Читать книгу Jelleyman’s Thrown a Wobbly: Saturday Afternoons in Front of the Telly - Jeff Stelling - Страница 30

One of the rare moments I lost my cool on camera. During the 2007/08 season I actually swore under my breath when I'd thought, wrongly of course, that the cameras weren't on me. The trouble stemmed from a match between Hartlepool and Barnet – it's always the ones nearest to you that cause you the most trouble, isn't it? We were in the middle of a very good run, unbeaten in 23 games in fact, and the last team to beat us were Barnet away.

Anyway, the day before the game I'd spoken to a few of the Hartlepool boys on the phone and they'd told me that Barnet were the worst team they had played all season. In fact, one player actually said, ‘How they beat us when we played them, we'll never know.’ Of course, in typical Hartlepool fashion, we went one down on the day. Luckily we managed to equalize in the 80th minute, and I was just about to go to the reporter at Barnet for news of this fantastic goal when I heard something in my earpiece. It wasn't meant for me, but in the background a doom-laden voice shouted, ‘There's been another goal! it's Barnet two, Hartlepool one.’ Imagine my frustration. I now had to throw over to the match reporter with the words, ‘it's not just news of one goal, but two at Underhill.’

Thinking that the screen would have changed to the match statistics, I mouthed the word ‘Fuck’ under my breath, not knowing I was still flashed across telly screens in electrical goods shops up and down the country. On Monday morning I was busted. I took a phone call from the producer asking me if I'd sworn on TV. Vic Wakeling had even received word that I'd lost my cool. I was completely taken aback. The tape was checked and my blunder was discovered. There weren't any complaints – it was hardly a repeat of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross's misdemeanours of 2008 – and I was only showing a bit of passion after all, but the footage was plastered all over YouTube. Of course, one should be professional about these things, and it won't happen again, I promise. Unless we lose to ‘the worst team we've played all season’. Again.