Lucky To Get Nil: City v Stoke Pre-Match Post-Match Review

Never let it be said that I leave any stone unturned in search of an angle on this column to enrich, tittilate and enliven your lives. And yet this week, I’ve been struggling.

After all, a freezing cold Wednesday in December against such tedious opposition is hardly going to inspire. You can almost hear the fixture computer laughing as thousands decide a Dale Winton Retrospective Xmas Special is more exciting than attending this match.

I didn’t agree - and wanted to subvert the preconceptions that surround this most mundane of cities. And yet - a search on 'exciting things happening in Stoke over Xmas' revealed… a concert by Richard Herring. A trawl through Wikipedia’s Stoke City page revealed that the club’s fanzine is called… wait for it... The Oakcake.

Readers, I was ready to slit my wrists. In desperation I hit upon the treasure trove that is funtrivia.com/Stoke-City. Get ready for your ribs to be tickled, your funny bones to be furtled and your mirth to give birth: “In 1976, the roof on the Victoria Ground’s Butler Street stand was blown off in a gale. Lack of adequate insurance meant that the club had to sell many of their best players to pay for repairs.”

…Er…that’s it. One wonders how any of the club’s fans can even be bothered to get out of bed to go and support a team of such stultifyingly dull tradition.

The only other noteworthy fact I could find about this most boring of clubs is the existence among its fanbase of a hooligan firm called The Naughty Forty – apparently notorious enough to merit its own entry. One imagines a group of fat, middle-aged men drinking, looking for a fight and living out the 1970s again; while back home their long-suffering girlfriends act out Delilah fantasies with the milkman. (That describes the entire supporter demographic of the league – Ed.)

So it was against this background that the teams trotted out for the Barclays Gary Speed Etihad Premier League handshake. The 15,000-plus crowd’s depression was made worse by the news that Richards, having avoided injury in the Arsenal game, had again made it into the side. Also, amazingly, the Forum’s Top Panel mystifyingly revealed no injury to Hargreaves. Perhaps he has left the club.

But if there was one person guaranteed to bring Christmas cheer, it was Mario. Eschewing the normal club colours and reprising a theme from earlier in the week, the Italian nutcase had decided to start the game dressed as a Christmas tree, replete with a fairy-shaped Mohican, lovingly crafted by his hairdresser.

The game began with an injury to Richards and settled into a familiar pattern. As the teams passed the ball to each other sideways, and shivered in the sideways sleet, The Naughty Forty amused themselves with chorus after chorus of Stoke’s signature tune, Delilah.

Isn’t it funny how fans only know the first line to songs?

For example, Richard Rogers, esteemed lyricist and write of Blue Moon, seemingly only wrote a song with 4 lines. Get to ‘Without a love of my own’ and you haven’t got a clue what comes next have you? In similar vein is the Oh Balotelli song, which appears to go: “Oh, Balotelli, he’s a striker, hmmm-mm,la,la mumble mumble.” Go in any toilet at half time and you will hear this. Does ANYONE know what happens in the subsequent lines of this ditty?

Likewise, Delilah. The details of the second verse, which illustrate the cuckolding antics of the eponymous heroine, are lost on their fans. F**k knows why they even sing it. Bored shitless by a shotless, scoreless nil-nil after 30 minutes, I had to know…

According to footballandmusic.co.uk  there was a guy who used to stand on the terraces behind the goal in the 70′s who’s name was Tom Jones. His mates found it rather amusing to sing Delilah at him and it caught on. Another explanation goes that there were a bunch of Stoke fans being rather loud in a pub prior to a game. The Police went over to them and said that they didn’t have a problem with them singing but could they mind the language - at which point one member of the group burst out with a few lines of Delilah and it snowballed from there.

But my theory about a) the extreme tedium of Stoke as a place and a team and b) the fan’s utter cluelessness about the second verse of the song were subverted by the final and (to me) the most plausible explanation: apparently, the “I felt the knife in my hand” line from the 2^nd verse was indeed appropriated by the fans, who changed it to  “I put my d**k in her hand…” The author of my research source tells how this reflects a certain misogynistic trait in the Stoke mentality, which has one of the worst ratios of males to females in the country.

No wonder they go to the football then.

Women of Stoke: enjoy your illicit Wednesday night shag/shopping spree/soap. The boyfriend will roll back around midnight, drunk and full of pies, and try to grope you to cheer himself up from the second-half goalfest that see us win by seventy three clear goals and go to the top of the league at Christmas.

Why, why , why, Delilah?