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…

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…

From Russia with Shrugs: The Unholy Union of Millwall and Sergei Yuran

Picture the scene: Paulo Dybala and Claudio Marchisio stride into the Juventus dressing room. Life is sweet in Turin. They’re top of Serie A. They’ve breezed through their Champions League group. Yet the duo are here to say their goodbyes. Arrivederci, Gigi. Adios, Gonzalo. For they have heard the clarion call of the English Championship. And those play-offs won’t win themselves…

Home Too Soon? Hodgson at Blackburn

Exotic. Mysterious. Sexy. Not words you’d readily associate with Roy Hodgson. Indeed, that’s been a big part of Mr Roy’s appeal in recent times. He is English football’s equivalent of a pair of oven gloves or a trip to the garden centre. Familiar. Unremarkable. Safe.

Thrashing Santa, fearing the reaper: Crystal Palace’s Millennium Bug

“Forget about the money and everything else. If we go up, we’ll face 10 months of misery”

Steve Coppell, 1997

How did you ring in the Millennium? Did you have a quiet one in with your loved ones, watching the fireworks smug in the knowledge that the end of a century was indeed nothing special? Did you raise a dignified glass to the next 1000 years? Or did you go hell for leather, embarking on a path of debauchery so depraved as to make the video for Smack My Bitch Up look like a Richard Curtis production?

Leeds 4-3 Liverpool, Charity Shield 1992

Charity Shield, Wembley, 8th August 1992

 

Life should have been good for the two teams who strode out at Wembley in August 1992 to bring the curtain up on the glitzy new world of the Premier League.

Lalas land: England’s US Cup Nightmare, 1993

It’s 20 years since the headline ‘YANKS 2 PLANKS 0’ belched from the mind of one of The Sun’s ever-culturally sensitive subeditors, summing up depressingly neatly the events of the previous evening in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where England had been beaten by the USA for the first time since Belo Horizonte, 1950.

90s Goal(s) of the Week: Tim Buzaglo vs West Brom, 1991

5th January 1991

FA Cup Third Round

West Brom 2-4 Woking

The FA Cup has lost so much of its gloss since the riches of both the Premier League and the Champions League came to the fore, treated as an irrelevance by big clubs and relegation scrappers alike.

90s Goal(s) of the Week: Dennis Bailey vs Manchester Utd, 1992

1^st January, 1992

English First Division

Manchester Utd 1-4 Queens Park Rangers

Sometimes, an individual performance leaves such an indelible mark on a football match that the player who delivers it is immortalised, his name forever intertwined with the occasion.

The New Best or Best Forgotten? The Rise and Fall of Lee Sharpe

As Manchester United finally started to look like a force again in English football at the start of the 1990s, there was something of a rush among pundits to crown a ‘new George Best’ from the crop of ‘fledglings’ that Alex Ferguson had begun to bring through. Russel Beardsmore (!), Lee Sharpe, and Ryan Giggs all found themselves lumbered with this lazy tag at one time or another – yet Sharpe, ironically, is perhaps the man with the career trajectory that most closely mirrors that of the Belfast boy.