Thread by @StreathamRovers

Hello. This is going to be a long thread. We want to explain something that’s happened behind the scenes here. There’s been inaccurate rumours flying about so we want to set the record straight.

Please be warned that there will be some quite intense video footage at the end.

One of our club mottos is #WhatAClubWhatAnEthos. That’s not just marketing speak like you might find in the Premier League. At our level it means something. We’re a community-centred club, so we’re going to be as open about all this as legally possible.

As you will all know, non-league clubs are completely reliant on the efforts of volunteers. That includes this social media team. Terry Banner has been a stalwart for #SRFC over the last few years, taking over the day-to-day running of our Twitter and Facebook pages.

More than that, Terry has been a supporter of this great Football Club for nearly half a century. He is embedded in the fabric here at Greyhound Lane. Part of the furniture. Terry is the very definition of a Clubman - so much so that he was our 2020 Clubman of the Year.

However, many of you will have noticed Terry has something of a quirk. For over 30 years now he has been completely obsessed with former @England striker @GaryLineker, and he has used this official club account to message Lineker on an almost daily basis: twitter.com/search?q=from%…

@England @GaryLineker Things got out of hand last year when Terry started sending @GaryLineker bizarre drawings. Thankfully we managed to get him to limit the number of images, but it didn’t stop his constant tweeting to the former @LCFC, @Everton, @FCBarcelona & @Spurs man.

https://twitter.com/StreathamRovers/status/1273683803802939393

We would just like to pause briefly to offer our sincerest apologies to @GaryLineker for this torrent of desperation and non-sequiturs he has been faced with. He has dealt with it with the dignity you’d expect from a man who was never booked or sent off during his 16 year career.

@GaryLineker Thanks for being such a great sport, @GaryLineker. A lot of people would probably have considered legal action, perhaps you even tentatively explored that avenue, but you obviously decided he was probably just harmless.

@GaryLineker (Speaking on an entirely personal level, as a longtime friend of Terry's, I'm not entirely sure that it is harmless. He's a good friend of mine, but over 30 years? I watched the 1986 World Cup match versus Poland and he didn't stop celebrating Lineker's 2nd goal for 20 minutes...

...the only thing that stopped him celebrating was Lineker scoring the 3rd goal, and by that point he was banging on the walls like a deranged ape - my mum was furious)

Anyway, back to the present day....

His obsession with @GaryLineker was getting embarrassing for the team. Rival fans would loudly rustle 100s of packets of @walkers_crisps during the hush before penalties (acceptable banter, if somewhat unsportsmanlike), chant “Lineker Sh*gg*ers” (utterly unacceptable abuse) etc.

@GaryLineker @walkers_crisps Our director of football and acting first-team manager @TaffGoose likes to run a very steady ship here at Streatham Rovers. The last thing he wants is his players getting distracted or demoralised by a handful of idiots in the crowd.

@GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @TaffGoose We therefore resolved to do something about it before supporters are allowed back into stadiums again for the 2021/22 season. You might be wondering why we didn’t just “sack” Terry from the voluntary position. Well there’s a simple reason for that:

@GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @TaffGoose Terry was willing to work evenings and weekends. Non-league clubs simply don’t have the resources to turn their noses up at that sort of free labour. Sure, we have other social media volunteers (such as myself - and in the spirit of openness: Hello, I’m Charlie) but…

...we can only do odd bits here and there. Terry would tweet all night and all day if the Football Club needed it. Unlike the rest of us Terry has a very understanding wife (well, to a point… more on that later).

Therefore we needed a solution that would somehow stop Terry’s constant tweeting to @GaryLineker. We had tried talking to him. We had tried threats of physical violence. Nothing seemed to work.

@GaryLineker However by happy coincidence Dr. Jakob Ritter, of our official multivitamin and sports supplement suppliers Dominion, learned of our plight after being accidentally CC’d into a Club Committee email and came forward with a solution to Terry’s infatuation with @GaryLineker.

@GaryLineker We won’t go into all the technical details but Dr. Ritter, a pyschopharmacist, has been working on a revolutionary new form of aversion therapy for several decades. It is called the Mariasforza Technique and is designed to help athletes overcome bad habits that impede success...

