100 bizarre football stories - Part 2

90. Sense of humor failure

No one seems to bring their funny side on the field eh?

Pedantic referee Dougie Smith didn’t see the funny side of cheeky-chappy Paul Gascoine. Having dropped his yellow cards on the pitch when refereeing a 1995 Ranger-Hiberanian Scottish League game, Gazza helped pick them up, then brandishing a card, playfully ‘booked’ the ref. Smith retaliated with a real booking.

89. Wee Doggy

Gotcha!

England goal king Jimmy Greaves had a dampner on his appearance in the England-Brazil match in the 1962 World Cup in Chile. He managed to capture a small dog that had invaded the pitch, but the terrified pooch peed on Greavsie’s England jersey. Brazil winger Garrincha thought the incident was so funny that he adopted the dog.

88. Heads you Lose!

Meeting the mighty Brazil is every international player’s dream and no less for Rajko Mitic of Yugoslavia at the 1950 World Cup finals. As he bound excitedly from the dressing room, he hit his forehead on the girder, severely cutting it. Without Mitic for the first 20 minutes, Yugoslavia lost 2-0 and were eliminated.

87. Knockout Drops

During the rough and tumble of a full bloodied 1930 World Cup semi-final between Argentina and the USA, the Americans’ trainer raced on to the field to remonstrate with the referee. He threw his medical bag to the ground, cracked open a bottle of chloroform and knocked himself out.

86. Sitting with the Enemy

Ron Atkinson didn’t know his way about the Nottingham Forest ground at his first match as manager. Mistakenly, he sat in the dugout of visitors Arsenal and fans couldn’t make him aware of the error. He only realized when he saw the Dutch ace Dennis Bergkamp and reportedly quipped: “We haven’t got him, have we?”

85. Come again?

Sir Matt Busby – the fruit-boiler. Really?

The Scottish accent of successful 1950s and 1960s Manchester United manager Matt Busby was said to be so strong and difficult to understand that a census taker once misheard and listed his occupation as ‘fruit-boiler’. Busby had said ‘footballer’.

84. Cup match proved fatal

One person dead, another with a fractured skull and many others injured sounds like the aftermath of a train crash. Instead, it was a 1971 Copa Libertadores match between Argentina’s Boca Juniors and Sporting Cristal of Peru. A dive in the penalty box by Boca’s Robert Rogel started a mass brawl in which only Sporting’s goalkeeper was not red-carded, but his skipper Fernando Mellan suffered brain damage from a skull fracture. The whole debacle was televised and the mother of Sporting’s Orlando de la Torre died of a heart attack as she watched. Various grades of assault charges followed, including grievous bodily harm, and some players were imprisoned.

83. Out to grass

In the 1920s the Ipswich Town groundsman Walter Woollard kept sheep, goats and chickens at the Portman Road Ground. They did their bit to crop and manure the grass and were kept below the stands.

82. Jammed up

A rooftop protest in London had a strange consequence – making Gillingham play in their opponent’s away strip. A protestor on a roof in 2008 led to the closure of a major commuter route for more than nine hours and Gillingham’s kit was somewhere in the grid-locked traffic.

81. Target man

Why always me?

Fans don’t seem to like Austrian goalkeeper Otto Konrad. He was hit on the head by a bottle while playing for Casino Salzburg in Milan. Then, two years later, Konrad needed treatment for first-degree burns after being hit in the face with a flare while playing for Real Zaragoza.

Read some of the other bizarre football stories here:

100 bizarre football stories Part 1