FSOM: From cigarettes and oranges to sweets and electrolyte drinks – how football’s half-time ritual has changed

Back in the day, one of the most important pieces of a team’s football kit was lugged along in a string bag.

Carried as reverently and carefully into the changing rooms as a holy relic into a cathedral, they would be  placed in a position of safety until their services were required.

These were the half-time oranges.

Vic, the secretary of Lyndhurst FC, would entrust their care to nobody else.

Having bought the half dozen Outspans or Jaffa navel oranges, the precious golden orbs would be given the care and attention of saintly bones until the ref’s whistle sounded for the interval. At which point Vic would take his trusty and rusty penknife from his pocket and hack mercilessly at them until he had 12 halves (that was enough, only one sub in those days!).

The oranges would be seized upon and their juice sucked from them drier than a vampire’s victim.

FSOM is not quite sure what the purpose of the half-time orange was. Maybe it was to sharpen up wits, or perhaps act as an analgesic to dull the half-time roasting inevitably dished out, whether we were winning or losing.

But the half-time orange was a ritual as old as football itself.

For some, the orange was a mere accompaniment to their other half-time main course; the half-time ciggie.

One of the substitute’s duties was to establish and keep safe the valuables bag. Depending on the sub’s mood, dictated by whether he was brassed off at being named 12th man, this would either be plonked on the dressing room floor or offered individually for team-mates to place their treasured objects in.

It was not safe to leave valuables in the dressing room, so into the bag went wallets, watches and jewellery, but also cigarettes and matches.

It seems almost unthinkable today that the referee’s half-time whistle was like a starting pistol to a set of warriors whose first act and prime thought after putting in a tough 45-minute shift would be to grab the valuables bag and dig into it for their smokes.

The first long, lung-filling drags would be followed by an award-winning standard exhibition of coughing which would have worried Florence Nightingale doing the rounds of a consumption ward.

Some were reduced to hacking wrecks of men, hands on knees and heads between legs with coughing fits which made us non-smokers fear for their lives, but after almost retching their innards to the surface, they would leap up like Lazarus and sprint out for the second half.

For those who missed it, there was a repeat performances of the Smokers’ Symphony as full-time.

Probably for the better, the half-time ciggie has been replaced, but the pulmonary concerns have shifted, and it was indicated and monitored by the valuables bag.

The packs of Benson & Hedges and Players were replaced by asthma respirators. As secretary/manager/dogsbody and toter of the valuables bag, FSOM noticed the subtle but significant change over the years as often as many as six or seven puffers went into the bag. The half-time coughing show was replaced by wheezing and the pump-action of relief giving nebulizer.

Of course, oranges, along with gaspers, were not the only half-time refreshment on offer.

FSOM’s school put out a team in the Southampton Wednesday League.

Wednesday Leagues were a not uncommon football feast. Originally established as a way of giving those who worked on Saturdays – mainly in retail – a chance of getting a game, midweek leagues were played on the days of half-day closing. In days of yore, most towns had an early-closing day to compensate for Saturday working but Southampton’s Wednesday day league consisted of teams who were able to wangle Wednesday afternoons off. These included the Post Office HM Custos & Excise, Hampshire Police, the Fire Brigade and assorted military teams, among them 17 Port Regiment Marchwood (Royal Engineers) and the Royal Army Pay Corps. Along with FSOM’s school. 

This was a hard, tough league which pitted 17-18-year-old sixth-formers against men. A couple of teachers padded out our team. There was Phil (we got to call teachers by their first names for Wednesday afternoons only) Thomas, a Welshman who was hewn from something deep underground, either coal or slate, and who defended his teen team-mates like Owain Glyndwr fighting off Henry IV. Gracing the midfield was former England schoolboy international Norman Eades. He might have been gone in the legs, but his first touch was sublime and he was capable of unfurling an exquisite pass.

The school team looked forward to games against the military teams with mixed feelings. Their post-match hospitality was famed and the spread like a banquet at Versailles.

But the price paid was almost certainly a right shoeing as the squaddies smelled fresh, young, teen blood and took out all the frustrations of being chewed out all week by the sergeant-major. The most notable example was a fearful afternoon at the Army’s port at Marchwood where ambulances did a shuttle service as two of our players were hospitalised, one with a broken nose and the other with a shattered elbow, upper arm and shoulder having been totalled by the goalkeeper in a Harald Schumacher-type incident long before the bubble-permed German assassin had been heard of.

And don’t be mistaken for thinking the Royal Army Pay Corps were poingdexter softies.

Any thought the RAPC team would be made up of spotty, bespectacled pay clerks who sat behind desks with calculators was quickly dismissed when you realised who guarded the Army’s payroll back in the day when they Queen’s shilling was paid out n folding money and loose change – the Military Police. 

