The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  At least he fared better than Halifax Town goalkeeper Steve Milton, who got his professional début on 6 January 1934 against Stockport County. He let in thirteen goals, setting an all-time league record. The final scoreline was 13-0, still a club record defeat for Halifax Town and a club record victory for Stockport County. There is no word on what became of Steve Milton.

  “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

  A memo at Western Union, late 1870s

  Most Embarrassing Tournament Exit

  In October 2011, there were scenes of wild jubilation as the South African football team celebrated a 0-0 draw with Sierra Leone, earning them the point they needed to qualify for the 2012 Nations Cup in Equatorial Guinea. Or so they thought. Sadly, someone hadn’t read the small print.

  South Africa had played for a draw from the kick-off. At the final whistle, players celebrated on the pitch for several minutes with a lap of honour while the state-run African Broadcasting Corporation proclaimed qualification. The country’s president went on air to congratulate the team. Seemingly, no one in South Africa realized that goal difference was not the deciding factor for qualification to AFCON 2012; it was head-to-head results between the top three teams in the group. Which meant that South Africa had had to win – and had failed to qualify.

  When the penny finally dropped, coach Pitso Mosimane told a press conference, “I’m confused. Just have a look at the table of the group now and see who is top of the group.” This didn’t inspire confidence. South Africa Football Association president Kirsten Nematandani sacked him and then apologized to his country for Bafana Bafana’s failure to qualify, promising that it wouldn’t happen again.

  As someone posted under footage of the game on YouTube, if the team had spent as much time acquainting themselves with the rules as they did choreographing their “victory” celebrations they would have qualified.

  “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

  Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926

  We’re Kicking Which Way?

  Middlesbrough left-back Bobby Stuart holds the record for the most own-goals in a single season in English football history. During the 1934/35 season, he netted five times against his own team.

  During a total of 247 league appearances for the Teesside club, Stuart only managed two goals at the right end.

  “I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.”

  H. G. Wells, British novelist, in 1901

  Least Successful Attempt to Organize a Fixture List

  In the 1930s, Charles Sutcliffe was one the most powerful men in football. He was also one of the sport’s Little Englanders. Sutcliffe believed that British football was vastly superior to that played elsewhere and voted to pull England out of FIFA, meanwhile referring to Germany, France and Austria as “midgets”. Six years later, he described the World Cup (played without England, of course) as “a joke”.

  His antipathy towards foreigners extended to English clubs who attempted to sign them. When Arsenal tried to sign Rudy Hiden from Wiener AC in 1930, Sutcliffe wrote, “The idea of bringing foreigners to play in league football is repulsive to the clubs, offensive to British players and a terrible confession of weakness in the management of a club.” The FA agreed with him and brought in a rule the following year which effectively banned foreign players from playing in England. Thanks to Sutcliffe, England followed a policy of “splendid isolation”, insulating themselves from advances in the world game from which their national team has arguably never fully recovered.

  As a referee, Sutcliffe didn’t shy from controversy either. In a game between Blackburn Rovers and Liverpool in the 1890s, he managed the heroic feat of disallowing a record six goals. After provoking the displeasure of the crowd in a match at Sunderland, he had to sneak out of the ground disguised as a policeman.

  But it is for his disastrous attempt to ban gambling in football, however, that Sutcliffe is chiefly famous.

  In 1936, he became England Football League President, which made him personally responsible for devising the schedule of fixtures for all Football League matches. Sutcliffe had an additional vested interest: he didn’t just work out the fixtures, he literally owned the copyright on the fixtures list and was paid 150 guineas a season by the League for doing it on their behalf, with the aid of a complex system of charts.13

  He was also a staunch Methodist and believed that gambling on football was evil. At the time, advertisements for “the Pools” – the traditional working man’s flutter on predicting the outcome of matches – were banned from football grounds, but Sutcliffe wanted to go further. He wanted to stamp out all football gambling, sparking what became known as the “Pools War”. As Charles Sutcliffe saw it, the solution to the “evil” of football gambling was very simple – if the Pools companies such as Littlewoods didn’t know in advance which matches were to be played, they wouldn’t have time to produce the coupons, so no one could do the Pools and the companies who ran them would be put out of business. So, in February 1936, Sutcliffe completely cancelled the entire football league programme, announcing fixtures for the weekend with just forty-eight hours’ notice.

  Pandemonium ensued. Clubs that would have the farthest to travel didn’t have enough time to make the necessary arrangements. It was also impossible to keep the fixtures a secret: they were leaked to the newspapers, who published them anyway every Friday, giving the pools companies just enough time to operate as normal.

  The biggest loser was football: the late publication of fixtures caused so much confusion amongst the fans that attendances around the country fell sharply (although Sutcliffe tried to blame the bad weather). George Orwell commented later that Hitler’s re-occupation of the Rhineland was greeted “with hardly a flutter”, but the decision to withhold the football fixture lists to stop the Pools companies “flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury”. The plan was scrapped after just two weeks.

