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Cyrille Regis RIP

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    #51
    Regis was very well respected at Villa but I will always think of him first as an Albion player. That late 70's side were great to watch.

    I saw Deane playing for Sheffield United in a cup replay at Colchester in about 1989. He was getting some appalling racist abuse from one idiot standing a couple of rows away. Inevitably Deane scored twice and ran over to celebrate in front of the racist twat. Needless to say he had the last laugh.

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      #52
      Yes, it was striking what Deane said there about Regis (and Cunningham and Batson) having a harder time with racism than he did, but that he still had a hard time.

      To back up the point, I was at West Ham vs Coventry at Upton Park in 1988/89. Regis played for Coventry that day, and took some horrific abuse from the home fans. I distinctly remember him rising above West Ham's defence to crash a header against the bar, and my being both sorry and relieved it didn't go in. Sorry because it would have shut his abusers up, relieved because I was in with the home crowd and any show of pleasure would probably have landed me in hospital.

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        #53
        Sad news indeed.

        I am old enough to remember watching him live in the early 80's at the lane.

        There was always something superhero'y about him, he had that cool tough guy look like those Blaxploitation Characters played by Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree, a shot like hot shot Hamish from the comic book. As the links to his various goals show, his style would be to get the ball, run though his opponents and smash the ball into the net.

        I think what made him stand out in his era was that he seemed to not fit into the classic forward stereotypes at the time.

        Most of his peers were either big "hold it up/ flick on merchants" (Toshack, Chapman, Hately, Mariner) or "nippy ones who feed of scraps" (Aldridge, Rush, Crooks).

        He was unique insofar he had the ability to not only physically dominate all the big carthorse centre-halves of his time, but the speed to outpace them with relative ease.
        In all my time watching premier league football the only players I saw doing this were Regis, Yeboah (for a brief period), (an on form) Heskey, Torres and Drogba.

        This is why in my opinion his great performances really stood out.

        Growing up, I wanted to be able to pass like Hoddle, have the midfield industry of Ardilles and score like Crooks. Despite all that I wanted to look like Cyrille Regis in a football kit with the brooding stare, pecs bursting out of the shirt and massive gats.

        In an age of portly footballers where beer bellies were the norm rather than the exception, he stood out as a physical specimen and for that West Brom were my second team growing up (despite me having no idea where West Brom is. Ironically, they are the closest Premier League club to where I live (at least until Wolves are promoted).

        Thanks for the memories Cyrille, good and bad, especially At a time when there were few positive black role models on TV in the UK.

        Apologies for the rambling. one of my memories of the 80's is Regis regularly dismantling the Spurs defence as West Brom would turn up to the lane and hand out their regular beatings (Don't mention 1987).

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          #54
          Since everyone is doing it, a Cyrille Regis anecdote.

          West Brom came to the lane back in either 81 and 82 and beat us comfortably, Regis got the customary racist chants from the knuckleheads around me in the east stand and at one point he came over to the touchline to pick up the ball to take a quick throw-in. As expected, there were numerous individual shouts of black this and black that from fans around me and he just stopped with ball in turned round and just glared at the crowd. To a man, the racist shouting stopped. He then dropped the ball for the full back to pick up and jogged into position in a very muscular fashion. Once he had jogged into a safe position, the racist chanting continued but the point had been made, the fence around the pitch was to protect the crowd from Regis and not vice versa. At this stage, I knew i had to get big gats when i grew up.

          Look at his gats
          https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/...lity=100&w=960
          https://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/d...38/1202199.jpg

          My memory of Regis bullying spurs
          https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incomin...ille-Regis.jpg

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            #55
            Thanks TG - great story

            "There was Brendan and Laurie and Viv but there was something about Cyrille... if it wasn't for him i never would have been a professional footballer "
            Dion Dublin

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              #56
              He looks like he's about to smash that guy's leg into a dozen pieces. Is that Remi moses with the fantastic Afro?

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                #57
                Yup, that’s Houghton

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                  #58
                  I’ve always considered WBA’s green and yellow number to be among the absolute classic change kits in English football.

                  I now realise that is because virtually al the photos of it I saw at the time were of Regis.

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                    #59
                    That WBA 5-3 win at Old Trafford was so dazzling that I have a fondness for it almost equal to anything my own team has produced. It must have been one of the first games I'd watched on TV, certainly one of the first that captivated me. I was at the Orient v Chester match E10 mentions above and Regis' display was indeed unforgettable.

                    Dion Dublin's tribute on MotD last night was another fine and moving one, I thought.

