John Gregory. For the early part of the season his homespun philosophy seemed to mark him out as the footballing equivalent of Peter Sellers’s gardener-cum-sage in Being There. However, once Villa started losing, his true colours came to the fore. Being a poor football manager is something he can be forgiven, but his treatment of Collymore and Merson cannot.His personal attacks on them through the tabloids showed crass insensitivity and an atrocious lack of judgment. Ian Cusack
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Stories
Stephanie Pride recalls the scenes of despair at Scarborough as Carlisle deliver a killer blow on the final day of the season
Sometimes the greatest crowds invite the greatest disasters. Take Scarborough’s baptism of fire in the Football League in 1987, when £25,000 worth of damage was done by rioting Wolves supporters – the attendance was 7,314, our highest in the league. So the omens were not good for what was billed as “the biggest game in the club’s history”.
Al Needham bravely takes on Reds in the Hood by Terry Christian and If the Kids are United by Tony Hill, two reflections on Man Utd-obsessed childhoods
With Manchester United finally confirming their status as the team of the Nineties with probably their best season ever, it’s no surprise that large chunks of Brazil are being cut down as we speak for scores of officially endorsed ghostwritten McUnited product. Much of it will be as incisive as a plastic knife on a rhino, so perhaps we ought to play like David Mellor and let the fans have their say.
Dear WSC
The article in WSC No 144 about the strange man who looks after the FA Cup reminded me of another story involving the same trophy. Back in 1980, I was working on Record Breakers (look, we’ve all got rent to pay) and I suggested we do an item about football that involved getting all four major trophies (the League, the Charity Shield, and the FA and League Cups) into the studio. Come the day the championship trophy and the Charity Shield were delivered by Securicor from Liverpool. Both were in highly polished wooden boxes as you would expect. The League Cup was delivered from Molineux, also by a security firm and also in its own polished wooden box. The FA Cup, however, was delivered from West Ham in a black cab – wrapped in a pillow case. To cap it all, the cabbie turned out to be a right miserable bugger. Handing me the pillow case he said, “I’m a West Ham fan and this is the first time I get a call to go there. Do I pick up anyone involved in the club? No, I get a fucking pillowcase to deliver.” I didn’t tell him what was in the pillowcase. It’s always given me great pleasure to think that there’s a London cabbie out there who’s missed a great opportunity to say, “’Ere, you’ll never guess what I had in my cab the other day…" One of the carpenters in the studio was a West Ham fan. Heartbroken at the way his club had treated the FA Cup, he built a mahogany box for it. The Cup was returned to the Hammers in the box. Ten years later, Spurs won the cup and it was brought into the LWT studios where I was then working. It was still in the box built by the BBC carpenter.
Robin Carr, Chesham
The Premier League is currently the least of Queen of the South’s worries. Jim Rutherford reports
IT'S A RARE DAY when Queen of the South steal the headlines in the Scottish press. But the Dumfries outfit enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame recently. Unfortunately, it came for all the wrong reasons as the club found themselves splashed all over the tabloids because of their manager’s marital problems.