  The Pools War had ended in humiliating defeat for Charles Sutcliffe, but his malign influence over the English game lingered on long after his death. Incredibly, his ban on foreign players remained in place until 1978.

  Most Sensitive Referee

  If you are a football referee, it helps to be thick-skinned. Ask the man who officiated at the 1878 FA Cup final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers, Mr Bastard.

  Similarly unfortunate was Eric Braamhaar, who made his début as a referee officiating at the 2001 Dutch First Division game between Fortuna Sittard and NEC Nijmegen. His surname rhymes with Dutch slang for female private parts. It wasn’t long before the crowd picked up on the coincidence and began to incorporate it into their banter. Mr Braamhaar was so upset that he stopped the game and refused to continue until the crowd apologized. Eventually, after they had finally milked the humour out of the situation, they began chanting, “We are sorry . . .” and play continued.

  There’s no record of how much “insult-and-injury time” was added at the end of the match.

  “Very interesting Whittle, my boy, but it will never work.”

  Cambridge Aeronautics Professor, when shown Frank Whittle’s plan for the jet engine

  Five Most Pathetic Excuses for Losing a Game of Football

  1. England’s goalkeeper David James made a few high-profile gaffes during his career, earning him the nickname “Calamity James”, but the ’keeper had an excuse for his irregular form. He said he was addicted to playing his PlayStation and was not getting enough sleep. It was the sort of excuse a twelve-year-old might offer for not doing their homework.

  2. Bulgaria are one of the great under-achievers of the World Cup, but not when it comes to creative excuses for failure. Following
their 1993 defeat in qualification against Austria, manager Dimitar Penev blamed the loss on: (a) the flag raised by their hosts (“nothing like the Bulgarian one”); and (b) the Bulgarian national anthem (“the band played a dreadful version”). As a result of both, Penev explained to the press afterwards, “the team’s composure and concentration disappeared and that’s why we lost.”

  3. In terms of talent, the Scotland-Uruguay fixture at Switzerland in the 1954 World Cup finals should have been evenly matched, but it ended in a 7-0 rout for the Uruguayans. Scotland seemed to be caught out by the summer weather in Basel which reached temperatures of over 100ºF. They were wearing old-fashioned, thick woollen jerseys with long sleeves and buttoned collars. Scottish midfielder and former Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty explained, “The Scottish FA assumed Switzerland was cold because it had mountains. You’d have thought we were going on an expedition to the Antarctic. The Uruguayans wore light V-necked shirts with short sleeves. No wonder we lost 7-0.”

  4. After their 4-0 drubbing at the hands of Spain in 2006, Ukraine’s defender Vladislav Vashchuk said the humiliating defeat was not the fault of the players – he blamed the frogs. They were croaking outside the team’s hotel all night before the game, leaving the team tired and out of sorts. A spokeswoman for the hotel denied that they had a frog problem. “Obviously, there are frogs in the lake. But there are also birds as well. In the morning, they wake up and start going ‘cheep’. It’s logical really.”

  5. Anything can derail a team’s preparations – a hamstring, a metatarsal, a flu bug. In North Korea’s case, it was a bolt from the blue. After they slipped to a 2-0 defeat in their opening women’s World Cup game against the United States in 2011, their coach, Kim Kwang-min, said his team lost because they were struck by lightning – not while they were at the tournament, mind, but a month earlier in Pyongyang. He wasn’t specific as to how many players from his squad had been hospitalized with electrocution – “probably more than five”. FIFA officials were sceptical about the claim.

  Worst Losing Streak as a Football Manager

  Results are not the only way to judge a football manager. Actually, many believe they are, in which case Dumbarton’s Jim Fallon is your man.

  In 1995, two games into the new season, Fallon was appointed manager of Scottish First Division team Dumbarton. He lost his first game 4-0 and it sort of went downhill from there. His first season record makes horrific reading: played thirty-six, won three, drawn two, lost thirty-one. It gets worse: two of the wins came in the opening two games, before they appointed Fallon. Dumbarton finished bottom with twenty-five points fewer than the next worst team. A record of 0.147 points per match convinced the Dumbarton board that they needed to act decisively – Fallon was promptly given a new contract.

  His team opened the following campaign in determined fashion with two more draws and a defeat. Fallon’s run of thirty-one league games without a win finally came to an end with a 1-0 victory away to Clyde on 7 September 1996. He promptly set off on another winless run, drawing one and losing seven of the next eight games before finally leaving the club in November.

  Dumbarton promptly won three of their next four games.

  “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.”

  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1869

  Most Expensive Own Goal

  Colombia had been tipped as a dark horse for the 1994 FIFA World Cup finals, but their dream ended almost as soon as it had begun when defender Andreas Escobar put through his own goal in a group match against hosts USA at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena. His mistake helped the USA to a 2-1 victory and condemned Colombia to bottom place in the group and elimination from the competition.

