From the rugby league collie to a football career-ending pup, via the seagull that stole a golf ball on the 17th at Sawgrass
When we say animals, we actually mean just dogs and seagulls, but in fairness they have paired up to lead professional sports stars a merry dance over the years, so ?
1) Jim McNichol and Bryn
The 1986-87 season saw automatic relegation for the first time ever from ? let's get these sponsors right ? Today League Division Four to the GM Vauxhall Conference. With the soon-to-be-Barclays Football League about to enter its centenary season, the first trapdoor looked like opening up in a grimly symmetrical way for Burnley, founder members of the league back in 1888 and needing to win on the final day of the season to have any chance of staying up.
Even a win at Turf Moor, where they would entertain Orient, was no guarantee of safety. With a game to play, Burnley were rock bottom on 46 points, Torquay United stood on 47, and Lincoln City on 48. The football world gathered at Turf Moor "like vultures at a sky burial", reported Cynthia Bateman in this paper. "The match crackled like thin ice, with Orient, fighting for a place in the promotion play-offs causing ominous rifts in the Burnley defence. Then a whisper blew into a storm of optimism; Torquay and Lincoln were both losing."
Just before half-time, Neil Grewcock beat three men and lashed a low drive into the Orient net. Just after the restart, a Grewcock cross was converted by Ian Britton. A mistake by the Clarets keeper Joe Neenan allowed Orient back into the match on 55 minutes, but 17 hours later, Burnley Mean Time, the final whistle blew.
Were Burnley safe? Yes, because with seconds remaining, both of their relegation rivals were losing, Torquay 2-1 at home to Crewe, Lincoln 2-0 at Swansea. With the final scores due in, Torquay were surely down. But while Lincoln's result was soon confirmed, Torquay's was not.
And here's why. Torquay had been 2-0 down at half-time, David Platt one of the scorers for Crewe, but the right-back Jim McNichol pulled one back with a deflected free-kick just after the start of the second period, giving the home side hope. That was running out with two minutes to go, as McNichol chased a long hoof up the touchline, passing a policeman and his dog. The dog ? an Alsatian called Bryn ? assumed McNichol was going for its handler, and sunk his teeth into the player's leg. Cue five minutes of treatment, and five minutes of injury time ? during which, of course, Paul Dobson scored the goal that saved Torquay and did for Lincoln instead.
McNichol later required 17 stitches in his leg. Lincoln, meanwhile, were left to nurse their own wounds; it was the first time they had been bottom all season.
2) Eddie Waring and K Nine
In 1971, the Rugby Football League commissioned a firm of marketing consultants ? and you thought these chancers were a relatively modern phenomenon ? to work out why attendances were plummeting at matches. The chance-ultants came back with a 30-page report, brimming with recommendations, of which one in particular stood out. "Urgent talks" were required with the BBC, they argued, the corporation giving the game a poor image. "There is little doubt that the game of Rugby League is widely held to be a sport for Northern heavyweights with a leaning towards brawn rather than brains, played against a background of pithead slagheaps in a steady drizzle and watched by a sparse, flat-capped crowd whose occasional comments are made in a nasal Eddie Waring accent." Waring himself ? the BBC's commentator since 1949, and considered by some to be laying on the oop-north-isms a wee bit too thickly ? was described as "entertaining and amusing" but "unfortunate and patronising".
Nothing, of course, was actually done to address any of these concerns. In 1976, 11,000 matchgoers delivered a petition to the BBC demanding change. It was a year that started with Waring finding himself on an Observer readers' "media blacklist" alongside other big names the public were sick of hearing about, such as Margaret Thatcher, the Bay City Rollers, and Idi Amin.
But the lowest point had yet to be reached. As Tony Hannon points out in his excellent biography of the legendary commentator, Being Eddie Waring, if the Don Fox Challenge Cup final of 1968 ? "He's a poor lad" ? had been "the zenith of Eddie Waring's rugby league career, there is little doubt about its nadir. It came during a televised Challenge Cup first-round tie between Leeds and Halifax, on Saturday 11 February 1978, when a particularly tenacious dog invaded the Headingley pitch."
The dog ? a black and white collie ? refused to budge from the pitch for the entire game, regularly getting snared up in passages of play. One wag pointed out that a dominant Leeds side were more bothered by its presence than that of any Halifax player. The BBC captioned the dog "K Nine", while at one point Waring quipped that the mutt had wandered into an offside position. All good yuks, and it's impossible to see how either the BBC or Waring could have otherwise played this farcical situation, but it wasn't one designed to go down well with a fanbase who'd had the radge on for the best part of a decade. "The game has been set back three years," blasted the oddly precise David Howes of the RFL, who finally rolled up their sleeves and entered combat with the BBC, demanding it up its game and treat the sport as less of a music-hall joke.
3) Eddy Treytel and a seagull
Few clubs have endured such a gently surreal few months as Feyenoord did between May and November 1970. Their rollercoaster ride began with a shock in the European Cup final on 6 May, when they became the first Dutch team to lift the trophy, beating hot favourites Celtic at San Siro with a Coen Moulijn winner three minutes from the end of extra time. They then won the Intercontinental Cup in September, beating Estudiantes 3-2 over two legs. After defender Joop van Daele scored the winner at De Kuip, he had his glasses whipped off his beak by the Argentinian Oscar Malbernat, who passed them to team-mate Carlos Pacham�, who stamped them into the ground. (This was Estudiantes on relatively good behaviour, incidentally; the previous year saw three of their players thrown in the jug for their anti-f�tbol antics against Milan.) Having reached the summit of the world, Feyenoord then almost immediately got themselves knocked out of the European Cup, their defence lasting not a single round as the Romanian minnows UTA Arad put them out on away goals.
