Pick On Someone Your Own Size!

Apologies folks, we’ve let you down; you see, in compiling our ultimate rundown of footballers’ Christmas parties earlier in the week we missed off one vital event. Former Chelsea player Tony Cascarino recalled to The Independent recently what went down in 1991 when amazingly Vinnie Jones was left unchecked to organise things. The location was a West London pub and the theme just a good old fashioned lock in; players only, no other staff, and training pre-emptively cancelled the next day.

So what ace did Vinnie have up his sleeves? A dwarf-tossing contest inside the pub. Yes, you read that right: an inter-team competition to see who could throw a vertically challenged adult the furthest. However, when only two dwarfs walked through the door, Vinnie was unsurprisingly perturbed: “Oi, what's your game? We've paid for three, not two!” One of them replied: “Oh, the other one got injured when he was thrown into a load of chairs at a gig the other day.” That is a sentence I definitely thought I’d never have to type.

The Chelsea boys apparently just cracked up, with a couple reasonably suggesting: “What about Wisey [Dennis Wise] making up the third one!” Anyway, faced with having to accept that explanation, Vinnie pointed at one of the dwarfs and said: “Ere, I fucking recognise you, don't I? You were the one I met when I appeared on that television programme, weren't you?” Apparently he was spot on, as the dwarf replied: “Yes, Vinnie, you were the one who tried to throw me in the water!”

The dwarves’ next step was to erect a bouncy castle, which had a sticky velcro wall, and put a mattress on the floor. They then reportedly strapped themselves into velcro suits and prepared to be, ahem, tossed. Cascarino remembers some of the players having difficulty getting the dwarves to stick to the velcro wall after a couple of jars. “They were heavier than I expected,” he quipped.

Why doesn’t this kind of stuff happen these days still? Damn you health & safety and political correctness!