At home with the stars

Imagine a world before Hello! magazine. It’s not easy is it?

These celebrity mags have long since cornered the market on photographing showbiz weddings or capturing the stars on film in luxury island hideaways. But life for a professional footballer hasn’t always been about securing exclusive image rights for star-studded weddings. Cast your mind back thirty years, and your average player was more than happy to let the Shoot! photographer into his house to take a few snaps for a feature ambitiously titled ‘At home with the stars’.

What really struck us flicking through old copies of Shoot! is that these guys were just like you and me. They were seemingly content with a modest bungalow or a semi in the suburbs. Occasionally, a shaggy-permed midfielder would’ve invested his signing-on fee in a cottage in the country, but that was as extravagant as it got. These were regular blokes who owned nothing more ostentatious than a new hi-fi or a colour telly.

The photos that the Shoot! snapper took were even more revealing. These professional sportsmen clearly enjoyed lounging about at home wearing their international caps and weren’t ashamed of being photographed mowing the lawn with their shirts off. True, the feature had a certain Life on Mars quality about it – wives and girlfriends were usually photographed bringing the star his tea, or vacuuming the lounge whilst our hero remained firmly ensconced in his armchair. And our hero would often be captured on film fingering the new Linda Ronstadt LP with a caption that read something like ‘Brian loves her voice – and her looks!’

But these were simpler times. Times when a top-flight footballer might still have lived round the corner, rather than miles away in an opulent mansion on some gated development, replete with a 6ft plasma TV in the khazi.

Flashy boots

£119.99 for a pair of football boots? You’re having a laugh.

Don’t we ever learn? Who was the best player at school? The rich kid who turned up to football training in the latest Man United kit and a brand new pair of Puma Kings? Or the scrawny kid, with the bandy legs and boots bought off the hanger in Woolworths?

Perhaps, at the highest levels of the professional game, the strategic positioning of special rubberised fins really does make a difference. But if, like us, you’ve got two left feet, then they just mark you out as a bit of a tit.

We remember when the might of the adidas Predator was unleashed on the unsuspecting world of Sunday football. It was autumn 1995, and the venue was a dreary Upton Court Park in Slough. Craig Johnston and adidas had launched the first Predator boot a year or so before and it had taken just over twelve months for the technology to trickle down into the very gutter of the beautiful game. You couldn’t get any lower than Thames Valley League Division Six, well, not unless you lied about your age. But there, on the killing fields of Slough, were not one but two pairs of Predator boots, worn by the opposition strike force. Of course, we took the piss but, really, we were shitting ourselves. We’d only ever seen this sort of thing on Match of the Day. We’d like to say that the Predator boots didn’t make a jot of difference and that we earned a credible draw. And, in one sense, that would’ve been right. They didn’t make much difference; we lost 5-0 and the result would’ve been the same if our opponents had played in a curious mixture of deck shoes and hiking boots. But the sheer presence of such expensive boots on a Sunday morning signalled defeat for us. It also marked a sea-change in Sunday football. Before long everyone was paying a small fortune to wear flashy boots. We can only put such extravagance down to the house price boom.

At least Predator boots incorporated exciting new technology and had jazzy suffixes like Mania, Supernova and Power Pulse. What really distressed us was the rise in the number of people wearing brightly coloured boots.

We know the late Alan Ball pioneered this sort of thing years ago (donning his famous white boots for the 1970 Charity Shield) but there should be a law against spotty seventeen-year-old kids turning up in them on a Sunday morning.

If you are Cristiano Ronaldo, you can probably get away with it. If you are a trainee car mechanic called Aaron or Tyler then it would probably be best to avoid drawing attention to yourself by wearing electric-blue football boots. Take it from us, it just gives ageing, thirty-something hatchet men something to aim for.

On reflection, we might be being a tad harsh on the youth of today. As we found out on a trip to our local, out-of-town, sports megastore, it is bloody impossible to buy a pair of regulation black football boots these days. We ended up with a couple of pairs of dark obsidian* boots, and not a lot of change out of £250. We should’ve gone to Woolworths.

*Look, we thought they were black. It was only when we got home and checked the dictionary that we found out that obsidian is actually a volcanic glass, similar to granite, usually dark but transparent in thin pieces. Well, you couldn’t make it up.

