Crouch on Gillingham - legend

You can understand Peter Crouch being a little bitter this season. Down the pecking order at Anfield and usurped by Emile Heskey as England's first-choice big fellah, he'd be forgiven for giving both gaffers a public, Lehmann-esque piece of his mind.

Instead, across two pages of his new autobiography, Walking Tall, Crouch sticks the boot into Gillingham. Not just the club and its fans, but the whole, unsuspecting community.

"Dad remembers his first visit to that Medway town in Kent quite clearly," writes Crouch, embarking on a memorable scene-setting stanza. In it, his father - high-flying advertising executive Bruce - visits a pub where the locals are "watching 'Supermarket Sweep' on television and betting on it with cash." He then observes a chap pouring oil into a drain while his child gambols merrily with a Staffordshire bull terrier. "If you've never had the pleasure of visiting Gillingham," he concludes, "I hope that puts you in the picture."

Why the rather classist hostility? Well, Crouch goes on to recount a nasty experience at the Priestfield early in his career when, playing for QPR, the distinctive young colt received an unpleasant reception from a group of home fans he likens to "the hillbillies in the film Deliverance".

He was unimpressed with the aesthetic qualities of the clientele in general, in fact. "Looking around at the faces of the home support at Gillingham, the irony was never lost on me that these people had the cheek to call me a 'freak'. Perhaps they should have taken a look at themselves first," he says, still in the highest of dudgeon, seven years on.

So that's why he celebrated so much when he scored for us down there and got booked.

Posted By: SCC 28, Nov 6, 13:31:10