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Football’s chequered history of half-time entertainment: Punch-ups, cheerleaders and booing The Shamen

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Football’s chequered history of half-time entertainment: Punch-ups, cheerleaders and booing The Shamen

It was one of the more surreal sights at an English football ground this season.

Stood on the pitch at Wycombe Wanderers’ Adams Park, a man on his stag-do belted out the words to Let It Go while dressed as Elsa from the Disney film Frozen, providing the half-time spectacle during their FA Cup match against York City.

The karaoke rendition at the start of this month was an extreme case, but it highlighted the culture of English football, where the prelude to, and mid-game interval at, a match are viewed as moments for light entertainment, a bit of fun and some gentle crowd participation.

The crossbar challenge and penalty shootout competitions are two regular favourites (just hope you don’t have David James in goal).

In the United States, half-time entertainment in the NBA might include acrobats, frisbee-catching dogs, baby racing and T-shirt cannons, while it was announced on Monday that Beyonce will perform at that point during the Christmas Day NFL game between the Houston Texans and Baltimore Ravens being streamed on Netflix.

Of course, the biggest half-time show of all is at the NFL’s Super Bowl, which has become a global event in its own right, attracting some of the biggest musicians in the world, such as Rihanna, Madonna and Michael Jackson, causing the league to extend the usual 12-minute interval to make more room for the show and prompting FIFA, global football’s governing body, to promise similar at the World Cup final in the United States in 2026.

For many English matchgoing fans, the idea of a carefully choreographed, slickly produced and commercially driven half-time show will feel light years away from what they watch week in, week out at club grounds around the country: the lowkey, the odd and the often eccentric.

Historically at English stadiums, dating back to the late 19th century, marching brass bands — often linked to the army, navy or police force — provided the entertainment before matches and at half-time, especially at big cup ties.

Arsenal, for example, were one of the last of the top clubs to host a marching police band, from London’s Metropolitan force, who were accompanied by vocals from one of the Met’s officers, constable Alex Morgan. On every lap of the pitch, the band leader would toss his mace (a long baton used to communicate with the musicians) high into the air as the crowd willed him to drop it. This happened from the 1960s to the early 1980s, though Morgan sang one last time when Arsenal said goodbye to Highbury in 2006 and moved to the Emirates Stadium.

“Nowhere else in the country had a singing policeman,” his son, Patrick, told local newspaper the Islington Gazette in 2017. “He would get serious abuse, especially as the band never performed music of the day. It would always be something like opera.”

Communal singing was another staple. This was a feature of the late 1920s and into the 1930s and became a long-running part of FA Cup final tradition, with Abide With Me (which started in 1927) still sung by the crowd to this day. However, this took place before kick-off, rather than during half-time. At the 1953 FA Cup final at London’s Wembley Stadium between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, songs included Auld Lang Syne, Soldiers Of The Queen, She’s A Lassie from Lancashire (both clubs were from the north-western county), She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside and I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts.

Police-dog training displays were another spectacle, which involved the force’s canine officers performing tricks and tackling obstacle courses on the pitch.

The public-address systems at stadiums were often used to inform fans of half-time scores at other games in the days before mobile phones and even portable radio, while the matchday lottery draws based on supporters’ seat numbers are another longstanding tradition that exist to this day.

With the introduction of the Premier League in 1992, UK broadcaster Sky Sports tried to modernise the entertainment and experimented with live pop bands on the pitch at half-time. For Sky Sports’ first televised Monday night match, which was between Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers at the former’s Maine Road, dance group Undercover performed their version of Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, though the miming was wildly out of sync with the prerecorded music.

Another half-time performance was by The Shamen, best known for their hit Ebeneezer Goode, but they were drowned out by the crowd at Highbury at half-time of a match between Arsenal and Manchester City when home supporters found out the lead singer Mr C was a diehard fan of their London rivals Chelsea.

“Half-time entertainment on the field seemed more suited to American football than our own beautiful game,” Mr C, aka Colin Angus, tells The Athletic. “But it was an odd opportunity, televised live; plus, Shamen had Ebeneezer Goode on single release at the time, a rambunctious number with a slightly hooligan refrain which we hoped might find resonance on the terraces.

“The stadium atmosphere became increasingly sour during Move Any Mountain, the first hit we played. By the second track, there were hurled coins whizzing past our ears. Luckily none found their mark.

