Villa memories or something similar

Legends deserve their own thread............ The

On behalf of all TBAR members, We salute you Sir.

While we're reminiscing, when I was a nipper we played Glasgow Rangers at VP, WTF, absolute mental day!

Broke my arm on the holte end when I was 10, crowd rushed forward and crushed me, but didn't matter, John Burridge saved a penalty and we went on to win the League Cup, happy painful days!

Nooo!

Please not, that's embarrassing ha ha.

Unless we turn it into an "our Villa memories -highs and lows" thread - that I can go for.

4BetLite wrote:While we're reminiscing, when I was a nipper we played Glasgow Rangers at VP, WTF, absolute mental day!

Christ, yeah I'd forgotten that - wasn't there though, thank God, it was mental wasn't it?!

If anyone else is into Villa history (and who wouldn't be) there's a favourite book of mine called The Weir and the Wonderful, by the old Villa photographer, Terry Weir. If anyone wants to remind themselves of the grass roots of football, before Sky stole the soul, this will do it - red brick stands, tatty dressing rooms, unbridled joy in wining for winning's sake, too short shorts, beards from the 70s, highlighted hair from the 80s, groundsmen in cow gowns and directors in 3 piece suits. Adverts for Typhoo and Dunlop, wooden rattles and white picket fences in the front of the Witton.
Proper football, innocent days when you played til you were 40 then bought a hardware store in Erdington.....

De Kuip wrote:Nooo!

Please not, that's embarrassing ha ha.

Unless we turn it into an "our Villa memories -highs and lows" thread - that I can go for.

Yep sorry mate, This thread is now known as Mr De Kuips memory lane

Bloody hell!

Okay, well this is my last post for tonight, but thought I'd share:

My brother was clearing out his loft last week and phoned me to say that he'd found the Bayern Munich shirt that I'd swapped with one of their fans at the European cup final, in a box with some other stuff - I genuinely thought it was lost forever. Turned out the little git had nicked it years ago and used to wear it for school sports lessons!

Anyway, upshot is it's turned up all these years later, slightly scruffy but still looking "cult" as he describes it - red with the 3 white Adidas stripes down the arms and the BM badge on the front.

He's going to drop it in next time he's in Devon so photos will follow ha ha.

I'm proper pleased as someone nicked my programme off the coach on the way back from Rotterdam, so at least I still have one souvenir lol.

De Kuip's stories are even more fantastic for Villans of my generation, who aren't old enough to properly remember our League Cup victories of the 1990s, let alone our European glory days and our last top-flight title. A good yardstick for measuring the calibre of a football story is this: does it get one of your friends (of roughly the same age as you) who supports another team to actually respect your team in a way they never did before, to the extent where they always look out for your results on match days and begin to dislike the way the media portrays your team in the present day? Well, De Kuip's story about his trip to Rotterdam for our victory over the mighty Bayern Munich had precisely that effect on one of my Arsenal-supporting mates when I told him it!

Bravo De Kuip, bravo sir!

[quote="De Kuip"]

4BetLite wrote:If anyone else is into Villa history (and who wouldn't be) there's a favourite book of mine called The Weir and the Wonderful, by the old Villa photographer, Terry Weir. If anyone wants to remind themselves of the grass roots of football, before Sky stole the soul, this will do it - red brick stands, tatty dressing rooms, unbridled joy in wining for winning's sake, too short shorts, beards from the 70s, highlighted hair from the 80s, groundsmen in cow gowns and directors in 3 piece suits. Adverts for Typhoo and Dunlop, wooden rattles and white picket fences in the front of the Witton.
Proper football, innocent days when you played til you were 40 then bought a hardware store in Erdington.....

I've just ordered it, thanks for the suggestion. My grandmother remembered running round the pitch during sports days in what would have been the early 1920s and her uncle (Jack Devey, hence the avatar!) used to take her and her sister to matches.

My dad always use to tell me when they washed the teams kit 10000 would go down to Villa Park just to watch them dry, I believed him for ages. After winning the league at Highbury I was the proud owner of a piece of that turf and cut out a section of my lawn and planted it. Each time I moved I dug up that part of the lawn and took it with me, sadly my last move didn't have a garden and  I had to leave it.

Brilliant stuff.