Floodlight pylons

Once upon a time, every ground worth its salt had floodlight pylons. Great big things that lit up the ground like a beacon, making it visible for miles around.

We never had any trouble getting to an away match at night, we just pointed our old man’s Ford Cortina towards the light and drove. The glow emitted from these monsters kept whole cities awake and caused birds to start their dawn chorus hours ahead of schedule.

When John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, reported an alarming yellow glow over Europe, Mission Control just checked the Houston Evening Argus and said: “Roger that. Everything’s okay, that’s just Ayresome Park, the ‘Boro are at home tonight.”

With out-of-town, flat-pack stadia and tighter controls on light pollution, old-fashioned floodlights on pylons have been hunted to the verge of extinction in the British Isles. But all is not lost: they can still be found alive and well in the outer reaches of continental Europe. Former Eastern Bloc nations are a particular haven for the floodlight fetishist.

These countries seem to specialise in a menacing forward-leaning pylon that casts an enormous shadow over the stadium and is capable of creating an eerie sensation of 24-hour daylight for several kilometres in every direction. Great examples of the genre can be found at the national stadium Lia Manoliu, in Bucharest (get there quick, there’s plans to redevelop the ground by 2010) or Honvéd’s atmospheric Bozsik stadium in Budapest. But the Holy Grail for pylon fans can be found at Carl Zeiss Jena’s Ernst-Abbe-Sportfeld stadium where four giant, steel floodlight pylons dominate the skyline for miles around.

With budget airlines offering great deals to the outposts of Europe, you and your mates could soon be basking in the reflective glory of some really big floodlights – all for the price of an afternoon at Stamford Bridge.

Racey chat

Did anyone else find the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny arousing? We hope so, or we need therapy. In much the same way that cartoon rabbits should not be sexy, neither should cartoon ladies in football comics. But in adolescence, it wasn’t the great storylines or the lure of free gifts that kept us avidly reading Roy of the Rovers – it was Penny Race. She was a MILF long before anyone had coined the term. And, as the wife of Roy, she was quite possibly the original WAG.

Think of a slightly more buxom Victoria Principal (you know, Pam Ewing in Dallas). She would pop up regularly in a pencil skirt, blouse, high heels and stockings. And damn, was she pretty. As adolescent fantasy figures went, she was right up there with Daisy Duke. How we craved something slightly risqué – an upskirt shot of Penny, or a sketch of her in a skimpy towel answering the door – you know, something that would turn Blackie Gray’s hair, well, grey.

Then, in the issue dated 15th September 1984 (we know, we kept it), all our prayers were answered. Penny was pictured in a tight-fitting referee’s costume celebrating Roy’s thirtieth birthday. Lucky Roy. When we turned thirty, nothing like that happened to us. And this was the same day that Roy was granted the Freedom of Melchester. Some blokes have all the luck, eh?

Back then it was hard to talk about. There was no way we were going to mention to our mates the strange stirring in our loins that Penny generated. With the benefit of hindsight, we know it is perfectly normal to fantasise over cartoon women. After all, who doesn’t fancy the cartoon pants off Mrs Incredible? But, in those days, there was an innocence about our feelings for Penny Race. She didn’t work at being a sex symbol, it just happened. She was a natural beauty, needlessly killed off in the later, sensationalist years of Roy of the Rovers.

Rest in Peace Penny Race. You were the original MILF, WAG and cartoon sex symbol. And dear God, we fancied you.

Strictly Celebrity Come Dancing on Ice

Can someone stop ex-footballers appearing on these damn TV shows? It’s just plain embarrassing.

We understand that this sort of programme offers former weather girls, disgraced Blue Peter presenters and ageing glamour models another shot at celebrity, but the line between humiliation and redemption is perilously thin, and football players always end up looking stupid.

This humiliation is compounded by the fact that the show is usually won by a cricketer or a rugby player. This just confirms to the nation, what we knew already – footballers spent their entire childhood playing football, at the expense of everything else. If they left school with a CSE in woodwork they were a f**king genius. In contrast, not only did your average cricket or rugby star get a full set of A-levels and a place at Oxbridge, but they had time to take classes in ballroom dancing or learn how to ice skate. Clever bastards.

The line has to be drawn before someone gets hurt. It is only a matter of time before Andrew Lloyd Webber lures Martin Keown into a pair of roller skates to audition for Celebrity Starlight Express.