NEIL SMITH
Hailing from the wilds of Buckinghamshire where he was born in the mid
1950s, Smiffy, as Neil is known to many Chelsea supporters, can trace his
lifelong love of the club to the door of cousins who lived on the World’s
End Estate less than a mile from Stamford Bridge. By the time he was 10-years
old young Smiffy had been indoctrinated into the true Blue faith… and the
rest as they say is history.
The 1970 FA Cup Final against Leeds United at Wembley? Smiffy was there
along with a dozen family members. The replay at Old Trafford? Smiffy wasn’t
there. “You’ve got French that day,” his mother had advised him while wagging
her finger. As he grew into his later teens, freedom from lessons beckoned
and Smiffy became a regular at Chelsea away games, travelling in silence
on football specials out of fear that his country bumpkin accent might
be deemed unacceptable.
A fully paid up member of Eddie McCreadie’s Blue and White Army, Smiffy
missed only two games of the fabulous 1976/77 promotion season and went
on to chalk up a 100% record in the 1983/84 campaign seeing all 42 matches
when Johnny Neal steered Chelsea to the Second Division title.
Not content with regularly ‘going through the card’ for domestic fixtures,
Smiffy also took in many of Chelsea’s pre-season tours. A trip to Ireland
in 1992 saw him share a taxi and then a pizza with one-time fabled Blues
striker Joe Allon after a night on the town in Cork. Of his many European
jaunts, Smiffy holds dear the memory of proposing to his wife Cheryl after
fearing her foot had been broken when one of his friends landed on it celebrating
that very good goal Dennis Wise scored in the San Siro.
Smiffy is world-renown for his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Chelsea.
In 1992 he was invited by Neil Barnett to become a columnist for Bridge
News (forerunner of the official Chelsea magazine) after continually pointing
out factual errors in the publication. Entitled Those Were The Days, Smiffy’s
column revisited previous and upcoming fixtures. He currently writes a
similar article for the cfcuk fanzine.
In 2017, the late great Ray Wilkins name-checked Smiffy as the Chelsea
Statistician on talkSport, a touching moment that ranks alongside being
reunited with Eddie McCreadie the same year when the former Blues boss
returned to Stamford Bridge for the first time in four decades. Eddie was
back in town to attend a tribute event held in his honour that marked the
publication of Eddie Mac, Eddie Mac, a book which Smiffy co-authored.
As a trivia buff, Smiffy would like to see the BBC TV programme Pointless
revamped to cover purely football and Chelsea FC… who else would know the
date, opposition, attendance and score when Paul McMillan made his only
Chelsea appearance?*
Follow Smiffy on Twitter @SmiffyEastStand
*the answer is nobody and very impressively 2 September 1967, Chelsea 2
Southampton 6, 32,726.
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