"There were children, teenagers, mums, dads, all kinds of ages, eyes popping out of their heads, mouths ajar, Eric just had them on every syllable. So, I get to my big question; 'Eric, let's go back to Selhurst Park and kicking Matthew Simmons. Do you have any regrets?' With impeccable timing, Cantona just paused before saying; 'Yes. I should have killed him,' and the whole room just exploded into laughter and he sat with a big smirk on his face like The King.”
Geoff Twentyman still revels in just one of the many memories he’s collected in a long and amazing career. For many people, this writer included, Geoff Twentyman has lived the dream. He grew up in football, he played over 400 league games himself before working for BBC radio, talking football and all kinds of sports for more than 30 years. Alongside raising a couple of healthy kids, mind you.
Spending an – highly enjoyable – hour in his company is like submitting yourself to a barrage of anecdotes and after retiring he’s put a few of them into a – equally highly entertaining - book called “Top Man”. Like the abovementioned with Cantona. Or about time he had the European Cup standing in his living room (seriously, read the book!) or when he told a football manager, he was a "s*** coach". To his face, no less!
“Bristol City brought in Benny Lennartson as a coach and he just wasn't successful," he tells Tribalfootball. "In my job I never, ever, said that a manager should be sacked because it's not my prerogative. But you can only defend the indefensible for so long. So, one day I've gone to the training ground and Benny, who was a really nice bloke, stood waiting, wearing his baseball cap and goes; 'I read your comments and you are xenophobic'.
“Well, I didn't like that at all. I'm not xenophobic and I just didn't like the way he accused me of something that was incorrect but he kept on; 'you only criticize me because I'm not English' and I just went, 'no, no, no, I criticize and make subjective comments. The results are very poor, you are sliding down the league and you're losing four and five nil. You're a s*** football coach and if you don't improve things you'll be looking for a new job and that is not the comment of someone who's xenophobic, it's someone who's played over 400 first team games in English football so deal with that'.” SLAM!
Francis ahead of his time
Geoff Twentyman was never prepared to back down when believing he was in the right, and it once cost him participation in a playoff-final. A silly dispute with then manager of Bristol Rovers, Gerry Francis, got out of hand, but Twentyman holds the former Tottenham manager in high regard to this day.
“He was the first football coach who taught me how to play football. He was a football analyst before analysts were a thing. He didn't record the match and break it down on a computer or laptop. He just did it all in his head. His attention to detail and ability to remember aspects of a game for all of us was scary at times but his ability to improve all of us as individual players and thereby the collective was quite staggering.
"He once taught me that in 80% of goals, there are three stages of where it could be stopped. I watch football now, and most of the time I see that he’s right. He was incredible and ahead of his time.”
Speaking of managers, Geoff Twentyman befriended a certain Neil Warnock even before he got into the professional game himself. Warnock has been a divisive character his whole career, but Twentyman knows another side of the controversial manager.
“My mum always taught me to take people as you find them yourself, not how other people report it. I bumped into Neil in my early 20s and sometimes you just meet someone and get on really well and we've kept in touch ever since. He is a bit of a pantomime villain on match day, he likes to upset the crowd. He plays to the image, but believe you me, he's a very sensitive, likeable man.
"Once I was presenting on BBC Radio Bristol and Bristol City were due to play Cardiff City which is a big game in these parts, the Severn side Derby and Neil was manager of Cardiff. I thought it'd be nice to get him on my show the night before the game, so I ring him up and ask if he’s got 10 minutes. He says, 'd love to but I'm just on my way to pick my wife up, she's had a mastectomy. But I'll be more than happy to record it'. To me that was just amazing act of friendship because he could quite easily just have said, sorry, not now.”
Geoff Twentyman knows a ton of people, he’s interviewed prime ministers and what not, but he’s been just as happy interviewing so-called “regular” people.
“I always remember interviewing a woman when I was doing the drive time show. Her son had died in his teens of leukemia so they'd done a fundraising exercise with an ambition to raise a million pounds for research. It was on the phone so I couldn't see her but I could hear her and sometimes that's a very powerful thing. I didn't want to upset her but there was a certain question I wanted to ask which I felt would bring real value to the conversation.
“So, I said to her; 'what was your son, David, like?' She took a deep breath, paused and went; 'Jeff, you'd have loved him. He loved sports, he loved football, rugby. You'd have loved him' and I was like; 'Wow' and it made me realize how fortunate I was in the job.”
Geoff Twentyman’s memoir, “Top Man” is out now and available at assorted bookshops, but can also be bought via the Pitch Publishing website or simply right here.
