Читать книгу Steel City Rivals - One City. Two Football Clubs, One Mutually Shared Hatred - Steve Cowens - Страница 10

During the 70s, Wednesday had a leader, not in terms of fighting ability, but a sort of cult figure who went by his nickname of Shandy, or Shandy the pig, as Blades called him.

When I first started going to the matches, it wasn’t long before you got to know the top, or most well-known, pig lads, and Shandy was certainly one of the most well known. In the 70s, a song would ring around the East Bank: ‘Shandy, Shandy, I walk a million miles for one of your smiles, oh, Shandy’, and if you had seen his smile then you’d realise that even Wednesday fans have a sense of humour. He was known well right across the city, both by the legions of football fans, no matter what colour their allegiance was, and also by a large percentage of the population at large. The main reason for this was that Shandy had unusual features, and I think that’s enough said on the subject, and wherever he went his rasping voice would chant, ‘Wenshdee! Wenshdee!’, his hair lip giving the enemy name a new sound. One thing about Shandy, though, was he was a laugh to have a drink with and I spent many an hour being amused by his tales of prowess among the hooligan world that we lived in.

He was often in the company of Blades lads and entertained us with his heroic stories of the Wednesday supermen led by himself, Super-Shandy. He lived in Hackenthorpe – still does, I think – and he knew most of the United lads from around that way; he also knew that we would ridicule him all night, not for his looks, but for his team, which tells you a lot about the problems with being a pig in our city in those days.

One thing United lads never did and that was hit or bully Shandy; no, we were better than that, we respected his faith to the blue and white. The last I heard of Shandy was that he had been hit by a bus while crossing the road in one of his many drunken binges; a shame really that a lad who had a lifetime of ridicule and verbal abuse for being a pig could suffer further misery. He recovered somehow. I don’t know about the bus though.

Shandy loved a drink and one time we took him around town after bumping into him in the Penny Black in town. We plied him with drinks, mainly shorts, until he spewed all over, pissed his pants, then passed out.

One of many stories from Shandy folklore: Shandy was once in the Birley Hotel, pissed as usual, and blurted out to the watching public, ‘I think that there is summat up with my water system.’ He then ordered a pint of whisky and supped the lot straight down. Suddenly his face turned from the usual arrangements of odd colours to bright green, he then pissed, shit and spewed up all at the same time, then collapsed. The ambulance arrived, and, as they were attempting to take him into the ambulance and off to hospital, he started coming round and started to shout, ‘Are we going to Gillingham, is this the bus?’ It so happened that the pigs were playing Gillingham the next day, and Shandy was having none of it, he escaped from the no-doubt relieved grasp of the medics and ran off down the street. We never did find out if he got to Gillingham.

We all remembered Shandy from the Testimonial games at the Lane in the 70s. At one particular game the pigs had taken our Kop, to add insult and humiliation to our lads Wednesday had Shandy hoisted up on to a crush barrier, singing, ‘Shandy, Shandy, I’ll walk a million miles for one of your smiles’. The 50 or so Blades who had bothered to turn up came in at the back and laid straight into the pigs, Scattering hundreds of the bastards until they realised how few of us there were, they charged back up the Kop surrounding us and we would have been battered if the coppers had not rounded us up and thrown us out of our own ground. It was not a good time to be a Blade.