Manchester United bomb scare and UFOs among football’s weirdest postponements
After the silliness of Argentinaâs clash with Morocco at the Olympics eventually taking four hours to play, and Manchester City being hit with a ÂŁ2m fine for appearing late for kick-offs, we wondered about the most bizarre reasons games have been delayed, postponed or abandoned.
Turns out thereâs a full gamut of explanations out there, from the difficulties of balancing new-found pop stardom to the very real-seeming threat of alien invasion. But firstâŠ
10. Stinky stadium
Start with the funniest one â we reckon thatâs the way to go, and weâve just spent a good five minutes laughing at the words âstinky stadiumâ. We hope you are as easily amused as we are.
There really isnât much more to the story than that. It was 1937, and Kings Lynn were due to play Gorleston â but the neighbouring farms were so appallingly smelly that the game got called off for the good of all concerned.
âIt would have been like playing football in a giant cesspit,â said the Kings Lynn manager, an excuse that hasnât stopped them playing at [insert name of your least favourite away ground here].
There was a similar incident in Peru in the 1920s, incidentally, when a drove of pigs ran riot around the pitch, doing what pigs do all over it, causing the game to be put back a day and one manager to complain that âthe players stank to high heaven thanks to all that s***â, which may be the most unnecessary qualification in the history of recorded language.
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9. Simply being incredibly petty
Estonia were meant to host Scotland as part of the two sidesâ 1998 World Cup qualifying campaign, but Scotlandâs complaints about the floodlights in Tallinn during a training session the night before led them to ask FIFA to bring the game forward from an evening kick-off to a 3pm.
FIFA agreed, but Estonia didnât like it, so in protest they refused to show up, leading to the ridiculous image of Scotland being made to kick off before the referee abandoned the game, with Scotland looking thoroughly unimpressed as they traipsed back to the dressing room.
Strangely, the game was replayed â in Monaco, of all places, possibly just because it was handy for John Collins. Just to emphasise what an enormous waste of everybodyâs time the whole thing was, the game ended 0-0âŠthough Mart Poom did earn his big move to Derby out of his performance in that game, which is nice we suppose.
8. Some people are on the pitch
Supporter protests stopping play and even causing abandonments is not unheard of. Reading had a League One game against Port Vale called off in January after hundreds of fans entered the field to make their feelings clear about then-owner Dai Yongge. They won the rearranged game 2-0 after receiving a suspended three-point penalty.
That held echoes of Blackpool fansâ protests on the final day of the 2014/15 Championship season. Upset at the Oyston family regime, they took to the pitch just after half time for a sit-in protest refused to budge for over an hour.
Neither they nor visiting Huddersfield had anything on the line in the game, so it was declared a 0-0 draw, as it stood at the time at the abandonment. Some Huddersfield fans still feel miffed to this day that they didnât get refunds, despite Blackpool being fined ÂŁ50,000. As if anything that could have happened in the remaining 42 minutes could possibly have been as entertaining as a fella in a motorised scooter driving onto the pitch to belatedly join in the protest.
7. Match abandoned (Fishcakes)
But what did those protests both lack? Fishcakes, of course, which is a terrible missed opportunity to use the slogan âMake Yongge the dish of the dayâ, or to celebrate Blackpoolâs seaside heritage.
Norway showed them how it was done just a couple of weeks ago, repeatedly throwing fishcakes onto the field during Rosenborgâs clash with Lillestrom to protest against VAR. Also flares and tennis balls, but thatâs less fun.
âThe protests at the Lerkendal stadium in Trondheim started from kick-off with a two-minute bombardment of fishcakes, forcing the referee and the players to return to the dressing room,â reads a Sky News report, which I think we can all agree is a tremendous sentence.
6. This is why the south west isnât allowed a good football team
Three stories from the bottom-left corner of England for the price of one entry here.
First: itâs summer 1999, and the UK is about to see its first total solar eclipse since 1927. Bear in mind that you can predict these events by decades here, because the police decided the influx of tourism to the south-west meant they were unable to cover Torquayâs scheduled match with Portsmouth, causing it to be rearranged.
Best bit: as Wikipedia notes, the south west âdid not have nearly as many spectators as expected leading many organised events to host smaller audiences than anticipatedâ. Letâs hope theyâve got it together by September 23, 2090.
Next: Frome Town were meant to host Chippenham Town in 2015, but it got rescheduled because of a conflict with the extremely important and world-famous Frome Cheese Show, which was held in town on the same day.
Finally, in 2018, Teignmouth had to call off a game against Crediton United because their goalposts werenât delivered in time for the season opener. Just send someone down to Costco lads, they have everything.
5. World War II bomb scare (in 1985)
We know bomb scares arenât funny in themselves, being that they can kill people and that, which is generally regarded as bad. Yet weâve included two of them on this list, because ultimately nobody was hurt by either of them and nor were they the result of any kind of terrorist atrocity.
