It's The Gloves That Did It!

Lucky Gloves?
By Glen Leat
March 6 2003

During this quiet time as we wait for the Six Nations to be completed so we can back to the "real rugby" I have been reading a few back issues of the original ERE fanzine and came across a quirky little article about supporters' rituals and have reproduced it below for your interest.

It was only after the European Cup Final in 1998 that we retired a pair of old woollen gloves which had, for the previous ten years, helped Bath win countless Cups and League Titles and often ensured that the Bath boys snatched victory from the jaws of defeat! The power of the gloves was incredible!

Wearing these gloves in the depths of winter was fine but having to pull them on whilst just wearing a tee-shirt and jeans in Bordeaux was a trifle embarrassing but we knew that if they were not worn then we would have travelled all the way to the South of France to witness failure - and we were not wrong!

Several times we tried to wean ourselves away from the gloves but, if the going got tough, as it often did in a Cup Final at Twickenham, out would come the gloves with about 20 minutes to go and Bath would then sweep to victory. It even got to the stage when friends would ask us to put on the gloves to help the Bath cause and they would get very anxious if we told them we felt the boys could do it on their own for a few minutes more.

The only reason the gloves were eventually retired was because you cannot not expect a pair of woolly mitts to win you a European Cup and still have some magical power within them - there are limits you know! Fortunately the power of the gloves has a successor, an old pair of blue rugby socks which the Rickster, wears to all Bath games. There is pandemonium in our house if he has worn them to play rugby and forgets to get them washed and dried in time to wear them to a Bath match.

If you think we have a problem at ERE, we recently read of a Gloucestershire cricket fan who takes a frozen chicken to one day Cup Finals, and the chicken hasn't seen his side lose yet. Apparently the owner of the chicken grabbed it by mistake in 1977 when he thought he had picked up his packed lunch to take to Lords. Well of course he then had no option but to keep the chicken for future Finals to ensure of his teams' victory. It gets frozen and de-frosted as and when Gloucestershire reach a Cup Final - madness!

We’ve even heard of a Saints fan who claims credit for winning the European Cup last season. Back in the mid eighties he used to video every Saints game which appeared on TV but stopped after the humiliation of a massive defeat by the Tigers. That was until the appearance of his club in the top Northern Hemisphere Club Competition, when he could not resist. After losing the League and the English Cup after allegedly going for the Treble this supporter felt he might as well risk videoing the game because they were probably going to lose anyway. And what happened? His team win the Cup and he can (rightly in our view) credit for the victory.

I think this was first written in the year 2000.

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