![]() ![]() I also handled all of the club’s travel arrangements. In the 90s I was the PA announcer at Upton Park. Here’s a stitch-up of a work colleague, albeit an accidental one. Strangest of all, the club employee Bill Prosser cleared the story up in a letter to the Fiver in 2005: Storrie was telling the truth because the story had stemmed from a misunderstanding between a member of staff at West Ham and a journalist and snowballed from there. ![]() “I didn’t see a caravan, or a tent for that matter. “We had our meeting in the Hilton hotel at Amsterdam,” he said. West Ham’s managing director, Peter Storrie, was forced to deny rumours that Boogers had been deemed “mentally unfit” to play in September 1995. In 1998 the Chile defender Javier Margas played three games in England before going awol for a year he returned the following season and showed his commitment to the West Ham cause by dyeing his hair claret and blue.įor Boogers, though, a simple trip home turned into one of the strangest stories in English football as it was reported that “Barmy Boogers”, as one paper put it, had gone to live on a caravan site in Holland. Foreign player visits own country shock! He was not the last West Ham player to do so, after all. That should have been that but Boogers, affected by the media attention and suffering from homesickness, went back to Holland. Thankfully, Neville was not hurt and finished the match but Boogers was immediately sent off and given a four-match ban for his recklessness. Shortly after coming on, Boogers flew through the air and fulfilled many a Liverpool fan’s lifelong dream, taking Neville out with what the Sun called a “sickening horror tackle”. He did not take long to make his mark – on Gary Neville, that is. West Ham were trailing Manchester United 2-1 when Boogers was thrown on with the minutes ticking away. Plenty of time to make his name.Īs it turned out, his next appearance off the bench a few days later would be rather more eventful. This being the days before Twitter, YouTube and European football experts, supporters had no idea what to expect and Boogers made his debut on the opening day of the season as a second-half substitute in a 2-1 home defeat by Leeds. That in itself is not so strange – Redknapp was hardly the first manager to rely on a tape – but it did him no favours when things took a turn for the worse. Boogers arrived at West Ham in the summer of 1995 for £1m from Sparta Rotterdam, having built up a perfectly acceptable reputation in the Dutch league, but it would later emerge that Redknapp had never seen him play, instead relying on a video of the striker. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |