|
Travelling Timelord Malcolm Baggio has been regenerated as the new Dr Who and, making an unpleasant whining and groaning sound, his football tardis travelled back to 1978 to bring you news of what Raydon Athletic were doing at the time Ipswich won the FA Cup. He’s arrived back with a big mullet, singing Bees Gees songs and dressed like wonderwoman. Sadly on the day his tardis arrived in 1978 Raydon were playing away at Gorleston and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the result so here is straightforward report into what’s been happening in the present day:
To mark the 30th anniversary of Ipswich Town’s FA Cup victory over Arsenal, Millionaire Chairman Lionel Stubbs had the idea for Raydon to put on a full re-enactment of the entire final at their Clockton Park ground. Stubbs even paid over £40,000 to have the ground transformed into a highly impressive looking makeshift (and slightly rickety) scaled-down wooden Wembley replica for the event. The original cost was £36,000 but £3,000 of work had already been carried out when Stubbs realised that the builders were recreating the new Wembley and not the old one. He had to pay a further £1000 for them to dismantle what they’d done.
Unfortunately the District Council’s health and safety department were tipped off about the construction by an anonymous source* and following an inspection of the premises, deemed it unsafe due to the flammable wooden construction. Stubbs therefore had to pay a further £25,000 for the mini-Wembley to be dismantled. He would have had to pay several thousands of pounds more to dispose of the 4942 sections of wood that the stadium was made from but instead he took the considered decision to fly-tip them piece by piece in miscellaneous locations throughout Suffolk over the course of the next few years.
One player was unable to take part in the re-enactment – loanee goalkeeper Marco Pastalanio was away filming for an episode of the BBC reality show “Freaky Eaters – addicted to………” that he is featuring in. Pastalanio is addicted to cake icing and has eaten nothing else since he was nine. The last time he attempted to eat anything else was twelve years ago when he tried to eat a 5 millimetre cubed piece of toast - which caused him to vomit blood, even though it was coated with a 10 millimetre layer of his favourite cake icing (plain). Pastalanio is hoping that the nutritional and psychological experts on the show will help him to break his eating habit but did admit to Those Were The Days, “I do really really like cake icing.”
So, the re-enactment took place without the replica Wembley but it did nothing to ruin spirits or severely effect attendance figures – ticket sales for the event generated over £200 for club funds. Aside from Pastalanio, every squad player (except those injured in the recent I’m a Raydon Athletic Player, Get Me Out Of Here” exercise) took part in the match, with numbers made up by a few players from the club’s youth teams. Each player was allocated the role of an Ipswich or Arsenal player and was issued with a ‘script’ which outlined in specific detail what that player did throughout the entire 90 minutes of action. We owe huge thanks to Raydon resident and Ipswich Town fanatic Don Blumbers who has attended all but one of every Ipswich Town match home and away at every level since 1949. Blumbers was able to write the player scripts from memory having watched the final on television over 8,000 times. “I’ve worn out 9 VHS cassettes of the match and 6 DVDs,” he joked. Sadly the game that he did not attend was the final itself as he had a slight sniffle.
The players held the scripts and tried to follow the action as accurately as possible - but successfully re-enacting a high-energy professional football match proved extremely difficult despite Roland Peters forgoing training for the previous six weeks so the players could rehearse their parts.
Nearly every piece of action had to be attempted several times before it was deemed at least a vaguely accurate reflection of what actually happened. One exception – re-enacted by Saul Quan who played John Wark - was Wark’s two strikes of the post which Quan successfully carried out with pinpoint accuracy at the first attempts. However that was very much the exception and the event ended up lasting nearly 18 hours over a two-day period which made Lionel Stubbs – who had naively thought that the match would be played at normal pace and therefore last 90 minutes – look a bit of a twat.
Despite the length of the exercise, Don Blumbers caught all the action on camcorder and has promised to edit the 18 hours of footage down to a 90-minute match, somehow ‘airbrush’ out all the scripts that the players were holding and also insert a Wembley background on the footage. Blumbers, who has absolutely no editing skills whatsoever and has never even attempted to operate a computer before, aims to have the footage complete by July. He is confident that the finished product will be an accurate re-enactment of the final, which he hopes that Raydon will be able to put onto DVD and sell to fans for £6.99 (£1 more than the actual FA Cup Final DVD). The DVD will be available from all retail outlets in the northern hemisphere and also Raydon’s new online store – ‘RaydonWow’ which sells things like replica shirts, 12 inch plasticine models of the more well known players and sheets of blank paper which fans can buy and ask the players to sign.
Prior to the cup re-enactment, Raydon were in a promising position in the league after a wonderful run of eight consecutive victories saw them surge up the table. Most of the recent loan signings had settled in after a shaky start and had helped steer Raydon up to third in the league – which would secure them a monetary bonus** from league sponsors “Basils’s Basins of Bentwaters”.
However during the build up to the cup re-enactment and in the weeks since, Raydon totally lost their focus and slipped to 11th. They didn’t help their cause by choosing to forfeit a crucial six pointer with Beyton Baywatchers as it clashed with the day of the re-enactment meaning that Beyton were awarded an 8-0 win by the league bigwigs. Raydon are now mathematically incapable of finishing above or below their current position despite having to play a further five games.
A discussion on the local Raydon village community radio station’s football show ‘The Naked Roland Peters Show’ recently focused on whether the FA Cup final re-enactment was perhaps something of a distraction to the club. Over 3,000 texts to the radio show responded with a unanimous ‘yes’ to this question, which made for tedious listening as the presenter read them all out to fill a bit of time.
Roland Peters is said to be ‘quietly outspoken’ about his feelings on the subject and justifiably peeved with Stubbs for undermining the business end of the business end of the season. Stubbs has been blasé, nonchalant, indifferent, relaxed, off-hand and unmoved about the whole incident. There are also unconfirmed reports that he has been non-plussed. Stubbs gave Those Were The Days a brief insight into his thoughts on the matter with the following brief statement: “Its all swings and spilt milk under the bridge now.”
The only other item of noteworthy news was the recent award of the ‘Player who has not improved or got any worse, has not made a significant contribution but at the same time hasn’t really stood out as being particularly bad’ which went to George Mnunga for the third year running.
* The anonymous source has been tracked down to Ethol Noon, an interfering old busybody who lives next to Clockton Park. Needless to say, Manager Roland Peters has got his gangster friend from London “Ted The Violent Maniac” onto the case and all I can say is, I hope you don’t value your elbows Ms Noon!
** The top three teams share a pot of £30 of vouchers to spend at Basils’s Basins of Bentwaters with the top placed team receiving £15, second placed £10 and third placed £5. (the cheapest item in their shop is a £40 mixing basin)
 Add as favourites (149) | Views: 16689 | E-mail
|