Look forward to seeing the Bayern top, DK.

gdale1 wrote: After winning the league at Highbury I was the proud owner of a piece of that turf and cut out a section of my lawn and planted it. Each time I moved I dug up that part of the lawn and took it with me, sadly my last move didn't have a garden and  I had to leave it.

Bloody hell I never thought I'd hear from another Villa fan that I'd done exactly the same as! I mean, I know there were loads of us digging up the 6 yard box, but you never really expect to hear from someone who did, years later!

At the final whistle I jumped onto the pitch, hacked a square of turf up with the heel of my Doc Martin and put it in my carrier bag, took it home and planted it in the back garden - it took lovely - put the rest of the lawn to shame.

I was down the front in the Clock End at the RH side and it kept going off towards the end of the match between Villa and some of their fans that had got along to the corner, lots of little skirmishes. Do you remember being on the pitch when the police lined up across it at the final whistle and suddenly the North bank poured out onto their half like a tidal wave - that was one of the few times I was genuinely scared - they didn't get through and we were too busy denuding the surface of grass to really look for trouble, but my God there was a moment when I thought I'd be meeting my maker.

Happy days - good old Bozo Jankovic ha ha

Personally I miss hearing about Mrs DK.... 

Villa_Dan wrote:Personally I miss hearing about Mrs DK..

She's become weaponised since taking up kick boxing so I keep out of her way now.

I've managed to dig a series of tunnels under the house connecting the rooms so I can skulk in relative safety.

Had to convince her I'd got Parkinson's as the only way I could get rid of all the tunnel soil was by smuggling it out in my trousers when we went for walks, then depositing it as we went along - it was the only explanation I could think of for all the leg shaking......

I usually post more info when I'm drunk, but recent scans have shown my liver to be the size of an elephant's tongue, so I'm on the wagon for a while.............

De Kuip wrote:

gdale1 wrote: After winning the league at Highbury I was the proud owner of a piece of that turf and cut out a section of my lawn and planted it. Each time I moved I dug up that part of the lawn and took it with me, sadly my last move didn't have a garden and  I had to leave it.

Bloody hell I never thought I'd hear from another Villa fan that I'd done exactly the same as! I mean, I know there were loads of us digging up the 6 yard box, but you never really expect to hear from someone who did, years later!

At the final whistle I jumped onto the pitch, hacked a square of turf up with the heel of my Doc Martin and put it in my carrier bag, took it home and planted it in the back garden - it took lovely - put the rest of the lawn to shame.

I was down the front in the Clock End at the RH side and it kept going off towards the end of the match between Villa and some of their fans that had got along to the corner, lots of little skirmishes. Do you remember being on the pitch when the police lined up across it at the final whistle and suddenly the North bank poured out onto their half like a tidal wave - that was one of the few times I was genuinely scared - they didn't get through and we were too busy denuding the surface of grass to really look for trouble, but my God there was a moment when I thought I'd be meeting my maker.

Happy days - good old Bozo Jankovic ha ha

I was also there that day and also brought some turf back, along with a pocket full of coins the wankers kept throwing at us...Good old days.

I remember it well, we must have been in the same area, I tried to get the penalty spot but finished up hacking up a big piece of turf and guarding it with my life.
There was 4 of us in a mini and after placing the turf in the boot drove all the way up the M1 with each of us holding a traffic cone on the roof ( don't ask why seemed a good idea at the time.)
The M1 was a ribbon of claret and blue,everyone blowing horns and windows open waving. Happy days.

4BetLite wrote:Legends deserve their own thread............

On behalf of all TBAR members, We salute you Sir.

I must be out of the loop here .......but Why ?

He donated his left testicle to the Save The Tree Frog fund.

They found out I've been masquerading as a Turkish Elvis impersonator called Hamal  Shukup.

De Kuip wrote:They found out I've been masquerading as a Turkish Elvis impersonator called Hamal  Shukup.

This thread's gone down hill badly :)

Oh I don't know. Hopefully Hamal has a YouTube playlist.

De Kuip wrote:At the final whistle I jumped onto the pitch, hacked a square of turf up with the heel of my Doc Martin and put it in my carrier bag

I was only 15 years old in 1982 and would never have been allowed to travel to the game.

I watched it in the living room with my mom, dad, sister and little brother (you know this 'little brother' as 'Mazrim').

Actually, little Maz might have been in bed.  Aaaaaahhhhh...

