Perry Groves on Lee Dixon’s football boots and his old boot boy, Andy Cole

Lee Dixon Own Goal

Lee Dixon went with an American company once called Brooks. They were trying to get into the UK football boot market, but their football boots were worse than Woolworths’ football boots. They were rock hard, were mis-shaped and were like wearing Hobnail boots.

Dixon was wearing them in training and we were all taking the micky. Normally he’d ditch them, but because he was being paid to wear them, he didn’t want to.

Anyway, Dicko (Lee Dixon) was wearing these football boots for the first time during a game against Coventry. he had the ball in the right back position, without any pressure. He went to flight the ball back to Seaman, but instead managed to lob the ball over Seaman for an own goal, he never wore the football boots again (see the goal here).

Andy Cole

Andy Cole was my boot boy. He was lucky, he only looked after three players’ football boots. It was me Rodders (Tony Adams) and someone else.

One Christmas we got all the boot boys together. They wouldn’t get paid much at that time, so we said we’ll give you a Christmas bonus.

In front of all the staff, we asked them to sing us a Christmas carol. If they had a go and sung it well, we’d each give then £50. So that would have been £150 for Andy Cole, a lot of money then, as he probably only earned about £25 a week. If they didn’t do it, we’d chuck the dirty boot bucket water over them.

Andy Cole was quite well balanced then, he had a chip on both of his shoulders, as he thought he was better that a lot of the other guys.

He didn’t do it though, he was the only one who didn’t get the money and he got the dirty water!

We’d like to thank Perry Groves for his straight up, honest words. His book “We All Live In A Perry Groves World” is a great read!