Many and varied are the pieces of memorabilia, art and paraphernalia that the football club has gathered about itself over the years. Over the next season or three, we are going to select some of these, in no particular order nor importance, to help tell a tale of Throstles down the years. It’s not a definitive history, might at times be apocryphal and at others completely fabricated, but these odd shafts of light will give you a sense of who we are and where we came from. Confused? You will be…
Episode Ten
MEDAL PRESENTED TO PLAYERS IN THE ANGLO-ITALIAN CUP 1995/96
Don’t let it be said that we didn’t take this Anglo-Italian Cup business seriously though for who but the Albion would be in the business of striking medals for a competition that we didn’t even win? There again, given the way things were going in the decade that hope forgot – not Bobby, he was still working here – the only way we were gong to let our players get their hands on medals was to make them ourselves.
Presumably at the outset of the competition, some bright spark decided we should send out to the Jewellery Quarter for half a hundredweight of brass blanks, upon which we had produced the glorious throstle upon the hawthorn or, as Simon Miotto would have, the bird on the stick with the raspberries.
These precious ingots of achievement were then duly handed out at the competition’s games, to both friend and foe alike, doubtless confounding our Italian visitors who possibly thought, given our proximity to Cadburys, that it was chocolate money and so dashed their dainty dentures upon them. Perhaps it was a fiendish plot to put them off their game, though if it was, it achieved pretty mixed results, let’s be honest.
We must have produced well in excess of a century of these little mementos which, lovely as they are to the eye of the supporter, quite possibly meant rather less to those who received them.
Had there been an ebay back in the mid 1990s, it’s likely it would have been backed up to buffering with a glut of them being sold from Italian IP addresses but as it is, if you can find yourself a junk shop in Brescia, you might yet be able to pick yourself up a genuine object of Throstletariat desire for a handful of euros. How’s that for bargain hunting?