They say you have to be a bit mad to be a goalkeeper, and Vujanic certainly fitted that description. His safe hands ensured he would be wearing the gloves. Our left-back would be George Benson, while shoring up the right side of defence would be the less-experienced but super-keen Oakelfish. We had our team.
What we didn’t yet have, of course, was our team song. No trip to Wembley would be complete without a suitable cup-final single, so Poet, Joe Weller, Vujanic and I headed to the studio along with super-producer Brett Domino to lay down the Spencer FC anthem.
It was very much a Live Aid atmosphere down in the studio, and I think it’s fair to say that not since Spurs legends Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle graced the charts with their legendary version of ‘Diamond Lights’ (look it up on YouTube) had there ever been such a perfect marriage between beautiful game and popular song.
Unfortunately, when I did a quick search for the lyrics of our song online, I couldn’t find them on any of the usual internet song-lyric providers, which is a disgrace if you ask me. Don’t worry, though. I remember them. Here they are, reprinted in all the magic of their top-notch, top-40 glory:
WE’VE COME A LONG WAY
FROM THE HEADY DAYS
OF PLAYING FOOTBALL JUST USING OUR HANDS,
WE’VE BEEN A BIT AMBITIOUS,
WE’VE QUESTIONED OUR FITNESS,
BUT MINIMINTER AND THE SIDEMEN DON’T STAND A CHANCE,
WE’VE GOT OUR GAME PLAN DOWN,
AND NOW WE’RE HEADING TO THE PROMISED LAND.
Chorus
CAUSE WE’RE GOING ALL THE WAY,
ALL THE WAY TO WEMBLEY,
SPENCER FC FOR THE WEMBLEY CUP!
YEAH, WE’RE TAKING IT ALL THE WAY,
ALL THE WAY TO WEMBLEY
AND WE WON’T LEAVE TILL THE TROPHY’S OURS!
THE GAME’S FAST APPROACHING,
WE’VE DONE SOME FA COACHING,
WE GOT THE POWER PULSING THROUGH OUR VEINS,
SO WHEN YOU SEE US MARCH
OUT, UNDER THE LEGENDARY ARCH,
GET READY FOR THE GAME TO END ALL GAMES.
WE WILL ALL BE HEROES BY THE TIME IT COMES TO PLAY.
Repeat chorus
No football song would be complete without a rap, and Joe Weller and Vujanic invoked the spirit of John Barnes on New Order’s ‘World in Motion’ for their section:
THE FAMOUS WEMBLEY IS WHERE WE’LL RAISE THE CUP,
CAPTAIN MINIMINTER GONNA SELF-DESTRUCT.
OUR TROOPS WILL BE RAPID, MOVE OUT THE WAY.
TOP SHOOTING SKILLS FROM MATT LE TISSIER.
SIDEMEN UNITED GONNA LOSE THE PLOT
WHEN THE F2 BOYS TIE THEM UP IN KNOTS.
BEEN DOWN THE GYM, WE’RE HARD AS STONE,
READY TO WIN WITH OUR MANAGER KEOWN.
YEAH, WE’RE TAKING IT ALL THE WAY
ALL THE WAY TO WEMBLEY
AND WE WON’T LEAVE TILL THE TROPHY’S OURS!
With the song settled and the team decided, there was only the small matter of the Wembley Cup final to be played.
When I envisaged the Wembley Cup final, I imagined a video as close to the Match of the Day-style and production values as possible. I wanted it to look every bit as professional as the BBC’s FA Cup final coverage, and with the funds EE were providing along with a stroke of unbelievably good fortune, we were able to do just that.
Although we put the Wembley Cup final video up in August, we actually played the match a few months earlier, back in May. It was 31 May, to be precise – the day after the FA Cup final. What that meant was that we could have all of the gear they’d used to film that left in exactly the same place so we could use it for our match, and it would look just the same. We were going to produce something the like of which had never been seen on YouTube before.
I went to the FA Cup final that year to watch Arsenal thrash Aston Villa 4–0, and all I could think was, In less than 24 hours I will be playing the biggest match of my life on this pitch.
