Читать книгу Jelleyman’s Thrown a Wobbly: Saturday Afternoons in Front of the Telly - Jeff Stelling - Страница 24

This was a play on the famous phrase, ‘They'll be dancing in the streets of Raith Rovers tonight’ which came from TV commentator Sam Leitch in the 1960s. I remember seeing the team name Total Network Solutions on the screen one afternoon and thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ They happened to be a real team, of course, and a very good one at that – they were based in Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain (thank god they play under a different name) in the Welsh Premier League and tended to score a lot of goals. The more they won, the more their name lent itself to some form of acknowledgement. After yet another TNS goal, and in a flash of quick-witted humour that only a man with several O-levels could deliver, I yelled, ‘And they'll be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions tonight!’ It soon became compulsory to throw in the phrase with every TNS win.

It wasn't long before Mike Harris, the managing director of Total Network Solutions, began sending me a pack of TNS-related goodies every year, which included a Total Network Solutions T-shirt, but I've yet to parade this around the high-fashion emporia of Winchester. The club even invited me to their European games in the UEFA Cup, but the journey to Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain always seemed to be a trip too far.

Still, the name is an indication of how football has changed. The club flogged off their real title (Llansantffraid) to a sponsor for £250,000 when they qualified for the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1996, but they weren't the first – Dutch giants PSV are named after a company. But according to the excellent book Prawns In The Game: How Football Got Where It Is Today! by Paul French, which details the state of modern football, ‘Total Network Solutions are the most successful example of a sponsored team … thanks to Jeff Stelling’. That wasn't intended, of course, and I was gutted when they changed their name to The New Saints. It just didn't carry the same punch.