Your Top Ten most embarrassing moments watching Leicester City…
10. The Ball came towards me, seated in the front row of the East Stand and instead of catching it I attempted to be flash and tried to head it. I mistimed it and received a nose bleed and a black eye. I also suffered the indignity of having Ian Ormondroyd laughing at me.
9. Against Tottenham, the night of the ‘Martin Please Don’t Go’ banners. Photographers were taking loads of pictures of the Kop and the next morning. I looked okay in The Sun, but the front page of the Mercury captured me wiping my nose with the back of my hand. Well, I’d run out of tissues hadn’t I?
8. Late 80s, Walsall at home after Nicky Cross got the winner for us. As Pen 3 surged forward my specs fell off and landed on the floor. While they were still jumping up and down with joy I had to crawl around people’s feet trying to rescue them. The frame and the lenses were bust and I had to put them back on (chin very high to avoid slippage) because I couldn’t see a thing without them. Cue much ridicule.
7. Grimsby v Leicester – opening day of the 1981-82 season. Just after half time, straight from kick-off, Grimsby scored. I was a bit switched off and when I saw the ball hit the net we had been attacking for the previous 45 minutes I leapt up with a roar.
6. Stood in the away end at Reading’s old ground Elm Park before the game, I went to fetch a stray ball that had come over the fence from the pre-match kick-in. As I went to drop kick it back over the fence I sliced it and it formed a perfect arc and landed even further back on the terraces. Russell Osman wasn’t impressed.
5. As the whistle blew at the end of the Great Escape game in 1991 we rushed to join the mass pitch invasion that signalled our Division Two survival. Unfortunately, with me being a Goth, I was wearing a pair of winkle pickers and they got firmly jammed in the gaps in the fence. My mate had to free me by pushing them back from the other side.
4. Most City fans will remember the Gary Coatsworth thunderbolt goal at home to Luton in the early 90s, but I couldn’t celebrate it as wholeheartedly as the rest of you. When this hitherto uncultured defender scored one of the best goals ever scored in a Leicester shirt I flew my arms out and promptly smacked a rather solid looking gentleman in the teeth, causing quite a lot of bloodshed. Why he didn’t kill me I’ll never know, but sorry mate.
3. I was in a packed Popular Side in the late sixties when City scored. As I cheered loudly my false tooth on a plate shot out several feet, hit someone on the back of the head and fell to the floor. I spent the next ten minutes searching for it and miraculously found it, still in one piece.
2. In the mid-70s I used to pay at the turnstile in Pen 4 where the queues were shorter and then hop over the fence into Pen Three. One night this simple operation went wrong and I was left hanging in mid air, dangling by the back of my trousers which were caught on a spike. Instead of rushing to unhook me, my mates just stood there wetting themselves.
1. My mate, who is a Charlton fan, went to University in Leicester and lived right next to the ground on Burnmoor Street. One Saturday in winter he had spent the whole day in bed after a night on the razz. Around 4.30 he eventually gets up to make his girlfriend a cup of tea, only to discover there is no milk in the fridge. No problem, I’ll just pop over the road to the shop, he thinks. Wearing undies, a tatty dressing gown and a pair of slippers he goes and buys the milk, but as he walks out of the shop the away supporters escort is being shepherded down the street. As he crosses the road and heads for his front door a copper with a snarling Alsatian shouts: “OI! Get back in there.”
“But I live just there!” he protests in his cockney accent. The policeman isn’t falling for it and lets the dog a bit nearer. It is a London club, as bad luck would have it! He did as he was told and ended up walking all the way to the railway station, in his dressing gown carrying his pint of milk. Accompanied all the way by shady cockneys asking him why he was dressed like that, and a policeman eyeing him suspiciously and keeping his dog close to him all the way. Not sure what time his girlfriend got her cup of tea!
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