Fat shaming – Who ate all the pies? | OneFootball

I recently had to deal with an incident of body shaming.

Bullying, racism and sexism are a constant with the youngsters where I work (and probably everywhere else), but now, we have body shaming to add to the list. Individuals being made to feel bad about their weight/size and the way they look.

I recall when I was a young lad, when playing football, picking sides, it was always the fat lad who would be picked last, unless of course the fat lad was exceptional.

I was at Stoke away midweek, Jack Charlton in charge, and he brings on a youngster as substitute. Everyone around me saying “Who is the fat kid?” It was none other than Paul Gascoigne. A young lad with podgy thighs but incredible ability obvious even then.

When I first started going to football in the early Seventies, we had Tommy Cassidy in midfield who seemed to carry a bit of weight in his later years, though his ability as he floated around midfield and fired in rocket shots every so often, could not be touched.

Kevin Keegan signed Peter Garland, a talented midfielder from Spurs, also prone to carry a few excess pounds. Then when we started watching Dulwich Hamlet in the 1990s, who turned up? None other than an obviously overweight Peter Garland, but the talent shone through, spraying the ball around, his football brain several steps ahead of the players around him in the Dr. Martins Southern League.

The great Micky Quinn (pictured above after scoring one of the four goals he got against Leeds on his Newcastle United debut) was prone to carry a few pounds but this didn’t stop him from banging the goals in for Newcastle United.

Though as Quinny famously said: ‘I might not have been the fastest out on the pitch… but I was quicker than anyone over one yard!’

I thought I might be able to name a Newcastle overweight eleven, having easily named four, but drew a blank.

As a kid I saw footage of Fatty Foulkes and thought it hilarious to have such an enormous keeper playing, but then again, some twenty years ago Bradford City fielded in the Premier League an overweight keeper in the form of Neville Southall, obviously past his best but still with great ability.

Not letting Forest off the hook though, they had a winger in the seventies who was described by the media (BBC) as “a scruffy fat lad”, the twice European Cup winning John Robertson.

Wayne Rooney when he first burst on the scene came back after a summer spent on the Paul Gascoigne Mars Bar diet and Moyes was not amused. Luke Shaw fell out with Mourinho over his physical state and Le Tissier was a bit wobbly around the middle in his later years.

Razor Ruddock piled on the beef whilst still playing and I met him in my local boozer after he had retired – he was massive.

And let’s not forget, the overweight Wayne Shaw, live on BBC for Sutton United in the FA Cup, eating a pie during the game (for which a betting company had been offering odds of 8/1 on him doing so) and then getting fined and banned for two months by the FA.

Most recently, Pep was not impressed with Kalvin Phillips when he returned from his time with England at the World Cup.

So, on that note, I think we can put together an all time fat lads eleven, not fat shaming, but celebrating ability of those carrying a bit extra weight.