SPECTATOR SPORT
Notes and quotes
Frank Keating
THE OTHER weekend, ITV's intrepid touchline lurker, Jim Rosenthal, bran- dished his microphone at the muddied cus- todian in the polo-neck pullover. 'So what on earth is an American doing in goal for Millwall?' he asked. 'Trying to keep the ball out of the net,' replied Mr Kasey Keller. Ask a silly question. Or, as the big, 'right choked' left-back had told one of Jim's con- freres the Sunday before, 'That penalty miss will give me nightmares for no end of sleepless nights.'
It is the time of year for practically every newspaper and magazine which considers itself remotely 'topical' to be topping up for publication its hoard of snippets and say- ings and quotes of the year. The disease is especially virulent on the back pages. The three best soccer sources are the staccato slips of the tongue from the commentary box, letters-to-the-editor columns and the manager's traditional 'Notes' each week in the match programme.
Down the years, my favourite in the first category remains ITV's Huw Johns's
. . and the crowd is urging the referee to look at his whistle and blow his watch' from the 1974 World Cup. (In the same match, I remember, the floodlights had briefly failed and in the darkened lull Johns asked his `inter-round summariser', Sir Alf Ramsey, to fill in with a quick comment. Said Sir Alf in that elocuted Essex-borders-mandarin of his, 'Ay em not on helectrician myself.) From the letter writers — unfailingly nut- ters — no end of gems have been logged, but I have yet to come across better than this a dozen years ago in the Stoke Sentinel:
Dear Sir, The only point worth mentioning about Port Vale's match with Hereford Unit- ed on Monday evening was the fact that the attendance figure, 2,744, is a perfect cube 14 x 14 x 14. Yours faithfully . . .
A trawl through the team manager's pre- match programme notes is the most rewarding. Watch out for a few crackers this next week or two. Football managers take themselves very seriously — and their weekly Notes even more so. A few years ago, Everton had a lugubrious fellow called Gordon Lee in charge. One Saturday, he had a swipe at the local press, which had been suggesting the team might play a brighter sort of game: 'The press keep on about flair and stars. As far as I am con- cerned, stars are little things in the sky and flairs are the things on the bottom of my
trousers.'
Sutton United had a manager, Barrie Williams, whose Notes consisted of exhorta- tions culled from Shakespeare, Moliere, or even the Venerable Bede. Two seasons ago, fired by such classical rantings no doubt, Sutton beat Coventry City in the third round of the FA Cup.
In the next round, against Norwich City, Williams had even dug up the Rule of St Benedict, of all unsporty types — 'See everything, adjust a little, be grateful for the burden.' The burden turned out to be an 8-0 defeat. Acknowledged master of the programme Notes, however, remains the Lincoln City manager, Colin Murphy. In 1990, Cohn was awarded the Golden Ball statuette by the Plain English Society:
It is a dangerous feeling to consider that where we are in the League is of acceptable standard because standard is relevant to the standard we have already set, which thereby may well indicate that we may not have aspired to the standard we set ourselves . . . The cobra has been tamed. Losing. A losing sequence, namely three games, puts doubts in people's minds. But the cobra has an excel- lent habit of wriggling free and, indeed, Gor- don Hobson wriggled three for us at Burnley last week . . .
Or as the ITV commentator, John Helm, told the nation last month, 'Sheffield Wednesday's veteran, Viv Anderson, has successfully pissed a fatness test.'
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