Deck John Halls With Boughs of Holly
Despatches from the 2004 Stoke City Christmas Dinner
The world felt a lot smaller 20 years ago as a Stoke fan. Exiled from the upper echelon of English football since 1985 but only two years removed from the third tier, the Premier League might as well have been Saturn, light years away, with no inkling how to even start getting there. Without the benefit of a decade of top flight exposure and cash behind us, or the might of the Bet365 empire, the Stoke of the early 2000s was not the slick operation we see today…
Perhaps because we were still slowly reacclimatising to the Championship, the gap between supporters and players didn’t feel quite as cavernous as it does now. You’d often still bump into a first teamer in Tesco, or clutching a bottle of Rolling Rock in Brassingtons. Maybe that made it easier to sell to both sides of the divide the prospect of a Christmas lunch event, where for the princely sum of just £30, fans could get a full turkey dinner in the Waddington Suite, with a player on every table. Home from university for the holidays, our hideously dressed quartet squeezed out the last drops of the semester’s student loan and eagerly signed up to break bread with our heroes.
Merry Christmas, Mr Wenger
There was trepidation about whose table we’d end up on - fearful of being lumbered with a Karl Henry or - god forbid - Dave Brammer. We wanted one of the big guns - Akinbiyi, Taggart, or the kingpin himself, Anthony Richard Pulis. Nervous, we ascended the stairs and surveyed the scene in the Waddington. There was Ade, holding court. Pulis’ laugh boomed boisterously from another corner. And there, awaiting us at our table, was - jackpot! - John Halls.
It’s easy to forget just how highly thought of Halls was during his first 12 months or so as a Stoke player. One of a couple of favourable loan deals made possible by Pulis’ burgeoning working relationship with *checks notes* Arsene Wenger - the 21-year-old made an immediate impression, and his loan was made permanent for a bargain £50,000.
What made Halls so exciting was how decidedly un-Pulisian he was. Arriving as a midfielder but refashioned into a right back, he was pretty much the antithesis of a TP full back. Where they were typically veteran, square-headed centre halves with their nose smeared halfway across their face like a sundial, Halls was dashing, somehow making a mullet work at the moment of its cultural nadir. No long diagonals to the big man or nosebleeds at the halfway line either; he was graceful on the ball, had an eye for a pass and liked to get forward. Giddier fans, as ever, talked of him as a future England player, but unlike, say, Wilko or Ryan Shotton, it didn’t actually seem that fanciful at the time to imagine that might lie in his future.
Sitting at Halls’ table wasn’t quite the window into debauchery one might expect, given his self-acknowledged love of the local nightlife. He came across as a shy, polite young man, one who was eager to ask questions of the guests about their lives and plans, was excited at the prospect of a return to Highbury after Stoke drew the then-champions in a plum FA Cup third round tie, and who seemed genuinely happy to be there.
This was…not true of every player present…
Binary Choice?
The previous weekend’s slender win over Coventry had put Stoke ninth in the table, two points outside the play-offs, but murmurs of discontent were already audible. It hadn’t been a brilliant performance, with Pulis admitting his side had been second-best for much of the afternoon. More notably, it marked game eight of what would become known as ‘The Binary Season’ - the astonishing run of 17 league games between 30th October 2004 and 19th February 2005 to end either 1-0, 0-0 or 0-1. It was, whether by accident or design, the most stultifying period of anti-football in the club’s recent history, accelerating the souring of the Icelandic era and extinguishing much of the goodwill Pulis had built up since his arrival in the winter of 2002.
Coventry actually marked the high point of the binary run, the middle of three consecutive 1-0 victories. Later that week, Akinbiyi’s superb solo goal at Brighton would ensure Stoke spent Christmas in fifth.
Even then though, there was slight unease in the room teasing that this wasn’t necessarily the happiest of camps. Halls himself alluded to his disappointment at some supporters’ reaction to the Coventry performance, and we’d notice some other glum faces as we polished off our Christmas puddings and took the opportunity to seek out other members of the team for photos.
A miserable-looking Chris Greenacre was mocked as “Mr Stoke City” by a sarcastic Marcus Hall as they posed grudgingly for photos with fans. Michael Duberry rocked up an hour late, his aftershave detectable from halfway across the room, dressed in a leopard-print suit jacket that was somewhere between The Rock and Bet Lynch, and going out of his way to avoid having to press the flesh with we great unwashed. Pulis, at least, was on form, a picture of bonhomie even to those of us who looked like they’d dressed in the dark that morning.
Bad Tidings We Bring
It was clear that the fall was coming, and when it did, it was steep. A particularly Baltic Britannia Stadium hosted an almost supernaturally tedious stalemate with Preston on Boxing Day, one so scarring to those who witnessed it that it’s still talked about in whispers, like an MR James story. Following that came five straight single-goal defeats, the low point being Burnley escaping with a fairly comfortable three points on Steve Cotterill’s first return to ST4.
It’s remarkable how few of the players who joined us for Christmas lunch that day were still at the club even six months later. Marcus Hall left the next month, paid up having fallen out with Pulis (leaving us to lament that we never signed the Gillingham defender who’d have given us a back four of Halls, Hill, Hills, Hall). Akinbiyi, the talisman, was gone by February, after staging a sit-in in John Rudge’s office to demand contract talks. Greenacre, Wayne Thomas, Gifton-Noel Williams and others departed on free transfers at the end of the season (at one point during the summer we only had nine contracted senior professionals on the books), and Pulis, of course, would be off as well, sacked as the relationship with his paymasters from Reykjavik broke down irretrievably.
So Long, John
John Halls had been eager to join the exodus. Unsettled by Pulis’ departure, and having been tapped up by Alan Pardew, then in charge of an exciting West Ham side, he sought to run down his contract, and was exiled by Johan Boskamp as punishment.
Yet the West Ham interest never materialised, and it was Reading who ultimately came in for Halls, a move his career never recovered from. The Royals’ style didn’t suit his game, Steve Coppell didn’t take to him from the outset, and the injuries began to pile up. Suddenly, the momentum was going the wrong way. He made just two league appearances in three unhappy years in Berkshire, and drifted down the leagues to Aldershot and Wycombe, falling a little bit more out of love with football every step of the way. He retired aged just 30.
Happily, Halls has bounced back to find success in the world of modelling, taking to catwalks all over the world, from New York to Milan.
Football was his first love though, and he still harbours regrets over how it ended: “…with the catwalking, they make you get there four hours before you have to walk down the catwalk, even though it only takes 30 seconds,” he told Planet Football’s Will Unwin in 2017. “It’s quite boring. I’d rather play a game of football.”
It’s a real shame. The young man we met that afternoon was living the dream.
Another shame? I don’t think the club has run a Christmas lunch with the players event since - how good would it have been to cadge a sprout off Xherdan Shaqiri, or join Marc Muniesa for a chorus of Feliz Navidad? Even a repeat 12 months later would’ve been worth it - a Johan Boskamp Christmas would’ve made for quite a sequel…
My theory about the Preston game is that they came for a draw and didn't realise until late that we weren't trying to win it either.
Great piece Rob. Makes me long for the days of JB describing Sammy Bang as 'a scheeet man'.