404: Andy Booth, Sheffield Wednesday, Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection


Searching through the sticker books to put together this blog has brought back many memories. It is impossible for me to see the front of the 1997 edition of the Merlin Premier League sticker book without being transported back to a corridor in my primary school. I had popped to the toilet during a lesson and, upon leaving the boys’, I noticed the corner of a shiny sticker poking out from underneath a plinth supporting a statue of the Virgin Mary. I checked the corridor. No one to be seen. I raised the cloth covering the plinth and, lo and behold, a wad of Premier League stickers. Hail Mary indeed.

Sadly the following season did not reproduce a similar moment of divine intervention and, as well as reminding me of Palace’s dismal efforts in the top tier, the cover of Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection will forever remind me of Sheffield Wednesday striker Andy Booth. This has nothing to do with Booth’s performance for a stuttering Wednesday side or his role in the relegation of my beloved Crystal Palace – in fact we did the double over Wednesday. Instead Andy Booth will always remind me of the importance of filling in forms correctly and the lingering thoughts of what might have been.

In April 1998 the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre hosted the annual Premier League Swop Shop (their spelling I assure you). Within just fifteen minutes’ walk of my house came the promise of finally completing a sticker album which had absorbed the vast majority of my pocket money over the preceding months. In a gigantic sports hall hundreds of tables were laden with innumerable stickers. I filled in my forms, I handed over my piles of doubles and triples and I headed to my Gran’s house to finish my album. Or so I thought.


As I sat in my Gran’s kitchen carefully removing the backs from the piles of stickers my heart sank. As I went to add sticker no.404 I noticed it looked remarkably familiar to no.403. I had filled in my form incorrectly and rather than the smiling face of Andy Booth, I was faced with the equally cheery but nowhere near as helpful visage of David Hirst. My misery was compounded when I realised I had made a similar mistake by skipping the superfluous back pages of both the Everton and Tottenham Hotspur sections of the album. Three stickers short and the Swop Shop closed for the day. The dream was over.

Luckily Palace were on hand to distract me from my misery by getting relegated a fortnight later, going down 3-0 at home to Manchester United and, with a World Cup around the corner, I moved on, for the time being at least. But despite the fact it was entirely my fault, and his wasn’t the only sticker I missed, I developed an irrational dislike of Andy Booth to the point that, when I first asked Rich and Emlyn if they would like to contribute to this blog, Emlyn asked if I wanted him to cover the Wednesday striker to spare me the agony (or more likely to rub salt into the wound). I decided it was time to face my demons and politely declined his offer (or at least that’s what I’m saying happened).

When the Swop Shop came around for the 1999 Premier League album I made sure that my mistakes were not repeated and I finally, having collected football stickers since the 1994 World Cup, completed an album. Even Andy Booth failed to thwart me this time. Writing this has made me reassess the Owls’ frontman and I feel the hatchet can now be buried. Either side of his five years at Wednesday, Booth racked up over 450 appearances, and scored 150 goals, for his hometown club Huddersfield Town. Such local heroes are few and far between in these days of ‘big football’.

In short I feel there are three things to take away from this post. First of all, make sure you fill in forms accurately and correctly. Secondly, Andy Booth is probably a very nice bloke and I can finally forgive him. Finally, if anyone out there has stickers 242, 404 and 455 from Merlin’s Premier League 98 Official Sticker Collection then you know what to do.

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