We won’t bore you with the exact details of how we started thinking far too hard about things that fry our brain because they never ever actually happened. There’s cricket involved, let’s leave it there.
Anyway. It led us here. Football stuff that also never happened despite our brain at one time or other being entirely convinced it did.
Even now, we’re pretty sure some of these things did in fact happen, much like these facts we absolutely cannot believe.
Let’s hear yours at theeditor@football365.com
Stewart Downing’s underwhelming Tottenham career
Those couple of years at White Hart Lane really did sum up the lost potential of Downing’s career. He really did seem to have the world at his feet, but for neither the first nor last time, Spurs got in the way.
Of course, as always with Spurs, managerial changes got in the way. Signed by Harry Redknapp six months before he left the club, Downing never truly got over Andre Villas-Boas’ early suspicions, and that was that.
Managing just three Premier League goals and a handful of assists, he – like so many others before him after being chewed up by Spurs’ ridiculousness – sought solace at West Ham, because they are very, very, very slightly less ridiculous.
We all remember it now, don’t we? Except it never happened. We can picture Downing, a look of exasperated frustration on his face and a cockerel on his chest, so clearly that we do actually worry about the deeply uninspiring nature of the things our brain imagines.
The West Ham bit is true, though. He did end up at West Ham. Which makes us wonder whether on some level even Downing himself feels like he experienced an underwhelming 18 months at Spurs. We bet he does.
Roy Keane, Blackburn manager
Come on. You remember. Don’t act like you can’t immediately conjure this in your mind’s eye. Keane, bearded but only flecked with grey at this time, eyes narrowing with rage, Kappa-tracksuited, yelling furiously at Junior Hoilett or perhaps David Dunn. Sharing a knowing look with Ryan Nelsen about these lazy fancy dans. Telling Roque Santa Cruz that scoring goals is ‘just his job’ and nothing all that impressive.
Blackburn didn’t even have Kappa kits at the time of this absolute nonsense we’ve invented in our heads. We are not well.
This Golden Generation England team: James, Neville, Ferdinand, Terry, Cole, Beckham, Gerrard, Lampard, Scholes, Rooney, Owen
Ah yes, the Golden Generation. Should have won stuff, shouldn’t they? Didn’t, did they? They also never once lined up with this starting XI, despite it containing all the key ingredients of the era.
Now, we’ve obviously committed a significant mischief in sticking Wayne Rooney here, because he’s not strictly speaking Golden Generation, but did play alongside all of them.
When you stop and think about it properly, this team never happening starts to make plenty of sense. Start doing the maths of Rooney’s emergence and Rio Ferdinand’s, ahem, forgetfulness and Paul Scholes’ early international retirement and it all comes together.
But at first thought we’d confidently expect each and every one of you to just go right ahead and assume this team played together a bunch of times. Yet even if you take away one layer of mischief and replace Rio with Sol Campbell and it’s still only four games together.
READ: Jude Bellingham is the Wayne Rooney of this Golden Generation; will he under-achieve too?
Younes Kaboul and Tom Huddlestone at QPR
It is simply impossible for any halfway football-addled brain to have two players so indelibly linked with Harry Redknapp and make that tally with the fact he never, ever signed them during his spectacular destroy-and-exit at QPR.
It’s just so easy to picture them in hoops, isn’t it? Plodding semi-aimlessly around the place in half-arsed and vastly overpaid fashion.
Especially Tom Huddlestone, but especially Younes Kaboul.
Man United losing 6-3 to Southampton in their grey kit
We’ve got a few of these coming up, all of the same type. The previous ones are just complete fiction, but plausible fictions. It’s beguilingly easy to imagine Roy Keane in a Blackburn tracksuit, or Stewart Downing in an Under Armour Spurs kit, or Younes Kaboul stumbling around Loftus Road.
There is no real reason for any of those things or anything like them to come to mind so easily, but there’s just something about those combinations of man and club that feel right, so your brain does the rest.
These next few come from a slightly different place. These ones are things that did happen, but not the way you necessarily remember them. Now we fully expect the comment section here to be full of ‘Well I never thought that’ and hurrah for you, but we guarantee that while you may not have misremembered or conflated these specific incidents, you will have done it with others. Like Denis Law relegating Man United.
This one we reckon, if we’re honest, almost all of us have at some point or other got muddled up in our heads, even if we subsequently go ‘Oh no, those were separate hilarities’. And that’s the point, they were hilarities.
It must be hard to imagine for younger fans now, but there was a time when Manchester United losing a game of football to a team they shouldn’t really lose to was an event of national importance. There’s a reason ‘Hated, adored, never ignored’ came to be a United call to arms, and it’s far more powerful than the ‘Hated, adored, occasionally viewed with something approaching pity’ that would now apply.
