Their cup runneth off

By Henry Church Source:Global Times Published: 2020/1/21 22:58:40

Football trophies do not have all the luck, ask Sergio Ramos


France's Kylian Mbappe kisses the 2018 World Cup trophy during a ceremony to celebrate victory at the 2018 World Cup in Paris on September 9, 2018.  Photo: AFP



Footballers are not necessarily the best when it comes to looking after trophies, as many incidents would attest.

Sergio Ramos once dropped the Spanish Super Cup trophy from the open-top bus in 2011 before the said bus drove over it. There have been incidents over the years, to the point where Manchester City's social media team played to the phenomenon by creating a video pretending that Sergio Aguero had dropped the English Premier League trophy from a balcony at the Etihad Stadium after winning it as part of a domestic treble in 2019.

Stolen

He hadn't, of course, but the club were lucky that there was even a trophy to joke around with. There have been almost as many times where the greatest prizes in football have been stolen - often never to be seen again.

The most famous of these is the FIFA World Cup itself. The Jules ­Rimet Trophy, as it then was, first went missing ahead of the 1966 World Cup in England.

In the March leading up to the July tournament, the gold-plated sterling silver and lapis lazuli trophy that depicted Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, went missing from a public exhibition in Westminster Central Hall on a quiet Sunday afternoon in between security checks.

Pickles

It was found a week later in South London by a dog walker walking his mongrel, Pickles. The black and white dog is immortalized in similarly colored television footage following the discovery of football's biggest prize in a garden hedge in Beulah. He has since been immortalized in an eponymous football magazine.

There are claims, published by the Guardian in 2018, that the trophy was stolen by a "gangster and his brother" in an attempt to ransom it, according to the son of the accomplice. But the truth, like Geoff Hurst's winning goal in that subsequent final, will forever remain a mystery.

What's clearer is that Brazil were allowed to keep the trophy in 1970 after winning it for the third time but that did not bring any more security for the most famous statuette in football. It was stolen again in 1983, taken from the Brazilian Football Federation's offices in Rio de Janeiro that December.

Those thieves did not bother with the replica in the same building to make away with the original which has never been seen again. It is presumed to have been melted down into gold bars during a period where Brazil was living under a military junta. The incident resulted in a book, The Theft of the Jules Rimet Trophy by Martin Atherton in 2008.

Unlike the heist 17 years before, no one has yet come to light as being responsible for the biggest trophy-­related heist in football since Manchester United won the 1999 UEFA Champions League against Bayern Munich with two injury-time goals in Barcelona's Camp Nou.

It is in no way a new phenomenon though. Even back in the early days of the English FA Cup - the world's oldest football competition, no less - there were risks to the security of that famous silverware. After Aston Villa's famous victory over local rivals West Bromwich Albion in 1895, that famous trophy was put in Aston town center, a suburb of Birmingham. On the night of September 11 that year it was stolen "without a trace."

The incident is mentioned in the FA Cup exhibit at the National Football Museum in Manchester, but that does not mention the claims of Henry "Harry" James Burge, who confessed to a national newspaper in 1958 as an 80-year-old of his part in stealing the trophy so many years before.

Missing

The modern Europa League trophy appeared to suffer a similar fate in 2018 ahead of the final in Lyon, France. The UEFA Cup trophy went missing in the French city's Mexican namesake, Leon, a city in Guanajuato state.

Following an event in the city, the trophy was taken from a vehicle according to a tweet from city authorities but the state police department soon responded saying that it had been recovered. Despite UEFA claiming that it was always in their possession, the Twitter tumult had people fearing that the original had gone missing.

With Arsenal in that final, there is a fair claim that the English are the bad-luck element in these stories. The theft of a trophy as far from Great Britain as it gets would add to that.

In Japan, the All Japan Championship Trophy, which was itself given to the Japanese FA by the English FA in 1919, disappeared in 1945. There was no mystery in this case: The milarist government seized it to melt it down for the war effort.

Further south in Australia, the Australia Cup, the predecessor to the current FFA Cup, was found in a rubbish bin in 2011, 43 years after it was last won by Sydney Hakoah in 1968.

Not that is this limited to the men's game: The Women's World Cup trophy was reported to have been stolen from the Norwegian FA headquarters in Oslo in 1997. There was a widespread campaign in the local press to get the trophy back but that failed and it has never been seen again. Not bad for a tournament that only started in 1991.

Bigger than even that, the "first-ever World Cup" was stolen from a Working Men's Club in West Auckland, a mining town in England's northeast. The team had won the Lipton Cup, a tournament involving English and Italian teams started by the owner of the globally famous tea brand agains the wishes of the FA.

"Melted down" is the view of one of the people in the latest documentary on England's first World Cup triumph, "Our Cup of Tea." It seems like there is one thing that is almost as English as a cup of tea and that is a missing trophy.



Posted in: FEATURE,SOCCER

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