“I always remember this lieutenant running around handing out grenades because we were expecting a counter-attack on our location. I just remember looking at him and saying, ‘I’m missing the f**king World Cup for this s**t’.”
Forty years ago, a teenage Phil Stant was a regular for Reading’s reserves. He was also in the army, stationed at Aldershot and combining a potential football career with one in the services. Before April 2, 1982, the thought of heading off to war had barely even crossed his mind.
“Our main training was all focused on the Cold War and a Russian invasion of Europe – that’s all everything was geared around,” he tells FFT. “We had The Troubles in Northern Ireland, but when the Falklands came up, most of us squaddies were saying to each other, ‘Where the bloody hell are they? I’ve never heard of them’. Many were thinking, ‘Why would the Argentines invade Scotland?’”
It might have made more sense had Ally MacLeod’s side lived up to their manager’s billing and stopped Argentina from winning the World Cup four years earlier. But now?
As the
