I was recently flicking through the Topical Times football book from 1960, the second in the long running series that existed between 1959 and 2001 and was published by DC Thomson and Co Ltd of Dundee, who still to this day are responsible for more famous titles, like the Beano, Dandy and People’s Friend to name but three. Apparently though the Beano these days costs £1.50 from your local shop, whereas the 128-page Topical Times book I am clutching would have you cost 8s 6d at the time, or 42 and a half pence I think in modern terms.
One footballer that caught my eye in the book being Chelsea defender Bobby Evans, the Scotland international having that year moved down to London after being with Celtic for 16 years. Evans perhaps ahead of his time as far as diet was concerned, as he attributes his lengthy career to the fact that he doesn’t drink and smoke, and that on match days he has a light breakfast of boiled egg, toast and tea two and a half hours before the game. On the other side of the coin though he does point out that at Celtic he had a steak every day in the Glasgow restaurant where the club laid on a four-course lunch after training.
Eating a steak after training reminding of a John Hartson interview I heard part of in the car the other day where on 5 live the length of a footballer’s career was the talking point, Hartson saying that after training his lunch used to be steak and chips and a ‘few’ pints. Hartson then, in complete contrast food-wise to Kevin Davies who spoke about his pre-match lunch of scrambled egg and beans on toast, describing his morning meal on a Saturday. The former Welsh international saying that he used to have a massive fry-up at around 10am and then nothing to eat from then on until kick-off.
Hartson’s logic on this one being that if he ate something around the 1pm mark then he would go into the game feeling contented and a little bit lethargic. However if he ate a large meal early in the morning then by kick-off time he would be feeling hungry and therefore a bit on edge, that then meaning that he would be feeling more aggressive during the match, aggression being something he said his whole game was built around. I guess that means Vinnie Jones had his last piece of food as far back as Thursday before a Saturday game.
It’s not just food information in the second edition of the Topical Times however, unless of course you need to eat it to wash your mouth out with on a regular basis, as soft soap gets a mention too. Bert Sproston, an England international in the late 1930s and Bolton’s head trainer in 1960 saying that he always packs a bar of soft soap in his kit bag in bad weather. Sproston saying that if the ground is hard then rubbing it on the socks of the players to moisten them takes some of the jar out of the contact with the ground, while he also rubs some between the boot-studs if there is a lot of snow about as it stops the snow clogging on the soles of the boots.
An ever better one for Neil Dalton, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to see it, being Dawson Walker who at the time was the trainer for Clyde and Scotland. Dawson once after one of his players got a head wound on which a plaster bandage kept falling off, letting the air out of a spare ball, cutting the inside bladder in half, and then using that like a water polo cap to keep the bandage in place. Dawson from that point on moving the theory on a stage as he then kept a water polo cap in his bag for every game, along with some chloroform and dentistry pliers should a player require a tooth pulling out during a game. The good old days I believe they called them.
Having said that there are some cracking insights into the way the game used to be, even just going back 40 or 50 years ago, so I’ll have to drag some more out for another programme article in the future. For now though I’ll leave you with one from the ‘oddest things happen in football’ section which I desperately hope was true: ‘referees in Al Harvas, on the Persian Gulf, carry rubber truncheons. They have the right to use it at once when a foul is committed.’