Nothing new under the star

AND there was you thinking that the ‘Chelski’ nickname for the Fulham Road side only entered the lexicon of football with the arrival of Roman Abramovich at Stamford Bridge. Well, think again.

In an article in the match programme for last Wednesday’s game against Barcelona, the club historian Rick Glanvill provided proof that the nickname first appeared in 1936 and was coined by a long-since defunct English sports paper ‘The Star’ to mark an end-of-season tour of Poland by the Blues.

Polish papers, tickled by the name, also picked it up but, thereafter, it languished in obscurity for nearly seventy years.

This, of course, means that there can’t be too many pensioners around who can truthfully say they remember where they read it first.