That's enough stories about our erstwhile Columnist With No Name. This one happened to me...*
A TRUE STORY FROM the CHILDHOOD of the ON-LINE EDITOR
Remember when you were eleven and people used to ask 'Which football team do you support?' I bet you never used to say Barrow. No, kids of that age always claim to follow some mega-successful glamour club, and not all of them grow out of it! It was just the same at my old school back in 1968. Our Columnist With No Name, you will remember, supported Liverpool; my brother went for Manchester City (okay, so maybe that's not the best example) and if you could have picked any kid at random from the hordes chasing a tennis ball around the boys' playground of the old Victoria Junior School and asked him to tell you his favourite team, the chances are the answer would have been 'Leeds', 'Man. United', 'Spurs' or 'Chelsea.' But me, I had to be different. My favourite team was West Bromwich Albion. And though they were in the First Division in those days there was no way they could be considered a glamour club. I've looked out for the Baggies results ever since I found out that my great grandfather played for them, appearing in two FA Cup finals in the 1890's. Even as a kid, this seemed to me to be a much better reason for following a team than because you liked the sound of their name or the colour of their kit or because they'd won the League for the last nine seasons or something equally tangential. As it happens, West Brom did win the FA Cup that year, but on the day everyone else in my class favoured their opponents Everton. Well, they did represent Lancashire in those days, I suppose. Kevin Proctor even spat on the Baggies team photograph in my copy of the Cup Final programme (but that's another story and one perhaps we shouldn't explore in too much detail in this, his testimonial season). But however wonderful winning the FA Cup might be, it does not guarantee your team worldwide fame and fortune or strike awe in the hearts of the pagan races as I was to discover only too resoundingly later that summer. One day on holiday I was in the lift of our hotel when this archetypal obnoxious American tourist got in and noticed I was wearing a badge that was very similar to the one illustrated on the left. "Hey kid, that badge is neat," he drawled in his best archetypal obnoxious American tourist drawl. "West Bromwich Albion, huh...? Say, is that your school!?" Issue 021 - January 1995 *Yeah, okay... so its rubbish, but I bet Frank Skinner likes it!