“Certainly the live coverage on Sky would have put Shamen onscreen in living rooms up and down the UK and Highbury was notable as the group’s one and only stadium show — other than a basketball arena in Australia.

“Mercifully the band were never invited to perform at their own public execution again.”

Sky tried other gimmicks too, including match balls being dropped in on parachutes, battles between people in giant inflatable sumo-wrestler costumes and firework displays. There were also American-style cheerleaders, the ‘Sky Strikers’, to accompany the entertainment.

“Sky Sports won the contract to cover the Premier League and were basically regarded as enemies of the people,” Ian Darke, who was a commentator for Sky at the time, tells The Athletic. “On our coverage, daggers were drawn. We realised that people were just waiting to rip it all to shreds. Sky’s attitude was, ‘We’ve got to make a splash, we’ve got to be different and we’ve got to get noticed’.

“In that time (the 1992-93 season), Norwich City had a fantastic season and we used to have them on Monday Night Football quite a lot. Quite often, we’d turn up there and the ‘Sky Strikers’ came on. After this happened for about three Monday nights, the next time it happened, I noticed a couple of the Norwich players came up to me in the tunnel before the game and said, ‘Are the Sky Strikers here tonight?’.

“It ended up with the Sky Christmas party that year being held in Norwich on a Monday night. Suffice to say, one or two of the Norwich players turned up mysteriously at the party later that night.”

However, having met with a mixed reception beyond the Norwich squad, Sky Sports’ flashy ideas were gradually phased out over the course of that first season.

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Months before the launch of Sky Sports, fans were treated to another spectacle.

Funded by the League Cup’s then sponsor, the electrical goods retailer Rumbelows, and thought up by television producers from the Saint & Greavsie football analysis and chat show, the idea of the ‘sprint challenge’ was simple: to find the fastest footballer over 100m across the 92 clubs that made up the game’s top four divisions.

Every club was asked to put forward their quickest player and the field was whittled down over a series of regional heats that culminated in the final on the pitch at Wembley at half-time of the 1992 League Cup final between Manchester United and Nottingham Forest. The players ran the 100m wearing their full club kit — and football boots.

Pitchside, television personality John McCririck, famous from UK TV horse-racing coverage, went through the odds alongside a bookmaker, with fans allowed to bet on their favourites. For the winner, the prize was £10,000 cash, courtesy of Rumbelows, as well as a new telly.

The field for the final comprised Kevin Bartlett (Notts County), who ran the quickest time in the heats, John Williams (Swansea City), Tony Witter (Queens Park Rangers), Adrian Littlejohn (Sheffield United), Efan Ekoku (Bournemouth), Michael Gilkes (Reading), Leigh Jenkinson (Hull City), and Paul Fleming (Mansfield Town). Nottingham Forest’s Des Walker was unable to take part, as his team were playing in the final.

Manchester City’s England international defender Keith Curle, who scored in the derby against United in the week leading up to the League Cup final, had appeared in the semi-finals, held pre-game at Wembley that day, where he received a hostile welcome from the United fans already inside the ground. After failing to reach the final, he swiftly made his exit.

Despite a shaky start, Williams, dubbed the ‘Flying Postman’ because of his previous job as a postie, finished first (pictured top), clocking a time of 11.49 seconds, with the race discussed by a fresh-faced Gary Lineker and England legend Jack Charlton in the studio. A podium was erected on the field to celebrate Williams’ victory, with Bartlett in second and Gilkes third.

Williams had travelled to Wembley with one of his closest friends and Swansea team-mate at the time, Jon Ford, who was celebrating his birthday. Their partying the night before was far from ideal preparation for the run.

“As it hit midnight, there was a bit of a free bar going on, so we had a few drinks and I was a little bit worse for wear, I think I got back into my room at 3am,” he told The Athletic. “Jon woke me up just before the semi-final. I think I finished in the top four and then I sobered up a little bit more after that and actually won it. That’s my memory of it.

“I’d scored the day before (for Swansea), celebrated my mate’s birthday and then won the sprint challenge.

“£10,000 was a lot of money then. I was slightly distracted before the race because there was a lad on the sidelines keeping the ball up and he wasn’t even looking at the ball. I was like, ‘Oh my god’. I realised it was (future United great) Ryan Giggs. Then the gun went off. I probably started last and finished first. I always knew that I was stronger from 50m in. When I did it, I just thought, ‘Wow, I’ve actually won £10,000’. It was a real shock.

