Robin Friday was a footballer like no other.
A man whose talent for football was only eclipsed by his enthusiasm for high-jinx away from the game.
Or, at least he apparently was.
All we have to rely on is a collection of stories,
the last brilliant footballer who really only exists as an oral history.
If they were true, he really was the greatest footballer you never saw - but
who knows if they were.
He was less a player, more a myth, a collection of tales told by
people who want to believe them.
Because Friday never played at a level higher than the old Third Division, and in the 1970s
before such games were routinely filmed, virtually no footage of him playing exists.
And while he was supposedly brilliant on the pitch,
the reason most don't know more about him, and the reason he never played at a higher
level, is how he behaved off it.
“ If George Best was football's first pop star, Robin was the
game's first rock star,” said Paolo Hewitt, Friday's biographer.
Drink, drugs, women: Friday certainly had the vices of a rock star.
Robin Friday was born in 1952, and was in trouble for much of his youth.
Several offences lead to him serving time in Feltham Borstal,
but after his release from there he played semi- professionally for Hayes as a centre-forward.
During that time he worked on a building site, and suffered a horrible accident when he fell
off a scaffold and impaled himself on a spike, which went up his backside and missed a couple
of major organs by millimetres.
He recovered, and in 1974 he was spotted by Reading,
who signed him for £750.
His first goal for Reading was against Barnsley, a header into an open goal.
“I was thinking of chesting it down and backheeling it in but
I thought I'd better not muck about,” he said afterwards.
In the months after that, he dazzled everyone with his brilliant play, to the point
that defenders gave up trying to get the ball off him, and simply tried to kick him.
Friday was perfectly able to dish it out, too: in his
early weeks at Reading, manager Charlie Hurley had
to warn him to stop fouling players in training.
Over the next couple of years he became a hero at Reading, he dazzled the crowd with
his remarkable skills and infuriated everyone
else with his remarkable capacity for trouble.
But there was enough of the former to make up
for the latter: one goal in particular, against Tranmere, summed that up.
Friday controlled a long pass on his chest around 35 yards out,
let it drop then volleyed with the outside of his right foot.
The ball dipped, swerved and rocketed into the top corner.
Afterwards the referee that day, Clive Thomas, said: "Even up
against the likes of Pele and Cruyff, that rates as the best goal I have ever seen."
Eventually though, Friday's hard-living caught up with him, and his powers waned.
Reading did the unthinkable and sold him to Cardiff
in 1976, and while he still did enough to earn cult
hero status there as well – including flicking Vs at a goalkeeper after scoring a goal, the
photo of which graced the cover of the Super Furry Animals single 'The Man Don't Give A
Fuck' – his time there was brief.
After six months he left the game.
His then-wife thought he lost the passion for the game because the
highs he achieved through football just weren't high enough.
But even though he only played the game for three years, he still left behind
enough stories to create his legend.
Those stories are long, plentiful and almost impossible to verify.
What about the time he squeezed Bobby Moore by the testicles?
Or the game in which he pulled down the shorts of
a defensive colleague, after he spent too much time in the attacking third?
And the most well-known, and widely-shared – the time
he took exception to some close marking by one
Mark Lawrenson while playing against Brighton, so after being sent off he defecated in his
training bag?
And then there's the off-pitch tales.
What about the time he walked into a nightclub and
removed his fur coat to reveal he was wearing only a pair of hob-nailed boots underneath?
​Or being banned from a pub in Reading ten times?
Or he and some friends spiking the punch at his wedding with LSD?
Ultimately, we'll never know what's true and what isn't.
After leaving football he drifted around for years, until he was found dead
in 1990 – he had suffered a heart attack, thought
to be related to a heroin overdose.
Hundreds attended his funeral, he was a hero at two clubs. Robin Friday, a footballer like no other.