Anyway, Back in the mid-90s, Manchester United did two hilarities at The Dell. And they are two of the more infamous United hilarities of the time. They lost a game 6-3, which even now would be notably funny, and they also infamously lost a game where they changed their grey kit at half-time because it had apparently rendered the players invisible to each other yet not, weirdly, to the Southampton players. Worst. Invincibility. Cloak. Ever.
But these two now frequently conflated events happened on two entirely separate occasions. United were in blue and white for the 6-3 paddling at the hands of a Southampton team managed by Graeme Souness, which itself feels like a candidate for this feature until you remember that he was the manager for that whole Ali Dia caper and then somehow it becomes something that could somehow belong in both this feature and its sibling about things that did happen but feel like they couldn’t possibly have and we’re not going to lie our brain really hurts.
READ: When kits go wrong: Villa suffer like Barca, Bees; Man Utd sockwatch; Fiorentina’s accidental fascism
Sir Alex Ferguson inspiring a 5-3 comeback win at White Hart Lane with the immortal: “Lads, it’s Tottenham”
Another classic era Man United one. Again, it’s two things that did happen, but not at the same time. Manchester United did come from 3-0 down at half-time to beat Spurs 5-3 in 2001 and Sir Alex Ferguson did once issue a team-talk comprising the words “Lads, it’s Tottenham.”
Or at least, there’s plausible enough evidence from enough places that he did despite the fact it could definitely also be one of those apocryphal things itself. Every chance we’ve put it in the wrong piece altogether.
Let’s accept, though, that he did say “lads, it’s Tottenham”. But what he definitely didn’t do was say it to inspire a comeback from 3-0 down at White Hart Lane.
Former Blackburn manager Roy Keane gives the full context in his telling of the story, and it makes it obvious it couldn’t possibly apply to a situation in which United are 3-0 down at White Hart Lane because it’s a) at home, b) pre-match and also about how easy it is to just sort Spurs out which wouldn’t really ring true at 3-0 down.
“I thought I knew what the group might need, that we didn’t need a big team talk.
“It was Tottenham at home. I thought please don’t go on about Tottenham, we all know what Tottenham is about, they are nice and tidy but we’ll f******g do them.
“He came in and said: ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’, and that was it. Brilliant.”
It’s brilliant, and brilliantly Fergie, and it’s easy to see why it feeds into the legend even more if he said it at 3-0 down in a game United would go on to win 5-3. But we all also know that Fergie’s inspiring team-talk that day will have involved much more screaming, a very red face, some enormously industrial language and at least one threat of physical evidence.
Whatever he did worked tremendously, but we would bet our house against it containing such pith and poetry.
A final note on “lads, it’s Tottenham”. After That Night In Bilbao, Spurs have reclaimed the phrase to the extent that they now sell official merchandise with it daubed across T-shirts and hoodies and so forth, and we are absolutely here for that level of petty point-scoring and 20-year grudge-holding. Daniel Levy will copyright it next, you watch.
Next step: beating Juventus in a European final and whacking “it is the history of the Tottenham” on a £10 hoodie and charging £60 for it.
Steven Gerrard slipping to hand Chelsea the title at Anfield
We’ve covered Gerrard’s Slip in great detail in the companion piece to this pish, but it definitely deserves a place here for the simple fact that the actual title winners that season were a very forgettable pre-Pep Man City.
Nobody cared about that City title win, because it lacked anything approaching the AGUERROOOO moment and the story of that season was 100 per cent Liverpool’s unlikely title charge and inexplicable late collapse, via The Slip and Crystanbul.
The fact The Slip came against Chelsea, who were at that time still very much a team who sometimes won the league, makes a perfect combination of a memorable disaster against a plausible title winner against a backdrop of entirely forgettable actual title winners.
Name one interesting thing about that City season without looking, go on. They even scored more goals than exciting, free-flowing Liverpool. Yet nobody now can remember a single one of them. Stop saying you can. We don’t believe you.
Michael Owen scoring 20 Premier League goals in a season
Most natural finisher you’ve ever seen, wasn’t he? The teenage phenom, racking up the goals. All kinds of goals. Poacher’s goals, instinctive finishes, goals scored with aplomb, defenders left trailing desperately in his wake. This the direct result of years and years and years refusing to grow or develop even the tiniest interest or curiosity about literally anything that wasn’t about scoring goals. Or to some extent racehorses.
Sure, injuries caught up with him and as his hamstrings betrayed him the goals and glory dried up a little.
But still he could look back on all those 20-goal seasons from his younger days with Liverpool. For Michael Owen, the rapid youngster with the insatiable appetite for goals, was the very epitome of the 20-goal striker.
Except he never did. Despite scoring 175 league goals in his career at Liverpool, Real Madrid, Newcastle and Manchester United he never once scored 20 league goals in a single season.