Weâll park the other one for now, and instead bring you the tale of Sheffield Unitedâs clash with Oldham in February 1985. An unexploded bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe some 40 years prior weighing 2,200 pounds was found underground during excavations for a new residential development on Lancing Road, just behind Bramall Laneâs Kop end. The game was put back until the 36-hour defusal process was complete; United won it 2-0.
(Just want to take this opportunity to vent about a lad called Adrian who lived on my street growing up who got his picture on the front of the local paper after he found a pair of small WW2 bombs and brought them home. Wouldnât shut up about it after. Why are we celebrating that kind of idiocy, even in a child? Adrianâs lucky he still has hands, the grinning little moron. I am a well-adjusted adult.)
4. Old Trafford âbombâ left by bomb defusal team
On the final day of the 2015/16 season, Old Trafford was evacuated after Manchester United staff found a suspicious package in the toilets, later described by Greater Manchester Police as an âincredibly lifelike explosive deviceâ.
And it turns out there was good reason for that: it had intentionally been made to look incredibly lifelike, not by a terrorist looking to strike fear into football fans, nor even a prankster with extremely bad judgement.
No: it was a fake bomb used in a training exercise earlier in the week, which had sat in the stadium for four days having gone unretrieved at the end of the day. Louis van Gaal was not impressed at having to squeeze in the re-arranged game against Bournemouth just days before their FA Cup final against Crystal Palace, but it all worked out: United won both games.
3. Player ruled out by clash with Swedish Pop Idol appearance
Kevin Walker is an irritatingly handsome and talented man, apparently. The midfielder had carved out a respectable career in the Swedish league when he decided to audition for the TV show Idol 13Â â that yearâs equivalent of Pop Idol (or, for younger readers, The X Factor).
That meant that because the Swedish second tier broadcast rights were owned by the same channel that showed the singing contest, Walkerâs club Sundsvall had several games moved to avoid a clash, much to the irritation of opponents.
âWhen our goalkeeper came back from the Under-21s, itâs been difficult to move matches. Heâs had to play the next day. Now a game is moved because Kevin is singing,â complained Degerfors midfielder Niklas Kllingberg.
Walker meanwhile showed a flagrant misapprehension of comic book lore by saying: âIâm living a Bruce Wayne life at the moment. I play football during the week, and then take part in Idol at the weekend.â Still, he won the whole bloody thing, so far play to him.
2. Betting syndicate cut floodlights on Premier League games
Honestly, itâs bizarre that this story isnât better remembered than it is, given it happened in actual Premier League games and led to people going to actual jail.
When it began, in November 1997, it seemed innocent enough: Frank Lampard, then a youngster at West Ham, equalised against Crystal Palace in a night game at Upton Park, only for the floodlights to go out. Match abandoned.
One month later: Wimbledon are taking on Arsenal, itâs goalless, and the second half has just begun â darkness again. Twelve minutes later, they come back on, but then during the warm-ups, off they go again. Dons don Sam Hammam is fuming, saying: âThis shouldnât be happening. Once was bad enough, the second wasnât pretty, and this is getting near a disaster. Unless we stop it there will be shame on the game. We are all embarrassed by it.â
Thereâs no further incident for over a year, until three days before Charlton were due to host Liverpool in February 1999 â at which point four men were arrested for having deliberately sabotaged the previous two games and planned to do the same at the Valley.
The reason? They were in cahoots with an Asian betting syndicate, who had bribed a Charlton security guard into playing along only for his colleague to quite rightly dob him in. The syndicate had won hundreds of thousands of pounds in bets on the game in question, we presume by betting on draws and exploiting bookiesâ rules on second-half abandonments.
1. ALIEN INVASION. Or: SPIDER INVASION (Both are great)
October 1954: Florence. Ten thousand Fiorentina and Pistoiese fans are in attendance for the big derby game.
But then, everyone in the crowd stops looking at the pitch. The players halt their running and kicking. All eyes are on the skies, where a giant, glittery, egg-shapedâŠegg shape is floating around mysteriously in the skies.
âI would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked,â one fan told the BBC years later, which may be the second-most unnecessary qualification in the history of recorded language.
Some who witnessed it still swore into old age that they witnessed extraterrestrial life visiting Earth that day. The newspapers decided they were from Mars. Onlookers claim to have been coated in a strange, white, sticky substance, which gives us some clue as to what the aliens were up to up there, the dirty sods. We donât care how big your eyes are, youâll still go blind.
âMigrating spidersâ appears to be the official explanation: apparently they can spin massive webs to effectively paraglide around thousands of feet in the air, which can cause optical illusions if theyâre caught by the sun.
Oh. Yeah. So anyway, this whole thing led the game to be put on hold for 30 minutes while everyone considered how their lives on this planet would be irrevocably altered by the awful regime of these new alien/spider/alien spider overlords.
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