My 5 Favourite Robin Friday Stories

Recently I discovered a story about an old footballer called Robin Friday. He never played at the top level, or for England, although he was talented and good enough. Friday spent most of his career at Reading and is something of a cult hero there, mainly due to actions off the pitch. Robin Friday smoked, drank, took drugs, stayed up all night and just generally didn't give a shit, but was still an amazing footballer. He was a massive hero, in other words, and he died in 1990 aged just 38 of a drugs overdose. Having read up on Robin, and being most of the way through a biography of him, here are my 5 favourite stories about the great man.

5. 'The Elephant'
As mentioned above, Friday loved to go out drinking, and according to his friends from Reading at the time, he'd often go out to clubs wearing little more than an overcoat and a pair of boots. He also enjoyed a dance he'd invented called The Elephant. This involved him turning his trouser pockets inside out and getting his wanger out. Then simply dancing about a bit. Unsurprisingly, he got barred from places a lot. Oh and he also liked to jump off 20ft balconies to the dancefloor below. What professional footballer doesn't?

4. The Policeman
Seemingly, Friday was as amazing on the pitch as he was off it and scored some pretty brilliant goals in his time. In April 1975 he scored the winner for Reading in a game against Rochdale, and as a celebration, ran over an kissed a policeman, who was on duty by the side of the pitch. Robin's explanation? "The policeman looked so cold and fed up standing there, so I decided to cheer him up a bit"
(A year later, he also scored what sounds like an unbelievable goal by taking the ball on his chest, with his back to goal and volleying in over his shoulder from 25 yards. When the ref told him at the end that it was the best goal he'd ever seen, Robin replied "You should come here more, i do that every week")

3. The Swan
Almost inevitably, Robin loved a joke at the expense of his team mates/opposition/anyone in the vicinity. My favourite of the ones I've read about involves him finding a group of Reading players outside their team-mate's hotel room, where he was with a girl. While the others knocked on the door and shouted various 'hilarious' insults, Friday simply kicked the door down with his hobnail boots. He then went down to the bar, had a few beers, went outside to the hotel grounds and wandered back into the bar with a swan under his arm. He then just carried on drinking, with a swan. Brilliant.


2. The Wedding
As well as everything else, Robin Friday was, by all accounts, a pretty nice guy, and at 16, married his black girlfriend, at a time when most people where he lived wanted them all sent home. They divorced and in '76 he got married again in what seems to be the greatest wedding football has ever seen. From Wikipedia: "The wedding was filmed by Southern Television, before whose cameras Friday, wearing an open-necked tiger-skin-pattern shirt, brown velvet suit and snakeskin boots, sat on the steps of the church and rolled a joint. Friday had invited about two hundred people, mostly friends and relatives from London, who joined in the drinking and drug-taking and ending up fighting each other and stealing the couple's wedding presents, one of which was a large quantity of cannabis. Liza later called the wedding "the most hilarious thing ever". "I have been to a few weddings," recalled Rod Lewington, "but never one like that."
Worth it just for the outfit he wore alone, i think.

1. Mark Lawrenson
Anyone who's ever wondered how the hell Mark Lawrenson gets away with being quite that much of a boring, miserabilist prick on TV every week will see why this is my favourite.
By 1977, Robin was playing for Cardiff. During an away game with Brighton, he was marked by Lawrenson. Robin got so fed up with Lawro's close marking that he waited for him to attempt a sliding tackle, then simply kicked him in the face. Which is good enough on its own. But there's more. Before he left the ground, while the game was still going on, he, by all accounts, broke into Brighton's dressing room, found Mark Lawrenson's kit bag...and did a shit in it. Beyond brilliant.

 Unfortunately, after he retired from the professional game in 1977, aged just 25, Robin went properly off the rails and did time in prison for, quite brilliantly, impersonating a policeman so he could 'confiscate' other people's drugs. He is, however, consistently voted both Reading and Cardiff's greatest ever player by their fans.

This is the only footage i could find, but it gives you an idea...

So if that's not enough to make Robin Friday your new favourite dead ex-player, there's something seriously wrong with you.