Final Third!

John Smith

Description

Final Third: The Last Word on our Football Heroes serves up another batch of funny, absurd and jaw-dropping tales discovered within more than 300 footballer autobiographies. Author John Smith has pored over the memoirs of the great and the good - as well as the not so good - so you don't have to. You're welcome. Final Third paints an intimate picture of our favourite football figures, using their own stories to show what makes them tick, what unites and divides them and exactly what they are prepared to share with us. They've seen things you wouldn't believe! The eye-opening stories include a defender deliberately driving a golf ball into Jimmy Hill's house, a goalkeeper confronted by a witch doctor in his penalty area, one football legend asking another to scale a church tower to stop the bells ringing, a manager who was like catnip to the wives of his directors and the England captain who drifted down the Thames. It all adds up to a fun third volume of the definitive digest of the autobiographies of our football heroes.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801504072
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
John Smith, 2022
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801504003
eBook ISBN 9781801504072
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Setting Our Stall Out
2. Legends
3. It s Not All Work, Work, Work
4. Behind Every Great Manager
5. You Wear It Well
6. Your Dukes, Your Cheddars and Your Widdleys of This World
7. I Want to Believe
8. Stranger in a Strange Land
9. Coming Over Here
10. Board Games
11. False 9 to 5
12. What Happens on Tour, Doesn t Necessarily Stay on Tour
13. Between the Sticks
14. Always Finish with a Song - Or a List
Bibliography
Photos
Acknowledgements
HUGE THANKS to Dan Trelfer for his help in editing this book. I missed writing with him, but he was always there with notes for me. And if Dan liked it, I knew I wasn t going too far wrong.
Thanks to Jane Camillin, Duncan Olner, Alex Daley and everyone at Pitch Publishing for giving me the opportunity to go around again and putting this book together.
Thanks to Alex Horne, Paul Hawksbee and Gabe Turner for their kind words.
Thanks to John Greathead, Ben Cooper, Michael Marden, Jim Henderson, Julian Shea and anybody else who sent me a book or suggested a particular autobiography that I might not have read yet. Much appreciated.
Thanks to Jo, Archie, Evie and Martha for all their love, support and patience. This is for them.
Thanks as always to any footballer who has shared their memories in a book. I will always find it fascinating, and I hope you do too. Football s great.
And a big hello to everyone who knows me, Ken.
Introduction
WELCOME ALONG. Come in, there s no time to waste. We ve got the best bits from well over 300 football autobiographies to get through. If you ve read the previous two volumes, then thanks for your loyalty and continued interest. If you re reading this third volume first, it s a bit weird, but okay.
The principal remains the same. I ve been on an odyssey through the written word of our football heroes and present to you the funniest, most interesting, and most baffling things discovered for you in one handy place. Well, three places now, but you get the idea. Michael Owen may claim to have the best shit-filter of anyone , but I think I could challenge him. I ve panned for the gold and want to share the things I ve learned. Learning can be fun.
For example, along the way, I ve discovered that:
- Colombia and hairdressing legend Carlos Valderrama rattled as he ran around the pitch, and you could always hear him coming. Graeme Le Saux observes that he was festooned with necklaces and bracelets , which makes him sound a bit like a pirate or an art teacher. - Paul Scholes loves a pun. When he was at home injured and missed out on Manchester United s embarrassing Club World Cup defeat to Vasco de Gama in 2000, he sent Gary Neville a text message that read, simply, Fiasco de Gama . Very enjoyable.
- Jens Lehmann has been stuck in two different lifts with team-mates (at time of writing). Once with a load of Arsenal lads and once at Dortmund with Jan Koller, which had him particularly rattled as a giant such as Koller needs more air than normal people . If this sparks off a debate in your house or place of work about the best or worst footballers to be stuck in a lift with, you have my blessing. 1
- Dundee United switched to their famous tangerine kit because in the late sixties, they played a friendly in the US against Dallas Tornado, who played in a fetching burnt orange home kit , according to winger Davie Wilson. Barbara Kerr, the wife of manager Jerry Kerr, liked it so much that she requested the change from their old black-and-white kit and carried enough clout to get it done. Just in time for colour television, but imagine how well a chain of events like this might go down on Twitter now.
- Jason McAteer has never been one for wearing undies and insists that commando s been my way . So now you know.
