First up is toon exile Will Rust, out in Prague.

Sunday 2nd February 1997 Newcastle United 4 Leicester City 3 Toon Scorers: Shearer 3, Elliott Premier League, (Live on Sky) St.James' Park, 36396.

My best Toon day was actually about 1000 miles from the Gallowgate End, in Prague. 

It was towards the end of the 96/97 season if my memory serves me correctly (jesus, it wasn’t that long ago...) when the Toon took on the crisp-munching foxes at St. James’. You already know the one.

Point was I had done my usual round of dragging along a number of unsuspecting semi-football fan mates to a local Irish bar where the game was on Sky, and sat patiently waiting for the boys to walk out on the hallowed turf. 

After 5 minutes had passed, and we were 1-0 up via a slightly deflected Robbie Elliott goal, I noticed that some Czech lad had taken it upon himself to support Leicester City. 

The entire base of this seemed to be that Emile Heskey’s second name sounds a bit like the word for “smart” in Czech, being as every time he got the ball, this tw*t kept saying “Heskey, Heskey”. Passive fans are always the most annoying, and this bloke seemed to know the right strings to pull as concerned winding me up, especially seeing as after we scored that goal we played pretty abysmal football for almost an hour, with this lad slagging off almost every touch we had of the ball.

At 3-1 down I was feeling pretty rotten, and even after Big Al had got two back the barrage of verbals from this lad’s cakehole didn’t let up. 

Then, that magic moment. Lee played the ball across the face of goal to Big Al in the 94th minute, and there it was. I leapt up like a lunatic, holding a full pint of beer, and accidentally (or was it Freudian?) the entire pint landed on the head of this unsuspecting would-be mackem. This caused him to spin around threateningly while I was in a five bellies-style frenzy of random hairyman shouting and vulgar aggressive jubilation. Seeing this, he turned and fled like the filth that he was. The best bit was that he was a regular at that pub, and the barman (a friend of mine) put our entire nights boozing on his tab, no questions asked. Magic.

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