Fight Club
So your team’s morale is low and you find yourself with a rare week off. You’re thinking of heading abroad for that well needed team-bonding session and a good rest, and why shouldn’t you? Surely there’s nothing better than a good old team “knees up” to boost squad spirit? Well, as Peter Beagrie, Joey Barton or Craig ‘the nutter with the putter’ Bellamy will tell you, setting off for a week of sun, soccer and San Miguel traditionally ends with disastrous consequences.
English club’s first entry to the team-bonding hall of shame’s was back in the 1986/87 season, when Craig Bellamy was just a small, but no doubt immensely irritating, seven year old and the Arsenal team were heading out for a mid-season break in Portugal. A local nightclub was the setting for a drunken fight with a difference, a scuffle between six Gunners and a group of US Marines ended with the soldiers following the footballers home and trying to run them off the road. The chase turned nasty when Charlie Nicholas, like all good Soccer Saturday pundits, launched a bottle of vodka at the pursuing US Marines, causing them to career off the road.
The players returned to England red faced eventually, despite being arrested the following morning before George Graham rushed to bail out his superstars. Nine years later and Arsenal were involved in more away day antics as Ray Parlour fought with a taxi driver in Hong Kong. Parlour was not guilty of attempted murder like the ’86 team, but for pouring prawn crackers into the cars engine….
The next entry to the hall of shame begins as a familiar scenario; you have a few drinks but return home only to find you are locked out. So do you crash at a friend’s? Search for the spare key? Or grab the nearest motorbike and ride in through the glass doors? Peter Beagrie, in Benidorm with Everton at the time, chose the latter, and the subsequent fifty stitches that came with it!
A year later it was Manchester City’s Steve McMahon’s turn to fly through panes of glass. In this case a playful, albeit drunken, fight with Niall Quinn, ended in Quinn chasing McMahon before throwing him through a shop window and then legging it. The story ends like many a drunken night out; McMahon woke up the next morning with no memory of the incident and took full responsibility!
McMahon and the Arsenal squad may have woken up to face the consequences of their night out from hell, but some players never get that far, the night’s antics never seem to end when the players stumble into bed. Callum Davidson for example, on Leicester’s tour of Finland in 2002, woke up in the night to find a snarling Dennis Wise ready to give him the proverbial smack in the face over an earlier game of cards. Closer to home, the Torquay team of 1991’s pre-play off drinking games night ended with Tommy Tynon, sporting a cut eye from a scuffle with club captain Wes Sanders, visiting his room for a spot of revenge, which involved hitting Sanders with the nearest object, in this case a kettle!
After Bellamy and Riise combined to drive Liverpool to a famous 2-1 win over Barcelona Rafa Benitez may be thinking that their Algarve adventure wasn’t such a bad thing. But one look at this hall of shame will make him thank his lucky stars his players didn’t have kettles, vodka or glass windows to hand!
Peter Evans- Appeared in Gair Rhydd Spring 2007
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