  A few days later on his return home, he told newspapers that his team’s exit was “not the end of the world”. Sadly, it was for Escobar, who was found dead in a car park shortly afterwards, shot by a gangster vexed at having lost a bet on his national team to beat the USA.

  “The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous.”

  Aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig, at tank demonstration, 1916

  Least Successful Attempt at Keeping Discipline

  The record for accruing the most red cards by one player in a football match belongs to Hawick United striker Paul Cooper. During a Borders Amateur League match in 2009, the thirty-nine-year-old lost the plot when referee Andy Lyon gave him his marching orders after picking up a second booking for dissent.

  Instead of leaving the pitch, Cooper launched into a lengthy, foul-mouthed rant at Mr Lyon, who felt obliged to brandish the red card five more times.

  When banned for two years, Cooper said, “I’m gutted because I love my football.”

  “Caterpillar landships are idiotic and useless. Those officers and men are wasting their time and are not pulling their proper weight in the war.”

  Fourth Lord of the British Admiralty, 1915

  Least Successful Impact Substitution

  On 6 September 1992, Derby County’s Andy Comyn was brought off the bench during a game against Bristol City at the Baseball Ground.

  A free kick had been awarded near the halfway line. As the ball was floated into the area, Comyn rose majestically to head the ball into the net, straight past his own ’keeper Paul Williams. It was his first touch and he had been on the field less than ten seconds. His team lost 4-3.

  “What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense.”

  Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton’s steamboat, 1800s

  Sore Losers: Football’s Top Five

  1. El Salvador (1969)

  Some wars begin with a surprise attack, others with a massacre. The “100-Hour War” began with a high tackle. El Salvador were paired with Honduras for the second North American qualifying round of the 1970 World Cup. Before the first game, held in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa on 8 June 1969, the El Salvadorian side were kept up all night by riotous fans outside their hotel. They went on to lose 1-0.

  A female El Salvadorian supporter watching on TV back home reportedly shot herself through the heart just after her team went behind. She was given a televised State funeral, designed to whip up nationalist fervour before the return fixture a week later.

  Back on home territory, the El Salvadorians took the chance to repay Honduras’s inhospitality by welcoming their star player Enrique “the Rabbit” Cardona at the airport with posters of him being sexually assaulted by a large rabbit. Other posters depicted various black players from the Honduran side with a bone through their nostrils. On the Friday before the game, two people were murdered outside the visiting team’s hotel.

  El Salvador went on to give the Hondurans a 3-0 drubbing. The results left both countries’ hopes of qualifying for the World Cup hinging on a deciding third match to be played in Mexico City. An estimated five thousand Salvadorians travelled to the game, many doing the 770-mile journey on motorbikes. El Salvador twice took the lead, but Honduras drew level, thanks to their star player Cardona, but the threat was blunted by a series of vicious two-footed lunges, one connecting with Cardona’s throat.

  The game went into extra time then, right at the death, Rodríguez headed El Salvador’s winner. Afterwards, their coach put the victory down to the small details: not eating in the hotel for fear of food poisoning and ensuring that his players all touched their testicles before the game “so they didn’t leave them in the dressing room”.

  El Salvador dissolved all ties with Honduras, which led to border clashes between the two nations. Tensions rose until, on 14 June, the El Salvadoran Army launched an attack on Honduras. By the time a ceasefire was put into effect on 20 June, just 100 hours after the first shots were fired, there were 3,000 dead on both sides.

  2. Kuwait (1982)

 
Kuwait’s only appearance in the World Cup made football history for the wrong reasons in the 1982 finals in Spain. After an opening 1-1 draw with Czechoslovakia, Kuwait saw their hopes of reaching the second round fade when, with ten minutes to play in their second game against France, French midfielder Alain Giresse ran through a static defence and slammed the ball into the net to give his team an unassailable 4-1 lead.

  The Kuwaiti players surrounded Russian referee Miroslav Stupar protesting furiously that they had all stopped after hearing a whistle in the crowd during the build-up. Despite the referee’s best efforts to persuade them otherwise, Kuwait refused to re-start the game. The match looked set to be abandoned until Kuwaiti FA president Prince Fahid entered the field of play from the stands to give the referee a piece of his mind and threatened to call off his team.

  Unbelievably, referee Stupar overturned his decision and gave a drop ball, much to the disgust of the French. Incensed at the referee’s U-turn, France’s coach Michel Hidalgo had to be restrained by police and, amid ugly scenes, his players refused to play on, but the game eventually resumed and France finished 4-1 winners courtesy of an eighty-ninth-minute goal by Maxime Bossis.

  Although they had lost the game by three clear goals (four, if you include the one they had successfully overturned), Kuwait went into full-on conspiracy theory mode. Prince Fahid described FIFA as “worse than the mafia . . . everyone knows FIFA wants certain teams to qualify for the second round. The minute they appoint USSR referee and Yugoslav linesman, we know we lose. If they would not let us beat France, they will not let us beat England.”