For an occasion like this, I wanted to prepare properly. I knew I wasn’t the best player in that final, so I needed to do everything I could to maximise what ability I did have. I had a decent, healthy meal the night before and went to bed at a not unreasonable hour (or at least not unreasonable for a YouTuber organising the biggest event on his channel to date) at the hotel we were all staying at. The match was kicking off at 10am, and I wanted to feel ready.
I couldn’t entirely control my nerves, however. I don’t really get nervous before I play football, even in big games. It’s usually just excitement for me – I can’t wait to get out on the pitch and play. But on this occasion, perhaps because it was my baby, I was pretty nervous. I suddenly started worrying: after spending a year in the making of this show, what if none of the players turned up? What if it didn’t go to plan? I struggled to sleep that night, but it turned out that I still got more rest than the Sidemen.
I think I’ve made it clear by now just how hard people on YouTube work, often staying up very late into the night to edit and make content because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. So when you’re talking about the Sidemen, some of the most successful and therefore busiest YouTubers around, you can begin to imagine the demands on their time.
Couple that with the Sidemen’s notorious not-always-nocturnal sleeping patterns and it meant that a lot of the lads didn’t make it to their hotel rooms until 6am … which offered them the chance of about three hours’ sleep before the big game.
You ask a professional footballer whether he’d fancy doing that the night before a cup final, and you’ll hear a very unequivocal response!
Their lack of rest the night before the match certainly gave us a bit of a physical edge, but there had been some other concerns leading up to the game about how evenly matched the teams were.
When we originally planned the series, the idea was that MiniMinter and I would go head to head in a challenge in every episode, and whoever won would get first pick of a player, and whoever lost would take the next one, so that the winner of each challenge got the better player.
When the Sidemen calendar got so busy, we reinvented the concept so that the episodes were all about my team being built, with the Sidemen squad-building happening in the background. EE, understandably, wanted to make the most-watched series they possibly could. We all did. And to them that meant featuring the most popular YouTubers as much as possible.
To do that would mean having the F2 Freestylers on my team. Now, not every big YouTuber is necessarily a good football player, and even of those YouTubers who are pretty good, there’s only a handful that can hold a candle to the F2 boys. Those guys were the best players in the group by far, and, what’s more, they came as a package. They insisted that they played on the same team, and I could see their point. They were a double act, and you wouldn’t break up the kind of chemistry that has seen them enjoy the success they have just to level the playing field.
Behind the scenes, I’d said all along that I was prepared not to have the F2 boys in my team (nothing personal, guys!). I just knew it would look like I was getting all the best players. I always preferred the idea of being the underdog anyway. But it became increasingly clear that they had to be in my team so they could feature strongly in the series, which left us with what some would call mismatched teams, and understandably the Sidemen had some concerns.
We came to a solution that we thought would make everyone happy, but instead it made a certain group of people very unhappy in the comments under the video. We decided that we would take our tricky winger Manny, who is the brother of Sideman Tobi, and put him on the Sidemen team. We thought we’d be a bit creative and have a bit of fun with it.
On the day of the match, while we were all in the dressing room waiting to go out, there was no sign of Manny. And when I went to call him, there was a text message from him reading:
Spencer, sorry, but I was sent to spy on your team’s prep ahead of the game. Had to keep it in the family and play with the S
idemen. No hard feelings bruv!
Our team were, naturally, in uproar, and Joe Weller wound up his best WWE WrestleMania moves and kicked Manny’s shirt to the ground, before Vujanic delivered an elbow drop to it.
Now, like WWE wrestling itself, there was a huge element of theatre to all of this, and I hold my hands up and admit that I just did not anticipate how this would be taken. I assumed everyone would get what we were doing, just as they had on the FIFA Playa meets Spencer video, and that the viewers would have a certain amount of intuition about it. I thought they’d be in on the joke, and, to be fair, the majority of the audience probably got it. But sometimes it’s easy to forget that some of the younger viewers don’t have that intuition yet, and we should probably have seen what was coming.
