The bald truth about Mancini
Talking to a Queens Park Rangers website recently, the defender recalled the circumstances of his debut appearance for the Republic of Ireland back in the early 1970s. One of the pioneering Anglo-Irish internationals, the centre-half had been born in London to an Irish father.
Terry’s surname at birth was Sealy but after his father died when his son was just seven, Terry’s mother changed their name to Mancini - hence, inevitably, his enduring football nickname of ‘Henry’.
It was a chance conversation with Queen’s Park Rangers’ Irish striker Don Givens which alerted Mancini to his qualification for Ireland, and the player duly travelled to Dublin for his debut game against Poland in Dalymount Park in 1973, notable also because it happened to be Johnny Giles’ first game as manager.
The man himself takes up the story: “It was a great honour to be selected and I lined up on the side of the pitch, desperate to get playing. All the pre-match ceremony seemed to go on forever, and then the music started playing and it went on and on, and I turned to Don Givens and said, ‘for f**k’s sake, their national anthem goes on a bit’ and he said, ‘that’s ours, Terry’. I didn’t have a clue!”
Regardless, Mancini went on to do his bit for Ireland that day, helping his team to a 1-0 win over the Poles, a result much celebrated at the time, not least because the opposition had drawn with England at Wembley a few days previously, thereby eliminating them from the 1974 World Cup. That was also the famous occasion when Brian Clough dubbed the Polish ‘keeper Tomaszewski “a clown.”
Mancini, an old-fashioned stopper unlikely to be ever mistaken for Franz Beckenbauer, was not above clowning around himself. Having received some bad press towards the end of a successful promotion season for QPR - including the suggestion from one scribe that the club should offload him - the bald centre-half borrowed one of his wife’s wigs and ran out onto the pitch for the last game of the season.
Fans and press alike were nonplussed by the mystery new arrival until, during the warm-up, as he rose to head a ball served up to him by team-mate Terry Venables, Mancini theatrically whipped off the hair-piece. Loftus Road went mad and Mancini, already something of a cult favourite on the terraces, could do no wrong for the rest of the afternoon.
But it was his move from Rangers to Arsenal which gave rise to another of the most enduring strands of the Mancini legend. QPR had put a price tag of 15,000 quid on the player’s gleaming head but when Arsenal surprised everyone by coming in for the player, Rangers chairman Jim Gregory suddenly raised the fee to £45,000. A protracted stand-off ensued, during which Mancini was left cooling his heels on the bench until, with David Webb out injured, Rangers were forced to play the Irish international one last time at Loftus Road.
The player recalls: “As I walked off the pitch I looked up into the South Africa Road Stand and Jim Gregory is sitting there with his arms over the railings looking down at me.
“So I turned around, dropped my shorts and wiggled my arse at him. Unfortunately, the BBC cameras were there, and consequently Jimmy Hill had me on Match Of The Day, asking me why I had done it.”
Mancini was fined £150 and banned for two games, but he didn’t mind.
“It worked, because four days later I was an Arsenal player and I served my suspension at Highbury.”
Ireland’s football poet laureate Pete Goulding has immortalised the incident in a lovely lyric poem, sensitively entitled ‘Terry Mancini’s Arse’: “What on earth were his thoughts/when he bent down and dropped his shorts/Did this Cockney centre-back/decide to do it for the crack/Though many there did darkly speak of balding Terry’s massive cheek.”
Which reminds me: are you watching, Rio Ferdinand?
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