Championship Letters 2: Martin Allen as Cerberus
Championship Letters 2: Martin Allen as Cerberus
A facile comparison maybe; and Mad Dog’s laurels have largely been gained outside the Championship, through FA Cup and lower league notoriety. Still, that short tenure at the Walker’s Stadium was every bit as tempestuous as Cerberus’s stint at the gates of the Underworld. Each of the canine guardian’s heads was said to have an appetite only for live meat and having witnessed a spectacularly snarling performance from Allen on the touchline at a Millwall-Reading season opener in the year 2000, one can imagine him gnawing on a goodly sized bone on his banishment to the dressing room. In the end, Cerberus met his match in Heracles; Allen in Milan Mandarić.
Rob Langham (pen name: Lanterne Rouge) is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 47 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Football Attic, The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.