Manny got caned in the comments, really harshly. People were calling him things like ‘snake’ for what he did to us, but he’d only been doing what we, the makers of the show, had asked him to do. We thought it would be quite funny and dramatic, and we weren’t ready for that reaction. I certainly wouldn’t have put Manny in that position if I’d known what was to come. I went on record in the days following the video release stating how good a sport he had been throughout it all and tried my best to defend him, but it was hard on Manny, who’s a really decent guy. In the end it all blew over, thankfully. Manny got over it and he’s smashing it on YouTube now.
That line between what’s real and what’s not had been regularly skated throughout the series. Of course, the episodes were scripted to a point (though the players’ performance in the challenges were all their own), with things like the Sidemen’s Ray Wilkins revelation planned in advance, and the Manny defection was another moment of that.
But once we’re on the pitch and the whistle blows, everything is 100 per cent real. We play football, 11 against 11, and there is no script except for the one we write with our feet and our heads in the heat of the game.
The teams were, at least, a bit more even now, and with the two brothers now in their team the Sidemen had a potent double act of their own. RossiHD stepped up to take Manny’s place in our team. Adding to the super-slick, Match of the Day-style production values, we had the perfect marriage of YouTube and professional football/BBC punditry in our presenters and commentary team. Taking our viewers through the day would be YouTuber True Geordie and former professional footballer Mark Bright, no stranger to Wembley Stadium. True Geordie, or Brian to call him by his real name, is a good pal of mine. We’ve done a lot together over the last few years and I have a lot of time for him. Like me, Brian is someone who’d already lived a very varied and interesting life before he came around to YouTube, and he’s never short of a story on his very popular podcast. I personally think True Geordie’s commentary made the Wembley Cup final what it was – he’s made for the microphone. Mark wasn’t bad either!
Their interview with the two managers, Ray Wilkins and Martin Keown, yielded some interesting insights. Martin Keown preached the value of keeping calm and moving the ball quickly, while Ray Wilkins’s admission that he had ‘a bunch of lunatics’ on his side will have come as no surprise to anyone. He finished with some advice that we should ‘enjoy the experience at Wembley because it will be their first and last time’.
We’ll see about that, Ray!
With all of the preamble out of the way, it was finally time to kick off. Spencer FC vs Sidemen United in the first ever Wembley Cup.
It was quite a surreal experience, walking out to a stadium as big as Wembley with no crowd. The organisation for the stadium was very strict and we were only allowed a guest each, so my girlfriend didn’t even get to see me stride out onto the Wembley turf as captain of Spencer FC. Besides, with all the editing work Alex was busy doing during that crazy year she probably wouldn’t have been able to spare the time!
I gave my ticket to my mum, to return the favour for the spare ticket she gave me for Graham Norton’s Totally Saturday. I didn’t have any surprises in store for her, though, and I hoped the Sidemen wouldn’t have any nasty surprises in store for our team either. My dad was there too, as physio for both teams, should things get a bit tasty. Anyone who’s watched my channel for a while knows about the magic hands of Stevie CB!
My head was in two places as we lined up and then did the obligatory pre-match handshakes. On the one hand, I was thinking about the production and everything that went along with it, and on the other I was thinking, I am about to play at Wembley Stadium.
I needed to focus on the match if I was going to give a good account of myself, especially as it was undoubtedly going to be the biggest audience online ever to see me play. The thing I have always found about any game of football, at any level, is that, once the match starts, I just want to win. I’m desperate for it.
It would have been easy to get distracted by thoughts of the filming and how things would look onscreen later, but thankfully we had an absolutely amazing production team and that took a lot of the pressure off me. I was able to forget about the video for 90 minutes and just play a game of football – a game that just happened to be the biggest of my life so far.
We took our positions and I had to pinch myself as I adjusted my captain’s armband on the Wembley turf. And then any such thoughts were immediately dispelled as the whistle blew and we were off. It was all about the game from now on.
