Man Friday

Amazing the tangents that research can take you on. I've acquired a copy of the excellent football nostalgia book Got, Not Got to help me out with my drafts, and among the many wonders of yesteryear buried within, it's suddenly reminded me of one of my favourite non-Albion players of all time, and surely the ultimate cult footballer for anyone with a punk rock heart beating in their chest.

I'm talking, of course, about Robin Friday.

For the benefit of those who generally steer clear of the beautiful game, or perhaps aren't versed in the finer details of mid-Seventies lower league action, Robin Friday was a delinquent, binge drinking, womanising, asthmatic Borstal inmate who somehow managed to forge a professional football career as bright and brief as a bottle rocket. Ostracised from his family and local community in 1969 for marrying a black woman, and disillusioned with his day job as a roofer after toppling off a house and impaling himself on a spike which pierced his stomach and narrowly missed a lung (incredibly, he extricated himself from the spike without assistance and made his own way to hospital) he decided that sport was a safer bet, and signed for Reading in January 1974. And that's when English football caught its all-too-fleeting glimpse of a player who made George Best look like Cliff Richard.

In the four years that he spent playing professional football, Robin Friday managed the following achievements:

- Getting barred from the Boar's Head pub in Reading on ten separate occasions.

- Spending Sunday to Thursday drinking constantly, and "sobering up" for the weekend's match on Fridays by taking LSD instead.

- Inventing a dance called "the elephant", which entailed turning his trouser pockets inside-out, unzipping his fly, pulling his penis out, and then bouncing up and down around the dancefloor.

- Spending the summer of 1974 at a hippie commune in Cornwall, completely missing pre-season training in the process.

- Entering Churchill's nightclub in Reading wearing a long overcoat and hobnail boots, before discarding the coat to reveal nothing beneath, and dancing around the club nude.

- Kicking Mark Lawrenson in the face.

- Shitting in Mark Lawrenson's kit bag.

- Breaking into the opposition's dressing room after being substituted early during a heavy defeat, and shitting in their team bath.

- Kissing opposition defenders and fondling their testicles to distract them at key moments of the game.

- Dismissing the concerns of his manager and teammates after showing up for a match with a cut, bruised and severely swollen face with the explanation: "Me missis hit me with a can of beans."

- Going missing during an away trip, only to walk into the hotel bar in the middle of the night carrying a live swan under his arm.

- Avoiding rail fares while commuting on trains by knocking on locked toilet doors claiming to be a ticket inspector, and then stealing the ticket which the occupant pushed under the door.

- Somehow finding the time to score a goal every three games in between the above.

Such a lifestyle couldn't last, and of course, it didn't. Football's answer to Withnail was in and out of hospital by 1977, and at the end of the year, demanded that his contract be cancelled so that he could be free of "people telling him what to do". He did more prison time in the 1980s for impersonating a police officer in order to confiscate drugs off people, and finally died of a heart attack in 1990, at the age of 38. Six years later, the Super Furry Animals immortalised him on their single The Man Don't Give A Fuck; and really, I think that's the best eulogy for Robin Friday that anyone could possibly give.