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                      #60
                      Just watched the highlights of that match on YouTube, after somebody posted the link on Facebook. A remarkable game that I can remember watching on The Big Match, with some great finishes throughout. (Cantello's and Regis's were the best for me.)

                      Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                      Yup, that’s Houghton

                      'Hughton'.

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                        #61
                        Chris was slightly different, in coming from an Irish-Ghanaian background, so was mixed race, not that that stopped the racists either, but an occupational hazard back in those days.

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                          #62
                          I was at this game, and it was quite possibly the most one sided one I ever attended. This highlight clip only shows the Coventry attacks, and I am absolutely sure that the two on here are the only times Coventry even got close to Spurs. Hoddle ran the game and was absolutely imperious. Falco scored in the first half, and despite repeatedly carving out incredible chances, Spurs couldn't get a second. Then right at the end, up popped Cyrille. The place went nuts.

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                            #63
                            Yep, Spurs could be 'Spursy' even in the mid-eighties. And we were probably top of the table at the time.

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                              #64
                              Spurs even Spursed up the pitch invasion.

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                                #65
                                Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                                Spurs even Spursed up the pitch invasion.
                                Regis always seemed to play well against spurs.

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                                  #66
                                  Originally posted by Bordeaux Education View Post
                                  Even managed to get a customary obscure (to me) reference. What is the reference to the media having a pop at the footballer buying his own house?
                                  Nigerian-born Tosin Adarabioyo of Man City bought a £2.25m house and hasn't started a match for them yet.

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                                    #67
                                    I think it's more of a reference to Raheem Sterling buying a house for his mother. That had to be one of the strangest things I've ever seen a player attacked over.

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                                      #68
                                      Great story TG.

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                                        #69
                                        The £2m house story is definitely about Adarabioyo. *Murdoch Scum link
                                        There is so much wrong with this story. The S*n seems have have numerous axes to grind here: the fact that a young player who has yet to break through to the first team is earning 25k a week, the fact that he has had the good sense to invest his not insignificant wages in property instead of splashing it on gold plated bathroom appliances or a chrome Humvee.
                                        The obvious thing that stands out, of course, is the fact that the player in question is black. They'll never say so, but the S*n knows damn well that the only thing that will grind the gears of the bigoted cunts that buy this piece of sub-standard arse fodder more than a young footballer earning vast amounts of money is a young black footballer doing so. It's veiled racism as clickbait.

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                                          #70
                                          This sentence from that article is almost funny.

                                          "Last year we told how £50,000-a-week England hotshot Dele Alli set up a property ownership and letting firm aged just 20."

                                          Congratulations to the Nigerian community, you've now reached the status of scousers in the mid nineties, when a footballer crossing the line into landlord, and the bourgeoisie by buying a few buy to lets qualifies as news.

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                                            #71
                                            Hahaha Berba,

                                            It's our grand plan to buy up all the houses and then erect signs saying "Blacks, dogs and Irish only".

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                                              #72
                                              I love that half-hearted pitch invasion above.

                                              Yoofs: "Yeeeaaaaahhh, we're the bad Spurs boys here to trot aimlessly about your manor"

                                              Graham Roberts: "Get the fuck off the pitch you little wankers"

                                              Yoofs: "Yes Graham, sorry Graham" <scuttles off back to their own end>

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                                                #73
                                                West Brom came to the lane back in either 81 and 82 and beat us comfortably, Regis got the customary racist chants from the knuckleheads around me in the east stand and at one point he came over to the touchline to pick up the ball to take a quick throw-in. As expected, there were numerous individual shouts of black this and black that from fans around me and he just stopped with ball in turned round and just glared at the crowd. To a man, the racist shouting stopped. He then dropped the ball for the full back to pick up and jogged into position in a very muscular fashion. Once he had jogged into a safe position, the racist chanting continued but the point had been made, the fence around the pitch was to protect the crowd from Regis and not vice versa. At this stage, I knew i had to get big gats when i grew up.

                                                this is a great story, but there is one bit of that that is entirely incredible. I can't believe that there was ever a single moment where you decided you wanted big gats. On a side discussion of the role in Gats in warding off interpersonal unpleasantness. I wonder when was the last time someone was homophobically abusive to a male gymnast's face? Those guys who do the rings look like they would give a group of russian hooligans considerable pause for thought.

                                                Also I'm really not sure that the spurs player that Regis is running through like he's engaged in some sort of martial arts movie set in one of those japanese houses with paper partitions, is Chris Hughton. He looks nothing like Chris Hughton.

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                                                  #74
                                                  I didn't think it was either. If I was to hazard a guess I'd say Tony Galvin.

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                                                    #75
                                                    The Children of the Irish diaspora are getting it tough in the discussion of this photograph.

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