A young Gary Lineker with Jock Wallace at the top of Sandhill 1, Wanlip Quarry, Leicester 1979.

I am a full-on walk on glass in your bare feet Bruce Willis on speed Die Hard Leicester City fan. My blood is blue, and I have no royal connections. This means that whilst I might indeed forget my children’s names, I have an infallible memory of Leicester City’s glories since 1969 (1 Byte), and equally of their failures (5000 bytes).

And so it came to pass that after the Cockney Glory Years under Jimmy Bloomfield in the early seventies (Frankie Wortho, Keith Weller, the Birch, the Driving Instructor, Lennie Glover on the wing, anyone?), we moved on to Frank ‘Brown Envelope’ McLintock (George Armstong aged 450, John Who? Lemmie Who? Who who?), and then to the BIG JOCK.

The arrival of Jock Wallace was a BIG Deal in Leicester at that time. First, he was Scottish. Second, he was Glaswegian, and therefore totally intelligible to anyone not born within a mile of Ibrox. Third, his daughter, Karen, went to my school. Easier to decipher, but not by much.

Now Big Jock, as he was christened by the creative fraternity of Leicester, because, indeed, he was big, was also a rare sight in Leicester because he was a manager who had won something bigger than the Second Division Championship, which was, and still is Leicester City’s piece de resistance, our default position. Haven´t won anything for a couple of years, no problem, let’s get relegated (again) and come back as champions (again). Cushty, Rodney.

Jock Wallace had won big things with Rangers in Scotland, who also happened to wear blue shirts, so game on. Now Jock was not from the Pep Guardiola school of thought, more from the school of Clint Eastwood do you feel lucky, punk? Which basically involved renting a quarry, and making the players run up and down sandhills until they puked. Messi, eat your heart out. Please see the YouTube links below.

Now this was good enough to once again get us promoted from the Second Division, see a couple of paragraphs above, but in the end somehow everything went wrong in the First Division, possibly because the players had a  clear idea of what a sandhill looked like, but had never actually seen a football.

Now, that said, we did have THAT game. The third game of the season, and we beat Liverpool 2-0, with a screamer from Andy Peake. I am sure he saw the ball he was so confused he just swung a leg at it to get it as far away as possible, and it ended up in the top corner. To compound this heresy, Big Jock proclaimed to all and sundry, that we could win the league that year.

Of course we didn’t, we got relegated that year, but, and you see what I am doing here, look at that shiny silvery cloud….it gave us another shot at promotion from the Second Division again! Cunning, Balders!

Now it’s time to do a Jim Halpert thingy: a pros and cons list with regard to Big Jock.

Pro: he introduced a lot of young players.

Con: the older ones died on the sandhills.

Pro: he introduced Gary Lineker for the first time.

Con: None at all. Con, con and con again: sandhills, which led to the end of my running career….another story!