Duckers & Diving: Showdown at the Villa
THIS week our bar stool-bound columnist contemplates having to fish out his football boots for a business journalist penalty shoot-out and has worryingly started talking about himself in the third person.
I hear that former newspaper hack John Duckers is getting decidedly edgy about pulling on his football boots at the age of 60.
The possibility is in play as part of a somewhat bizarre move to ‘decide’ who won this year’s Midlands Media Awards Business Journalist of the Year category.
For the first time ever there was a dead heat with Duckers, whose success was also a first, sharing it with many times winner Jon Griffin of the Birmingham Mail.
Rewarded with a very nice glass gong each.
And, in the euphoric aftermath of the awards night announcement, Griffin proposed a penalty shootout to determine the ultimate victor, a challenge Duckers felt honour bound to accept.
Surely an idea which would quickly be forgotten about in the sober light of day.
Worryingly though, there has been further talk from the Griffin camp of approaching the Mail’s Aston Villa reporter Mat Kendrick to inquire whether the contest might be held at Villa Park.
And now Barclays has generously got behind it, looking to get a loan of the Premiership trophy and promising to organise a charity bash.
Date to be confirmed, but looks like June 15.
This has got Duckers quaking in those boots – that’s if he had any (they were put out with the rubbish some years back).
He revealed: “I’ve still got my rugby ones – couldn’t face finally getting rid of them after all those glory years at the top with Aberdeenshire in the then Scottish division five, or was it six – but the football equivalent are no more.
“Though I can reveal that 30 years ago I was a rugged centre half for my then office team. Good at kicking people but no track record as a penalty taker.
“These days I do a lot of walking but, leaving aside running for the bus on infrequent occasions, haven’t broken serious sweat for a decade or so. The last two times I got roped into doing the line for Moseley Oak in the dizzy heights of rugby’s Midlands Two West North – Duckers junior is the hooker – I pulled muscles.
“Clearly not something I want to repeat at Villa Park, with a watching crowd of ‘chums’ taking the mick big style. There is a danger I might have to come out of retirement and get down to some serious practice.”
A Liverpool supporter – not happy about current league form – Duckers’ only consolation is that Griffin is a Mansfield Town fan … so presumably is as useless as his team.
“My plan is to tell Griff that if it’s not going to be held at Wembley then I’m not interested, go into a Balotelli sulk, kick the goalposts, throw my shirt at the bench and storm off down the tunnel,” he says.
“Do you think it will work?”
