The secret influence of Vinnie Jones’s granddad’s gerbil

Still crazy….

Former Wimbledon manager Bobby Gould recalled the Crazy Gang years in a 2014 television documentary. “If you can imagine the worst comprehensive school, that’s what I walked into every morning.”

For eight years and 136 league games, Carlton Fairweather was one of them. Not the craziest, perhaps, not the leader of the gang, but one of the remedial class, nonetheless.

“Today’s footballers are thoroughbreds. We were stray alley cats,” Vinnie Jones once observed.

Carlton Fairweather is now 55, a community coach at Sunderland, spoke last Friday night at a talk-in at Shildon FC. It would be hard to imagine a more agreeable feller.

Wimbledon had joined the Football League in 1977, replacing Workington. Within nine years they were in the top division; in 1988 they beat Liverpool 1-0 in the FA Cup final.

“The Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club,” marvelled John Motson on the BBC. It stuck, though Carlton reckoned that Liverpool were beaten even before the game kicked off.

“All our lads were just bellowing in the tunnel. You’ve never heard a noise like it,” he told Shildon. “Liverpool just choked.”

“Nothing to do with Vinnie Jones doing Steve McNamanan early on?” asked Shildon board member Wilf Tray.

“It maybe had a slight effect. Today he’d have been sent off. Back then I don’t think he was even booked.”

Jones – “until he crossed that white line the nicest man you could ever meet” – joined the likes of John Fashanu (“a very distinguished player but maybe liked himself too much”) and Dennis Wise at the centre of the hard corps.

Carlton Fairweather, signed from non-league football, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t (as he puts it) go with loose women and didn’t even spit on the “This is Anfield” sign as they entered the fray at Liverpool.

“I wasn’t that kind of guy,” he said.

He even made biblical reference to Lazarus, who rose from the dead, though most of the Shildon lads probably thought it was that bloke who played for Queens Park Rangers.

There were tales of training on Wimbledon Common – “any man and his dog could walk across the pitch” – changing in a transport café 300 yards away. When players were stripped naked, as ritually they were, the walk of shame left nothing to the south London imagination.

Said to celebrate “the ramshackle, unhinged majesty that was the Crazy Gang”, the BT Sport documentary talked not just of Ralgex in the jockstrap and Gucci shoes nailed to the floor but of setting fire to Eric Young’s bag and contents, then dancing around it until the fire brigade arrived.

On one occasion, Carlton had himself been the victim after forgetting to close his sunroof window and finding the car filled with sand. When he discovered the culprits, he merely talcum powdered their suits.

It was the players, he insisted, who ran the club, a team rooted in route one. “We managed ourselves. Bobby Gould was the gaffer, but he just tweaked things a bit.”

And Sam Hammam, the Lebanese chairman? “Sam was fantastic. He loved the publicity. There was no one in the world hadn’t heard of us.

“It was a Sunday morning football club with a professional attitude. Once we crossed that white line, there was no better side.”

After leaving Plough Lane he had a spell in Hong Kong, including an appearance for the Golden Select X1, all over 30, against Terry Venables’s England side just two weeks before the 1996 European Championships.

England scraped a 1-0 win. “A horror show, a diabolical farce,” said The Northern Echo. “The Golden oldies made a mockery of two years preparation.”

Carlton had met his Sunderland-born wife at the Tall Trees night club near Yarm, moved to Wearside 16 years ago, has coached at most levels including Sunderland’s women’s team.

“It’s the way the game used to be played, no egos. The girls are a lot better than you might think,” he said.

Someone asked how Vinnie Jones came to play for Wales. “I think it was through his grandfather’s gerbil,” said Carlton.

At Shildon he entertained for ninety minutes, didn’t take a penny, helped raise funds for prostate cancer research.

We talked before and afterwards, a not altogether successful attempt to understand how he and his sanity got through the Gang show. “You had to be mentally tough at Wimbledon or you were out. I think it was a case if you could survive that, you could survive anything,” he said.

“They were the sort of blokes you’d always want beside you in the trenches. It changed my temperament, made me a better person.”

It was a very good evening: we’re all Fairweather fans now.

The Wembley tunnel wasn’t always Cacophony Corner. Former England amateur international and Bishop Auckland inside forward Derek Lewin recalls the 1957 Amateur Cup final against Corinthian Casuals before which the legendary Bob Hardisty spotted England cricketer Doug Insole – who died two weeks ago – in the Casuals line-up. “Bob just walked over and started a conversation about cricket,” recalls Derek. “The referee had to ask them if they’d mind playing a football match instead.”

Two little coincidences, firstly that former West Auckland centre forward Ernie Curtis – featured in last week’s column – should have recalled watching the original Crazy Gang the night before West’s FA Amateur Cup final appearance in 1961.

The second is that this month’s Oldie magazine – a sign of the times, alas – should carry a recollective feature on them.

Formed in the 1930s, much in demand at the Royal Variety Performance, the Gang were three slapstick comedy double acts – Flanagan and Allen, Nervo and Knox and Naughton and Gold. Flanagan, who sings the Dads’ Army theme, usually– inexplicably – appeared in an ankle-length fur coat.

Before he became Poet Laureate, recalls The Oldie, John Betjeman wrote a poem to mark their retirement:

Goodbye old friends of the great tradition!

From the serious thirties of slumps and tears

Into the age of nuclear fission

You kept us laughing for thirty years!

They were first resident at the London Palladium, then the Victoria Palace, their final bow in 1962. Ernie Curtis and his pals had reached Wembley just in time.

Few football clubs have more generous followers than Shildon. This Sunday four of them – Wilf Tray, Adrian Humble, Amanda Scaife and Tom Clegg – plan a 30-mile sponsored walk from the Tan Hill Inn across the moor to Bowes and then back to the Dean Street ground.

Since it starts at 6am, they won’t even be able to manage a quick pint beforehand.

They walked the same route three years ago. “Four toe nails fell off. I was limping for three months,” Wilf recalls.

Adrian and Amanfa seek sponsorship for the Alzheimer’s Society, Tom for cancer research and Wilf for cystic fibrosis research. Walk on.