Glbutt described the vital moment later, in his autobiography, 'Once SCored A Goal And It Was A Gas'. "We knew we had to score. Our strikers were f***ed after trying to get the ball off Scarborough, the bastards, for the best part of half an hour. The manager signalled for me to go up for the corner. I didn't want to because I'm a goalkeeper and I can't kick a ball properly, but I thought why not?"
When the ball was fired across the goal by some unknown Carlisle winger, the defenders, distracted by a sudden darkening of the skies, much in the biblical manner and like in some horror film, missed it completely. The only man who saw the ball was Carlisle 'keeper Glbutt. He pounced on it and, with the referee inhaling to blow on his whistle and end the season, pulled back his leg to kick for goal.
"In that split-second," recalls Glbutt tearfully, "I glanced over at the ref. I could see the whistle in his mouth and him sucking in his cheeks ready to blow. Then, as I connected with the ball, I saw him blow. I could even see the pea inside the whistle as it moved, ready to rattle about and sound for time. But my shot was just too hard and, before the pea could make that sound, the ball was in the back of the net. I still wank off about that moment even now, all these years on."
Indeed. Even as the ball bolted into the back of the Scarborough, the bastards, net, the referee's whistle did make that shrill sound to end the game, and the season. Carlisle had scored and their status as a Football League club was preserved for at least another twelve months. They would be back the following May to scrape their sorry hides out of the poo again, but for now they were safe. And it was all thanks to the right boot of an on-loan goalkeeper by the name of Jimmy Glbutt. As unlikely a footballing hero as you're ever likely to find. Like as not.
Glbutt, naturally, was feted as a hero by the Carlisle fans. He was chaired from the pitch and awarded a specially-made medal for saving the club from relegation. A journeyman goalkeeper without a club to call his own, his future now seemed secure because of this one great moment of footballing fluke. Sadly, it was not to be. Cash-strapped Carlisle could not offer him a contract, not even a few measly quid a week. Having promised Glbutt a permanent deal, tight-fisted bastard chairman Michael Knighton realised he needed a new pair of cufflinks and told him to f*** off and find somewhere else.
"It was great to score that goal," says Glbutt, "but it soon turned out to be a pain in the butt. Seemed like the real thing, only to pbutt. Then they let me go and I had to find another club. No-one wanted me, so I ended up going back to bricklaying and scrounging off the dole. Oo-oo-oo-woe-o."
Among the Maradonas, the Renaldos, the Beckenbauers, Charltons, Bests, Platinis, Bergkamps, Henrys, Owens, Butts, Holdsworths and Dowies, the name of Jimmy Glbutt means f*** all. He never won the World Cup, never won the League or the European Cup. He never played for England, never won a Cup winners medal, was never voted Footballer Of The Year or died playing for Cameroon in some poo friendly tournament. But by the people of Carlisle, he will always be remembered for that one goal he scored against Scarborough, the bastards, to save them from going out of the Football League.
Arthur Thacker Man Of Bollocks 2003
-- "i'm just a soul who's intentions are good, Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"