- On the night Stanley Matthews met his second wife Mila, the pair took a stroll around the gardens after a cocktail party in Prague and walked into the swimming pool by mistake as they were looking into each other s eyes . I believe this is what they call a meet cute in the Rom-Coms, although Sir Stan s first wife might not have seen it that way.
- The Paul Newman film The Mackintosh Man was filmed at
Stanley and Mila Matthews house in Malta, and in one scene they even had Newman carrying Stanley s own mackintosh after a wardrobe mix-up. No, I haven t seen it either, but I ve watched the trailer and there are loads of good people in it like James Mason, Michael Paddington Hordern and Harry Grout out of Porridge .
- Due to the prevailing, more innocent times, Jimmy Hill and his first wife Gloria were both virgins on their wedding night, which he blames for their failure to adapt to a satisfactory sexual relationship . Oh yes. Jimmy goes below the waist don t you worry about that. And don t worry about him either. He made up for it later with some surprisingly saucy behaviour.
- Hope Solo s dad was once accused of murder. But it s alright, he didn t do it.
- Chris Sutton reveals that as a young apprentice he stayed in digs where a Siamese cat gave birth to a litter and immediately ate her new-born kittens. He says, There were legs and afterbirth everywhere - it was horrific, and I m inclined to think that this experience has informed his jaded worldview. Well, it would, wouldn t it? I can imagine him standing there shouting, Stop eating your kittens! You re better than that! while Robbie Savage takes a contrary position behind him and invites cat fans to call in and let him know what they think.
There s light and there s dark, you see, but it all needs taking in.
On top of all the new information I ve been bursting to tell you about, there have also been occasions when further reading has thrown new light on old subjects. A previous volume dealt with Viv Anderson and Mark Proctor being left out in the countryside by a reunited Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, who nipped off and left them when they were discussing a possible loan move for both from Clough s Nottingham Forest to Taylor s Derby. However, East Midlands insider and confidante of Brian and Peter, Maurice Edwards, tells us that the pair were still at loggerheads when this happened, that Clough wasn t even there and that he simply sent Anderson and Proctor to knock on Taylor s door to annoy him. Who to believe then? Viv was there at least, while Maurice is peddling second-hand news, so perhaps we should stick with Viv. Either way, the image of Anderson and Proctor being abandoned in the countryside, telling anyone who would listen we ve tried to come on loan by mistake remains powerful. 2
I also read Howard Gayle recounting a story from Sunderland training under Lawrie McMenemy, in which the team was asked to practise kick-offs with nobody in opposition. The team dutifully worked the ball back to keeper Iain Hesford who wasn t looking, and the ball rolled straight in for a one-nil lead for nobody. The same story was also told by David Armstrong, and dealt with in Second Yellow , but involved Southampton, with Chris Nicholl in charge and Tim Flowers in goal. Now, I guess there s an outside chance that McMenemy passed this practice on to Chris Nicholl and exactly the same thing happened. But did it really? It makes me think that one of them must be borrowing the story and repurposing it. Maybe it s one of those generic anecdotes that gets trotted out as evidence against an unpopular gaffer. Now I m still a wide-eyed optimist when it comes to our footballers and I want to believe every word they say, even the ghost stories and impossibly witty comebacks in stressful situations which they lay claim to, but this sort of thing has got me rattled. Perhaps sometimes it s better to remain in the dark. For example, I still don t know why Ars ne Wenger didn t go to Pat Rice s leaving do and I m not sure I want to.
Step forward then Jamie Vardy, who can provide reassurance about retaining a bit of mystery, as he struggles to shed some light on his now famous chat shit, get banged tweet. He seems genuinely amazed that people have the catchphrase on T-shirts or incredibly, tattoos of it , but by way of explanation, the best the Leicester man can come up with as an origin story is, The chances are that someone has chatted shit and got banged over the years, but the honest truth is I don t know .
Another man who does his best to keep us guessing is the archetypal unreliable narrator Neil Ruddock - a man who strings a series of very entertaining stories together whether they happened or not. Take, for example, his version of that lovely story of Harry Redknapp pulling a heckling fan out of the crowd and putting him on the pitch for West Ham in a pre-season friendly at Oxford City. Harry isn t shy about embellishing a story and tells it very well himself, with some customary add-ons, but the bare facts of the tale are that the game took place in 1994, the fan was barracking Lee Chap