The RAPC played at Worthy Down, a bucolic sounding location north of Winchester, but in reality a gaunt, barren windswept plateau which in winter doubled for artic training terrain.

So it was one Wednesday afternoon, where the wind howled ceaselessly and merely standing perpendicularly was a physical effort as the sleet and snow was blown horizontally into faces.

Half-time brought some promised respite in the form of an army billy can full of tea. As the tea was poured into paper cups and eager faces were swathed in rising steam, some wise-arse piped up; ‘the army puts bromide into its tea.’

For those not familiar, bromide was used a means to suppress the fundamental needs of testosterone-fuelled soldiers in the confines of barracks.

That was enough for our right-winger. While we all clamoured for refills, he clamped his jaw shut and steadfastly refused the hot tea, valuing his claimed sexual prowess more than his rapidly freezing carcass.

As the ref signalled the end of half-time, he looked blue in the lips and went off to take up position on the windswept steppe of the right wing, shivering.

Ten minutes into the second half,Eades arrowed a superb pass out to where our flying winger should have been, but he was not there. Instead, there was a fetal lump, shaking like a shitting whippet. on the halfway line. A quick assessment showed he was suffering from exposure and once again Hampshire’s ambulance service was called out.

I have spared the blushes of the army tea refusenik as he joined the police and rose to the rank of detective chief inspector.

But as sports science became a thing and advanced, it was decided the half-time suck on a segment of citrus was not enough to refuel tired minds and bodies.

The world of tennis might well have been a pioneer of replenishment, albeit in a refined and genteel way. Robinson’s, with their Barley Water, cornered the market at Wimbledon and it was advertising gold as between games and sets, players would pluck a bottle from a rack, pour some barley water – only lemon was available back then  – into a paper cup and top it up themselves, delicately turning the tap on a silver urn.

Now, thirsty players swig a suspiciously pink liquid from a sports bottle, the formula of which is kept a player’s closely guarded secret but which is probably concocted and formulated in a laboratory buried deep under a Swiss mountain. by a man in a white coat and bi-focals.

Oranges were replaced by other fruits such as bananas, which apparently restored carbohydrates and it was found footballers and other sportsmen needed to replace electrolytes, which FSOM thought was a means of illuminating a garden in summer or a tree at Christmas.

In his newshound days, FSOM was used as a roving pitchside reporter in the first season of the fledgling Twenty-20 cricket campaign. It was all a novelty and his role included access to the team dugouts where he discovered a vital tool in keeping players in top nick was jelly babies. Even cricket had twigged that the evolution of a fast-moving, hyperactive game took something out of a player which needed to be replaced, in this case by biting the heads off an anthropomorphic sweetie.

More famously, Manchester United and England defender Rio Ferdinand brought attention to the need to keep up the levels when he was thrown a chocolate bar in the second half of a match, which he wolfed down.

The is nothing in the laws of football to say a player can’t chow down mid-match, and Ferdinand would have been confident in this instance that a Lion bar did not contain banned substances which would have seen him fail a drugs test. After all, this is a man who was banned from football for eight months for giving the swerve to a test at United’s Carrington training ground.

Science says that players need fast-acting, easily digestible carbohydrates and fluids to top up their levels and it’s a common sight now to see substitutes about to enter the field of play, squeeze something from a tube into their mouths. It’s more likely to be a high-energy gel, rather than a squirt of Colgate to make sure he doesn’t have fishy breath which might upset the referee as he gives him an earful.

Of course, in the monkey-see, monkey-do world of football, what is seen on the screen on a Saturday, trickles down to grass roots level the following Sunday.

Electrolyte-replacing drinks can be bought in powder form at pharmacies now and the more affluent grass-roots clubs will make up several bottles for players, brought to the touchline in the sort of crate in which the milkie once delivered a pint or two of gold top to the doorstep

Otherwise, players have taken to bringing their own bottles. Not empty squash bottles but swanky sports bottles, the swankiest of which come in black stainless steel,

It’s a cross continent train journey away from the days when Lyndhurst club secretary Vic performed another vital task.

Fifteen minutes before the end of a home game, he would surrender the linesman’s flag with which he had patrolled the touchline and having entrusted it to either a reluctant , sulking and sullen player who had been dragged off and substituted, or assistant secretary Bunny Hutchings, Vic would scurry off and light a match under a boiler that saw duty in the Boer war, so that by time the match ended, there was a pot of tea ready and waiting.

Not the finest champagne or Grand Cru burgundy was a more welcome drink on a winter’s afternoon where where torrential rain and driving wind pushed payers close to hypothermia.

FSOM is not sure if replaced lost electrolytes, but a cup of builder’s tea the colour of a brown bear’s backside was just the job.

Jus the one sugar for me, please, I’m trying to cut down.

And have you got anything other than an orange? Perhaps an organic papaya or jackfruit?