Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 14

Mickey Thomas was always a bit of a jack the lad, even to the point that for several seasons Match of the Day’s opening sequence included the bit of footage that had him smiling and winking to the camera after conning his way to a highly dubious free-kick. A gifted winger who could even run rings around Tommy Docherty, he gave a hint of the cheeky cockiness which was later to land him in deep water when Chelsea chairman Ken Bates came calling.

In 1978 Bates was desperate to sign the mercurial Welshman who was then playing for Wrexham and travelled all the way up to Wales, only to find that Thomas—who had an urgent appointment at the local bookies—was a no-show. Undeterred, Bates set up another meeting. This time Thomas turned up on the dot of 10am. Bates, determined to gain a measure of revenge for the Welshman’s earlier extraction of urine, didn’t. Thomas had the last laugh, though: when Chelsea eventually signed him six years later, it was on condition that he moved closer to London. Thomas did: he decamped ten miles down the road, moving from Colwyn Bay to Rhyl. It’s staggering that he lasted seven years in Chelsea’s colours.

By the early 1990s, Thomas was still able to raise his game for the odd last hurrah, such as when his wonderful free-kick famously helped Fourth Division Wrexham to knock champions Arsenal out of the FA Cup, but it was for his off-field antics that he was soon to become most famous. The ‘Welsh George Best’ lived up to that moniker in 1992 when Rhyl’s classiest geezer found himself down a country lane shagging his brother-in-law’s wife in the back of a car. Needless to say, the brother-in-law took a pretty dim view of proceedings and, catching the pair in flagrante delicto, plunged a screwdriver into Thomas’s backside. He then dragged the former footballing genius into the road, where he administered a going-over even more thorough than the one his wife had just received. Thomas was in hospital for a week.

It only took the Welshman a year to comfortably eclipse the notoriety gained in that incident, however. In 1993 he was caught passing dud £10 and £20 notes to the trainees at Wrexham and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Judge Gareth Edwards told him that he had ‘an image of himself as a flash and daring adventurer’ before sending him off to share a cell in Liverpool’s Walton Jail with a big bloke in dungarees who admitted on Day One that he was incarcerated for beheading his victims.

But the cheeky Welshman still got the last laugh, earning a living as an after-dinner speaker whose favourite gag remains ‘They say that Roy Keane’son fifty grand a week. Well, so I was I until they found my presses.’