November Pain: Birmingham City and the Battle of Ancona

The Barry Fry years at Birmingham City were often as chaotic as the man’s public image suggests – obscene t-shirt scandals at Wembley! Selling the Managing Director’s boyfriend to a local rival! Widdling in all four corners of St Andrews to ‘ward off a 100-year-old curse’! Yet despite the almost permanent tumult, a playing staff that swelled to almost 50, and setbacks ranging from an embarrassing FA Cup derby defeat to Kidderminster to relegation in his first season, there were signs by 1995 that Fry’s Birmingham were going places.

“Making the record isn’t my job”: Graham Taylor vs Gary Lineker Part 2

Four days after Gary Lineker missed a golden opportunity to equal the all-time England scoring record with his fluffed Panenka at Wembley, The Observer published an interview with Graham Taylor in which he vented his frustrations with his captain. “It’s almost as if Gary is a national institution who cannot be touched,” he said. “You could argue we played Brazil with 10 men, but you’re not allowed to.”

“There’s Something I’m Not Sure About”: Graham Taylor vs Gary Lineker Part 1

Euro ’92 can be considered The Empire Strikes Back of England’s 90s tournament showings, the dark middle chapter between the heroic exploits of Italia ’90 and Euro ’96. Sunlit uplands seemingly lay ahead when the qualification campaign for the Championships in Sweden kicked off with a new manager, new captain, and new audience hooked by the drama of Bologna, Naples and Turin. Two summers later, that feeling was gone, replaced by yet another period of tortured soul-searching.

“You can only hurt so much”: Mark Bosnich’s Manchester Utd Nightmare

It was supposed to be the fitting conclusion to the story arc of one of English football’s biggest characters. Eight years after visa issues had caused the teenage Mark Bosnich to abandon his Manchester United career almost before it had begun, he returned to a club newly crowned champions of Europe, to replace their greatest-ever goalkeeper.

Video Nasty! The Vinnie Jones Moral Panic of 1992

The rise of the clips compilation video was, on balance, one of the gentler by-products of English football’s post-Italia ’90 boom. The proliferation of VHS stocking fillers started with the likes of Goals Galore! and Saves Galore!, hoovering up the best action from the death throes of the old First Division, before the first tentative yet inevitable steps in the direction of the banter bus were taken via the Danny Baker Cinematic Universe (Own Goals and Gaffs, Freak Football, Right Hammerings etc.) Even in these early days of the genre, long before everyone from Nick Hancock to Olly Murs made an honest day’s living narrating that clip of Peter Devine’s 1991 HFS Northern Premier League Division One Cup Final penalty miss, niches were being sought in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

By the standards of the era, Soccer’s Hard Men still felt like a barrel being scraped. Essentially a cobbled-together collection of goals and meaty tackles from assorted midfield hatchet men of the previous 30 years, interspersed with inane interviews from ex-professionals just about clinging on to the last vestiges of relevance, it was a tough sell. To a nine-year-old in 1992, men like Dave Mackay and Peter Storey may as well have been the handlebar mustachioed figures haunting Victorian cigarette cards. Nor did the sleepy narration from Central TV stalwart Tony ‘Heart of the Country‘ Francis scream ‘edgy’.

The filmmakers, however, had an ace up their sleeve – English football’s resident bogeyman. The video opens with Vinnie Jones in his pants. His involvement with Soccer’s Hard Men would leave him even more brutally exposed…

The Mother of All Games: Iran vs USA at France ’98

The collective sucking of teeth could have knocked the World Cup trophy from its pedestal in Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome. Making the draw for the following summer’s World Cup Finals, Sepp Blatter (presumably relieved not to be bantered off the stage by Robin Williams like last time) plucked the United States from the bowl and deposited them in Group F. Waiting for them there were European Champions Germany; a Yugoslavia side comprised of players from Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo; and, most significantly, the nation that considered them ‘the Great Satan’ – Iran.

Eyes Wide Shutt: Leeds, Stuttgart, and an Unlikely Hero at Camp Nou

Have you dreamed of scoring a late European Cup winner at the Nou Camp? Were you wearing the colours of the Blaugrana, a packed-to-the-rafters cauldron chanting your name? Perhaps it was a Clasico and you were breaking their hearts in pristine white. Maybe you were simply turning out for your hometown club, your goal all but tying their ribbons to the trophy?

Presumably, your reverie didn’t play out in front of a crowd smaller than the average gate at Sincil Bank, only coming about as the result of a basic admin error. That was how the hero of our story’s big moment came, but it was no less glorious. Less than a decade earlier, Carl Shutt had been playing up front for Spalding United in the Northern Counties East League. After 9th October 1992, however – the day before his 31st birthday – Shutt would be forever associated with one word. Barcelona…

Mightier than the Sword: the Life and Times of Chic Charnley

The late 80s and early 90s were the heyday of the dressing room joker. Almost every club seemed to have at least one in various assorted flavours: from the John Moncur-alike journeyman prankster, always name-dropped in interviews in the pages of Shoot! or Match for his antics with a can of fart spray in the physio’s room; to the next level ‘clown prince’ maverick, who sprinkled his anarchic mischief on and off the pitch. Paul Gascoigne was, of course, the market leader, whether it was bringing an ostrich to training or digging up London with a pneumatic drill. The rise of ‘professionalism’ as a concept in British football, with its super athletes and and-it’s-live portentousness, seems to have squeezed out the game’s harlequins.

‘The Dream is Dead’: Terry Venables and Australia’s Heartbreak

On being sent the script for notorious flop Jaws: The Revenge, the story goes that Michael Caine opened it, saw the words ‘Ext: The Bahamas’ and signed up for the film on the spot. It’s not difficult to imagine Terry Venables’ thinking being similar when he answered a call from Soccer Australia in 1996.

Oranje Go Boom: The Dutch Combust at Euro ’96

It was the gulp heard around Europe. As Patrick Kluivert calmly dinked the ball over the onrushing Pat Bonner, 15 other nations shuffled nervously to their drinks globes and poured themselves a stiff one. The Dutch would be at Euro ’96.

It had been a scintillating performance in the Anfield play-off against the Republic of Ireland, a 2-0 win that brought to an end Jack Charlton’s golden reign as Ireland manager while immediately establishing the Netherlands as one of the heavy favourites for the Euros. It mattered not that they’d only made it via play-off, having contrived to lose to Belarus in qualifying; nor that they’d only avoided finishing third in their group on goal difference. The European Championships were earmarked as the next step towards world domination for the Godenzonen of Ajax, the most exciting club side in Europe.