We weren't holding out much hope against the Great Bayern, especially when Jimmy Rimmer limped off to be replaced by Young Nigel.

When we scored I was beside myself, but then I just couldn't watch! I went upstairs and rolled around on my bed, covering my ears because, if I didn't, I would hear the shouts and screams from downstairs and think Bayern had scored.

I didn't come out of my room until my sister ran up and told me there were only a few minutes left. I watched us keep the ball for the last few minutes (you could pass back to the keeper back then) and it was all over.

It was a massive achievement. Knock Out football against the best teams in Europe. No Group Stage, no second chances. If you had an off day in the Home Leg, you were as good as out.

Apparently, John Stones needs to leave Everton so he can play in the Champions League.

Why??

So he can start against the Champions of Kazakhstan, and then maybe admire the Bernabeu from their heated bench, as Chelsea bomb out of the Last 16?

Despite massive spending, English clubs are not flourishing in Europe. Sky are taking a huge gamble, that if they pump enough money into the English game, PL clubs will land the likes of Bale, Neymar, Ronaldo, Pogba etc, and that will in turn grow their revenue, because more people will subscribe to Sky so they can watch them every week.

Spending has indeed broken all records but the Galacticos have not arrived. Expect Sky be flogging it harder than ever this coming season!  

I can see the Bubble bursting at some point soon. Villa just need to be ready and self-sustaining so we can take advantage.

I have great memories from both Rotterdam and Highbury (still have a scar where my drunken leg crashed against the small metal fence at the bottom of the Clock End you had to cross to get on the pitch - I picked it and picked it again just to make sure it'd scar!)

One memory that's worth sharing dates back to 1981/82 season - 4th round of the Milk Cup, Wigan away (we won 2-1 Withe and Cowans scored)...

Me and me mate Don (both about 18/19 - big and daft) were driving up to the game and were asked by this frail, quite, ginger kid called Toosk if he could come with us - he turned up at my house with a Union Jack flag and suggested we write VILLA on it...without further discussion, I grabbed a half inch brush, an old tin of my dad's white car paint, laid the flag on the garage floor and proceeded to write the word PENIS in massive letters down the middle of it.

We chucked it on the back shelf and by the time we got up north it was pretty much dry - from getting out the car before the game to getting back to it afterwards I only said one word...I chanted it to the tune of pretty much every Villa song of the day much to the amusement of lots of my old mates that I met up with at all the games back then. At one point I was beckoned down to the front to explain what was going on to a couple of friendly, northern coppers - with a very serious look on my face I had the pleasure of chanting the word 'penis' at them repeatedly.

The next day I got home from work only to find my mum looking perturbed - when I asked what was wrong all she wanted to know was why the word 'penis' was written across the garage floor in massive white letters!

I didn't think anything more of it, until a couple of months later...unknown to me Toosk, in his wisdom, had decided to take the flag to the home game against Sunderland, he got to the back of the Holte, unraveled it and proceeded to chant out its one simple message. Little did he know that they'd recently installed surveillance cameras and before he knew it he was jumped on by 5 miserable boys in blue, they arrested him for 'defacing the flag' and was frogmarched down to the Villa Park holding cell.

They opened the door and shoved him in - he was confronted by 11 others, all of them Macham meatheads - with no real option he had to admit that he was Villa, it didn't go down well and he seriously feared for life...their next question was what he was nicked for - when he explained they thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and treated him like a hero. After he appeared in court (he was fined 130 quid), his new mates chair-lifted him out, took him on the piss and wouldn't let him pay, not even for one pint!

That, George, is a proper story!!

VR and George absolutely class stories I love them - keep the stories coming folks - I tell you what there's a book here somewhere. Never mind official club biographies or books about football days covering the same group of lads - what about a social history of Villa told by loads of people who pretty much don't know each other but share a common bond and have loads of great stories.  I'd buy it.
Oh and Trotters please please can we change the name of this thread to "Villa memories" or something similar. ..pleeeeeseee?

De Kuip wrote:I tell you what there's a book here somewhere. Never mind official club biographies or books about football days covering the same group of lads - what about a social history of Villa told by loads of people who pretty much don't know each other but share a common bond and have loads of great stories.  I'd buy it.

Top idea! I'd definitely buy that, it would be great for Villa fans of my generation who haven't been there for all the glory days and had as much to cheer about!