A Sticker's Worth 500 Words

At the time of writing it remains unclear whether Liverpool will end their thirty year wait to secure the league title. For the majority of this bizarre season it appeared that nothing would stop them in their relentless march to glory, perhaps except Watford, and we would be subject to endless reminders of how lucky we were to be alive in a time of such heroes as Adam Lallana, Adrian and Nathaniel Clyne. I’ll stop being sour about the inevitable now. Or smug if it doesn’t happen. Rewinding to a simpler time when the hopes of Liverpool winning the Premier League rested on such luminaries as Emiliano Insua, Andriy Voronin and Lucas Leiva I decided to take on the role of Liverpool’s manager on Football Manager ’08. Bolstered by the signing of a young Gareth Bale from Tottenham and a bizarre glitch that made Fabio Aurelio the greatest dead ball specialist in world football my Liverpool team marched to Premier League and Champions League glory on numerous occasions. A w...

Campionato…di Calcio…ITALIANO! If your Saturday mornings didn’t feature these three words, an adorned cup of coffee and the Gazetta Dello Sport then I don’t believe you truly lived through the 1990s. Channel 4’s sensational Football Italia, with a little help from the 1994 World Cup, brought the fascinating world of Serie A to British screens and ensured that a generation of pretentious kids idolised the likes of Gabriel Batistuta, Paolo Maldini and Roberto Baggio rather than the prosaic domestic alternatives such as Mike Newell and Steve Harkness (no offence gentlemen). Roberto Baggio was THE hero of my childhood. I even had the questionable ponytail in tribute and was willing to turn my back on a Juventus team that had lit up my 1994/5 (Palace were too busy being relegated as the sacrificial lambs of Premier League restructuring) when Baggio moved to AC Milan ahead of the 1995/6 season. The ‘Divine Ponytail’ joined a team smarting from the end of a period of dom...

Covid-19 has forced many of us to reflect on the things that really matter in life. It has also forced us to finally do jobs that we’ve been delaying for months due to the enforcement of social distancing. This combination of phenomena has led me to sort out the box of football related ephemera I’ve accumulated though years of misspent youth (and adulthood) and, without regular captive audiences due to school closures, a need to talk about things that happened a long time ago. Which brings us today to Mr Peter Fear. The sticker above shows a fresh-faced midfielder on the verge of his third season with Wimbledon FC having joined the club as an apprentice straight out of secondary school. He went on to make over 100 appearances in the Premier League, as well as picking up three England U21 caps, before gradually working his way down the league pyramid to Sutton United where he retired from football at the age of 34. Peter Fear had a much more impressive football...