It was a pretty tense start to the match, and Jeremy Lynch showed early on why his skills were in such high demand as he cut through the Sidemen defence, but it was MiniMinter’s boys who had the first clear chance, with freestyler Daniel Cutting forcing Vujanic into action.
We drew first blood after five minutes, when Jeremy’s pace helped him go clear and square an easy finish for RossiHD. What a way to announce your arrival in the team!
Sidemen United weren’t about to give up the YouTube bragging rights without a fight, and Daniel Cutting scored a goal worthy of any cup final when he brought them level with a delicious chip over Vujanic. And if that wasn’t enough, Cutting followed up with a cartwheel-and-somersault combo celebration every bit as delicious as the goal.
What do they say about the most likely time to concede a goal being straight after scoring one? Almost immediately afterwards, vice-captain Joe Weller burst through the middle and rifled a #SwiftReply, immediately justifying his demand to play centre-forward. And while his topless homage to Cristiano Ronaldo in celebration wasn’t quite the equal of Daniel Cutting’s somersault, it was definitely worthy of the obligatory yellow card for taking off his shirt.
Hugh Wizzy in the Sidemen goal had a couple of fraught moments, one when he was barged on the goal line and fumbled the ball (a foul was given), and another when he completely cleaned out Billy Wingrove à la Harald Schumacher at the 1982 World Cup semi-final. Billy was OK, though, so my dad rested easy on the sidelines with the stretcher.
Unbelievably, the referee allowed play to go on, and the Sidemen’s very own freestyler made us pay. Daniel Cutting ran on to a great through ball and blasted it past Vujanic. Eighteen minutes had been played and it was already 2–2. It was breathless stuff.
The main difference I found between Wembley and any other ground I’d played on, aside from the faultless surface, was the size of the pitch. It felt huge, and playing at this breakneck speed meant that we were already feeling it. Steady on, lads, there’s another 72 minutes to go here!
Manny’s day wasn’t about to get any better for him as he missed a sitter from a few yards out that should have put the Sidemen in front, and my dad was making himself busy by giving MiniMinter a quick shoulder massage on the sidelines. MiniMinter had been working till very late the night before so he probably needed a little stress reliever, but whose side are you on here, Dad?
We went in at half-time with the scores level, and Martin Keown shared some of his cup-final experience with us before we went out for the second. Daniel Cutting picked up where he had left off in the first half, hitting a sweet long-range effort that just went over.
We needed
a reaction from the lads, and we got just that. In the 56th minute we put together a slick move with the F2 Freestylers at the heart of it. RossiHD, real name Ryan, who had been wrongly pulled up for offside only minutes before, was lurking once again, and he put us in front with another straightforward finish. We couldn’t let our lead slip again, could we?
It was all Spencer FC now. Sidemen United keeper Hugh Wizzy made amends for some of his more eccentric moments in the first half with a top-drawer save from a Billy rocket, but in the 65th minute ChrisMD made it 4–2 and that was surely game over.
It certainly felt that way when Wroetoshaw scored a perfectly good goal for the Sidemen that was disallowed. Video replays afterwards showed that it had crossed the line, and there were shades of Frank Lampard’s shot for England against Germany at the World Cup in 2010. During the game I had no idea whether it had crossed the line or not so there’s nothing you can do but play to the whistle. We definitely had luck on our side there though!
Fairly early on in the game I’d moved back to centre-back to help shore up the defence, and I was shattered as the match reached its later stages after covering so much extra ground on the huge Wembley pitch. I was starting to get cramp. I wasn’t the only one struggling either. There were some tired Sidemen United legs and not much defensive fight left as Billy sealed a 5–2 victory for us. It probably flattered us, but I wasn’t about to complain.
When the whistle blew, it was a great feeling … but I’m not sure I entirely allowed myself to enjoy it fully. Just as the switch had been flicked in my mind when we kicked off, which meant game time, so the final whistle flicked that switch again so that I was now thinking about the video, and mulling over the ramifications of the result. Oh, yes, and I was catching my breath too!
Gamechanger Page 10