Vegetable-hurling habit simply good, healthy fun
It’s been a long while since I enjoyed a story as much as this week’s cabbage attack on Aston Villa football manager Steve Bruce.
Villa are a big club with a rich history in English football; a fan in the stands biffed the cabbage at Bruce after they continued their poor form in the Football Championship, settling uncomfortably in 13th place. It’s unlikely they will be returning to the Premier League any time soon.
Bruce was fired a day after the cabbage attack, giving rise to some significant questions: I mean, how many people take a cabbage to a football match? How do you hide it, for a start? It doesn’t fit up your jumper. If it’s discovered by the bagsearching security folk, do you say: “Oh yeah, just been to Tesco’s”?
But, more importantly, maybe New Zealand (where the fan base can be a bit, well, staid) should harvest a whole variety of vegetables for those days when frustrations need to be released.
In fact, we could almost invent a whole new coded world of vegetable insults that could be slung at errant coaches and players. We’re looking at you, Michael Cheika . . .
Like a kumara, as in “suck the kumara” — a wonderfully illogical piece of New Zealand slang that means to suffer an abject failure or disaster, even. These could be thrown at coaches or players who have had a bit of a disaster of a match — though it wouldn’t be as serious as the dreaded cabbage attack which has now come to preface an imminent sacking.
Brussel sprouts — with olfactory properties resembling, ahem, human emissions, they are ideally sized missiles and could be directed at those who have stunk the place up. Memo refs, assistant refs and TMOs . . . duck.
Chokos would be reserved for teams which snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Get it? They choke — and are then subjected to a barrage of chokos. Leeks could be used (in spite of their association with Welsh rugby) for peppering a team with a leaky defence.
We can rush quickly past beetroot (far too many possibilities there for a family newspaper) but rhubarb has potential — particularly for coaches who talk a load of old baloney and who would then be visited by the embodiment of “talking rhubarb [nonsense]”.
Former Springboks coach Allister Coetzee would have been ideal for this, though All Black coach Steve Hansen probably qualified when, the other day, he mused about the government giving lots of money to New Zealand’s top brand.
But in case you think I’m talking rhubarb, the noble art of vegetable throwing has a proud tradition in sport and English football in particular. For this we can thank Chelsea.
At Stamford Bridge and some away venues, the Chelsea fans throw stalks of celery on the pitch, accompanied by a mildly pornographic song whose lyrics shouldn’t be repeated here.
The origins of this strange missile are cloudy but the practice has been around since the 1980s. In 2002, four Chelsea fans were arrested for celery tossing at Villa Park but got off when their lawyer argued that celery throwing had been a Chelsea tradition for at least 20 years.
Matters came to a head in 2007 when, during a Carling Cup final, Arsenal’s Cesc Fabregas complained about being pelted with celery stalks when taking a corner. In another irony, Fabregas now plays for . . . Chelsea.
The club then released this statement: “The throwing of anything at a football match, including celery, is a criminal offence for which you can be arrested and end up with a criminal record. In future, if anyone is found attempting to bring celery into Stamford Bridge they could be refused entry and anyone caught throwing celery will face a ban.”
Don’t you love it? Still, we shouldn’t be too scornful of New Zealand fans’ rather pallid record re such things — after all, one strange person at a World Cup tie involving the All Whites and Chile a few years back allegedly hurfed a car door on to the Auckland pitch.
I’m not even sure it’s true. There’s no documentary evidence and, if there’s photographic proof, I’ve been unable to find it.
Don’t think it’ll catch on, though, even if it is more than urban legend. Not like some of the inventive tossing from the north — like the bombardment of hundreds of small plastic pigs that delayed the start of a Coventry v Charlton match a few years ago, the Mars bars thrown at Tottenham’s Paul Gascoigne (he loved them and had a tendency towards chubbiness ).
Though we should draw the line at the severed pig’s head thrown near Portugal’s Luis Figo after he committed the sin of transferring from Barcelona to Real Madrid.
But cabbages? Aston Villa may just have started something . . .