“Do they call me the ‘Flying Postman’? Yes, they do. Everywhere I go. They remember me all for that race. Great memories, great times, I can’t complain. If they do it again, I need a 20-yard head start because I’m old now.”

There have been some other notable half-time events, though less remarkable than watching professional players in a sprint race — think small-sided matches involving local children or rolling out a decorated former player to be applauded by the crowd.

Half-time entertainments to have proved a hit include Crystal Palace’s ‘On Me Shed Son’ in the mid-2000s, where fans had the chance to win a new kitchen worth £2,500 if they could chip two out of three balls into a garden shed. Wolves had a similar game, but involving a bathtub instead.

Palace, incidentally, are the only Premier League team to still have cheerleaders — called The Crystals — who do routines pre-match and at half-time. The Crystals have been a fixture at Palace since December 2010, shortly after Steve Parish took control of the club. They have continued to perform even despite some criticism and after Formula 1 and the Professional Darts Corporation decided to phase out the use of ‘grid girls’ and ‘walk-on girls’ in 2018.

For Peterborough United’s half-time entertainment, happening this season, supporters try to kick a football into a builders’ skip — a tie-in with sponsors Mick George, a skip-hire firm — to win a prize, a game that was also played at neighbours’ Cambridge United for many years and proved very popular.

At Bristol City, there’s a half-time relay race involving runners in inflatable apple costumes, because of their sponsorship link with the West Country cider company Thatcher’s.

However, some of the recent half-time efforts tend to stick in the memory because of how they went wrong.

Nowhere was this more apparent than the punch-up between Wolfie, the mascot for Wolverhampton Wanderers, and the three pigs, who were provided by double-glazing company Coldseal, during a match against Bristol City at Ashton Gate in 1998.

What started out as harmless fun in the form of a penalty shootout ended up with a brawl between Wolfie and one of the three pigs in the middle of the pitch as the travelling Wolves fans started chanting, “Come on Wolfie, come on Wolfie!”

As tensions escalated, stewards rushed onto the pitch to separate the feuding mascots, with City’s 6ft cat mascot also acting as a peacemaker.

After the game, Patrick Kelly, who was portraying one of the pigs, blamed ‘Wolfie’ for the violence. “At half-time, the wolf approached me, struck a blow to my head which resulted in my head becoming detached from the pig body,” he told Midlands Today.

Wolves defended their mascot and insisted he wasn’t the perpetrator. The man behind Wolfie, Steve Bird, later told his side of the story to the BBC, saying the violence began when he fouled one of the pigs to get to the ball. “One of the pigs lost his head,” he said. “I was defending the honour of our club.”

However, he then accepted he was to blame and issued an apology on air when they were all brought together.

Heavy-metal band Saxon were another example of a half-time performer having a tough time, when they did a show during Sheffield Wednesday’s match against Sunderland in January 2007.

The idea, dreamt up by pop promoter Harvey Goldsmith, was to try to set a new world record for most people playing air-guitar at once, but with the home side having conceded moments earlier to be 2-0 down at half-time, Saxon were booed off by the angry and uncooperative Wednesday supporters and cut their set short.

“That’s the worst three minutes I’ve ever f***ing spent in my life,” lead singer Peter ‘Biff’ Byford said afterwards.

A live band being jeered is nothing compared to what happened at Villa Park in 1998.

Nigel Rogoff, an RAF parachutist, had to have a leg amputated after he hit the stands during a parachute jump at half-time during Villa’s home match against Arsenal, while dressed as Father Christmas. “I was lucky to get away with my life,” he later told UK newspaper The Guardian. “I was on a ventilator for three weeks, and it was the new year before I was conscious.”

However there was some reason for cheer — Rogoff met a nurse, Sarah, in the rehab unit, and they eventually married and had two sons together.

With FIFA now eyeing up a Super Bowl-style half-time event of their own at the 2026 World Cup final in MetLife Stadium just outside New York City, perhaps some of the stories in this piece will act as a source of inspiration.

But if you’re reading, FIFA, just make sure to keep the Wolf and the three little pigs apart.

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(Top photos: One of the Bristol City’s mascots by Tom Honan/EMPICS; and John Williams winning the Rumbelows Sprint Challenge final, by Mark Leech/Offside; both via Getty Images)

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