The toilet roll matches

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was what we nowadays think of as an extraordinary sight at football matches. No, I don't mean long haired players or shirts with no names or sponsors on, although you could be forgiven for thinking along those lines. Most certainly, players did have long hair, Welsh international star Trevor Hockey of Birmingham City and Sheffield United being one such example. But there were many more besides him who grew their locks to shoulder-length and longer (and never tied them back). 

Players' shirts back then only carried their position number, from 1 (being the goalkeeper) through to 11 (being the left-winger, also known as the outside left). Until 1965 came along, there was no number 12 because the every day games in England didn't allow for substitutes. Most clubs didn't even sport their club badge on their shirts! And, of course, apart from the national team there were no squad numbers in club teams.

But there is one sight which appears to have disappeared from the game and has been long-forgotten by time. I am talking about the lobbing of unused toilet rolls onto the pitch, to a big cheer from the crowds, so that the paper unravelled en route. The matches got held up while the debris was cleared; it happened several times during a match but the activity died out sometime in the 1980s. It must have cost either the lobbers, British Rail or the football clubs thousands of pounds in bought or repurposed (as in pilfered) bog rolls. If my memory serves me well, I do believe that some professional football clubs and British Rail eventually resorted to searching supporters on the way out of the lavatories to make sure they hadn't purloined the paper rolls for alternative use during the matches.

Of course, we all found it amusing when a roll of toilet paper was launched and in mid air above the players. Strangely enough, in all the Football League games I attended, I don't recall a lobbed bog roll actually hitting any players or the referee, although I don't doubt for a minute that some (if not all) of the toilet rolls were actually aimed at the man in black. It's just that, by the time the rolls unravelled, play had moved on.

The pastime of lobbing toilet rolls towards or on to the pitch seemed to die a natural death sometime in the early 1980s. It has been cited that football clubs themselves may have imposed bans on the use of toilet rolls for reasons other than what they were intended in the changing style of stadia, or the activity could have fallen under the auspices of the Football Offences Act 1991 which made it a bannable offence to throw things onto the pitch, but such claims are not written in stone and, other than these flimsy indicators, there is no record found anywhere that the activity was banned outright by either the Football League or the Football Association. 

It seems the throwing of toilet rolls onto the field of play has been 'wiped' from footballing history completely.

Trevor Mulligan