If you’ve never listed to the Magic Sponge podcast with Jimmy Bullard and Rob Beckett, you really should.
Basically, they invite ex-footballers on for an hour to tell funny stories that happened during their careers. Barry Fry recounts a tale where he threatened Harry Redknapp with a shotgun, Dean Windass comes across as the nastiest bloke ever born and former ref Mark Halsey describes receiving hand-relief while working as a taxi-driver… It’s pretty revealing stuff!
Today, the latest podcast was released, with former Liverpool stopper Tony Warner; and the man formerly known as ‘Bonus’ didn’t disappoint! Warner’s given us an interview before and is a top bloke.
You can see a list of the Magic Sponge podcasts and download them for free, here. The Warner one, released today, is at the very top.
Warner recounts a fight he had with Stan Collymore during their time at the club, after our former record signing tried to put a chair around his head! Unfortunately former boss Roy Evans got caught in the middle of the scrap at the end…
Here’s how Warner’s story goes…
(Remember, he’s laughing along with the hosts – it’s a lot more jovial than it perhaps appears when written down…)
(This is as accurate a transcript of Warner’s quotes as we could manage. (There’s plenty of interruption, repetition and laughter during the podcast, but this is pretty much the gist!))
So I think David James has poured water on my chair, to start with. So I swapped chairs, left the wet one alone. Now, I’m really looking forward to the game – my first start. But Stan comes and looms right over me and says, ‘I want my f*cking chair back!” Im like, “No.” He raises his voice then and says again, ‘I want my f*cking chair back!’
Everybody turns round at this point. Something’s going off. So I can’t get mugged off here, f*ck that. So he picks the chair up and comes walking towards me… I’m thinking, f*cking naively, he’s just gonna pour the water on me.
Next minute he just swings the chair, a big heavy chair, trying to properly take my head clean off! So I put my arms up,and the chair just clatters my forearms. I knew if my arms weren’t there my head’s coming clean off! After he’s swung it, he’s then punched me straight away – he’s straight on me with a sweet right.
So then I just stand up, swinging, swinging, smacking him, getting in a few myself! The pair of us are just trading!
At this point, Stan’s upset a lot of people. Nobody likes him. So David James and Razor come up behind me and lend a bit of weight to my cause… They get Stan down, get him on the floor. All I remember is one has their elbow across his throat and the other is leaning across his legs. So he’s pinned! I’m thinking, ‘this cheeky c*nt threw a chair at me’ – so I just keep hitting him as many times as I can, until I got pulled off!
He jumped up, so now we’re just snarling at each other. Roy Evans comes in and asks what’s going on. We just start scrapping again and as Evans comes in to stop it, I’ve just nailed him. I’ve accidentally nailed the gaffer!