An erratic period came to a turbulent climax on 15 November when, during a league derby at Sparta Rotterdam, the keeper Eddy Treytel launched a long goal-kick upfield ? bringing down a seagull, the high hoof having killed the poor bugger instantly. The dead bird was thrown behind the goal as play continued. After the 90 minutes were up, Treytel gathered up the sorry seagull and took it home with him, in order to get it seen to by a taxidermist. Now stuffed, the bird resides in the Feyenoord club museum. However, that was not the end of the tale. In a deliciously petty coda, Sparta subsequently claimed that the bird was their property, as it was technically shot down while flying through their airspace, and that the stuffed bird might not be the correct gull in any case.
4) Chic Brodie and a dog
In November 1965, at Griffin Park, the Brentford keeper Chic Brodie was milling around his own penalty area, minding his net and his own business, as you do, when he spotted a hand grenade in his goalmouth. It had been dispatched from the away end ? populated by jaunty funsters from Millwall ? and the firing mechanism had been removed. Luckily the thing failed to go off, and was removed in a bucket of sand by ? credit where it's due to the boys in blue ? a very brave peeler. Bottles were also wheeched on to the pitch. At the end of the game fighting broke out, and the Millwall keeper Alex Stepney was attacked by some other nutter, who was at least only throwing hands and not munitions.
Anyway, Brodie must have used up all his on-pitch luck that day, because five years later at Colchester United, the keeper came out to gather a shot and was knocked out by a white dog that had taken to the pitch and was bowling for the ball at speed. "There was no confirmation of the rumour that Brodie's shins were barked," brayed the Observer's football round-up man Ronald Atkin. Guffaws all round for the pun, though sadly the stripping of a bit of skin from flesh wasn't the sum total of Brodie's injury; his knee was shattered to pieces, and he would never play league football again. He did come up against league opposition a year later, though, on the comeback trail at non-league Margate ? whereupon Bournemouth put 11 goals past him in a first-round FA Cup tie (Ted McDougall scoring nine). Yes, it's probably safe to say he used up all that luck with the grenade.
5) Jimmy Greaves and (please stop yawning) a dog
Animals at the World Cup are all the rage these days. The 2010 edition in South Africa boasted two stars. From the life aquatic, the undisputed sensation of the 19th Fifa World Cup, given that the football was almost uniformly tedious, was Paul the Octopus, the octopus vulgaris who correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany's matches, plus the final to boot. However, our favourite, an arguably even more intelligent creature, was the bird which perched on the netting behind Algeria's goal for large swathes of a group-stage game with England, having correctly predicted that none of the clowns in white were going to bother the Algerian net in a million years.
The original and greatest moment came in 1962, however, during the quarter-final between Brazil and England when a stray black dog ran on to the pitch. Managing to do what no player did throughout the tournament ? outwit Garrincha ? the dog then swept past Bobby Charlton with ease , though in truth Charlton attempted to catch the pup with about as much conviction as he routinely showed in tracking back or man-marking. It was up to Jimmy Greaves to deal with the situation. In what would prove to be his one major contribution to a World Cup finals, Greaves got down on all fours and psyched out the intruder before grabbing it by the neck and carting it off the field.
But, as he did so, the dog unleashed a soupy jet of Special Water all over Greavsie's shirt. "I smelt so bad," said Greaves, "but at least it meant Brazilian defenders stayed clear of me." Much good this did him; according to Brian Glanville, in his indispensable History of the World Cup, he played out the match ? possibly understandable, this ? "curiously shy of physical contact". England lost 3-1, an unsurprising result seeing the match ended with more yellow shirts on the pitch than white.
It has been claimed that Garrincha, Brazil's two-goal hero, was so amused by these canine capers that he took the stray dog home and kept it. A half-truth: in fact the dog ? who was christened Bi ? was the subject of a raffle held by the entire squad, and the Little Bird had simply won it.
6) Steve Lowery and (yes, OK, but variety isn't always the spice of life) a seagull
In 1986, the US magazine Golf Digest staged a competition at the TPC at Sawgrass designed to find the most hopeless golfer in the country. Their efforts bore spectacular fruit. After 16 holes, Angelo Spagnolo was 104 over par, and not in the best shape to take on a hole that sends even the top touring professionals into a blind panic. The 17th hole at Sawgrass is one of the most famous in golf: a short 132-yard par three with an undulating island green, into which players must hit a high wedge, ensuring the ball lands softly on the small putting surface, as opposed to skimming off it and into the drink. Sadly, poor Spagnolo found it nigh on impossible to get any loft to his tee shots whatsoever, his flat approaches either arrowing straight into the briny, or on the few occasions he found the green, taking one bounce and getting wet.
After several attempts, he opted to putt along the walkway around the lake, then up the path connecting the green to the rest of the land. By the time he had got his ball on to the dancefloor, he had taken 63 shots. At which point he three-putted. Spagnolo finished with a round of 257, a triumph of sorts.
By rights, that should be the most ridiculous thing to have ever happened at the 17th at Sawgrass. And yet it's not.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/oct/07/joy-of-six-animals-sport
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