Читать книгу You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport - Matthew Norman - Страница 35

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Ken Bailey

Even during the glory days of football hooliganism, the reliably miserable experience of following England’s progress offered no more depressing sight than this unnervingly strange old boy. For decades Ken Bailey’s presence in his John Bull uniform – red militia tailcoat, blue top hat with Union Jack front centre – was a fixture at just about every international sporting event, broadcasting a stale aroma of Empire and long-anachronistic presumptions about English superiority across the planet. Wherever and whatever a national team played, the TV cameras would pick him out in the crowd. Eventually he bacame such a familiar character that Subbuteo honoured him not only by putting his image on the exterior of a five-a-side box, but including a Bailey figurine in its 1974 Munich World Series set.