@GaryLineker i.e. a sprinter might have a slow start, or a javelin thrower might have bad posture. The Mariasforza Technique associates those habits with some of the greatest horrors of the 20th century through forcing the individual to watch elaborately edited historical footage...

@GaryLineker ...that places a symbol representing their bad habit or technique (i.e. a starter pistol for the sprinter or a diagram of a spine for the javelin thrower) central to the events depicted. Nausea-inducing drugs and mild hallucinogenics are used...

... to further the medicinal experience of the subject. The end result is that the patient will feel such a strong physical revulsion at their previous actions they will stop doing them. Completely stop.

It should be pointed out - again, in the spirit of openness - that acting mananger @TaffGoose was very interested in using the Mariasforza Technique on the playing squad here at Streatham Rovers to get an extra competitive edge next season.

@TaffGoose After much discussion at a Club Committee level we decided it was safest to experiment first on Terry’s obsession with @GaryLineker before putting the players at any risk.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker Once given the go ahead Dr. Ritter explained the process to us at length. He emphasised that in Terry’s case @GaryLineker was the symbol we were to use as it would be central to the process of his aversion therapy.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker Budgetary constraints meant that we couldn’t have a professionally edited video with @GaryLineker seamlessly placed into 20th century historical atrocities via expensive CGI(like in Forrest Gump), but Dr. Ritter assured us that a simple likeness would have much the same effect…

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker “As long as the likeness looks as fascist as possible. It must look like Lineker is a high ranking Third Reich official. We must crush Terry’s resistance like a walnut.” - that is a direct quote from Dr. Ritter (see e-mail pictured below):

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker We agreed but decided to replace any nazi-era imagery with the logo of @GaryLineker’s principle commercial partner, @walkers_crisps. This isn’t twenty or thirty years ago, you can’t just go around sticking swastikas on things - because it will offend people.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps Quite by chance Terry gave us a golden opportunity to carry out the aversion therapy when he got himself temporarily suspended from operating the official social media accounts for mistakenly libelling the chairman’s wife (see tweet attached below):

https://twitter.com/StreathamRovers/status/1401874260092674059

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps One final piece in the jigsaw was getting Terry’s wife to sign a medical consent form for what was - legally speaking, if not morally - a completely “experimental and unproven” therapy. We convinced her that it was for the best and have included a photo of the form as evidence:

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps It is really important to emphasise that Mrs. Banner signed this of her own free will and volition and under absolutely no duress. In fact Deborah was crying tears of joy at the prospect of getting her husband back rather than the Lineker-obsessed husk she currently lives with.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps (strictly speaking Terry was already obsessed with @GaryLineker even when they got married in 1991 but he was managing to keep a lid on it back then, just limiting himself to the occasional halloween party costume etc.)

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps And so, last Friday, the big day came. We invited Terry to watch some #Euro2020 football in the clubhouse (an almost crucial error as there wasn’t actually any games that day and in the ensuing panic we claimed “Belgravia” were playing) and chloroformed him as soon as he arrived.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps We strapped Terry’s briefly unconscious body into a folding ‘Evac Chair’ that we are required by law to have - at great expense! - but this was actually the first time we’ve used it (just as an aside it does make you wonder if healthy & safety regulations sometimes go to far).

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps We took Terry down into the storage room under the stadium. It is sometimes reported that this is called “The Torture Dungeon” but that’s just a little in-joke amongst us here at SRFC. It’s not actually used for torture. Obviously torture is illegal. It’s just a large store room.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps (usually full of training gear, unsold merchandise and a large amount of “gaelic football and hurling equipment” that an unscrupulous door-to-door salesman who fraudulently claimed he had @UEFA accreditation sold us - if @UEFA could condemn this practice that would be great)

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA This is where the Mariasforza Technique was carried out. Terry was propped up in front of a TV screen, the drugs injected into his upper left arm and his eyes held firmly open by our physically strongest Club Committee member.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA The video compilation you are about to see features only very brief clips of the footage because we don’t want to accidentally alter your minds & inadvertently affect your ability to freely tweet @GaryLineker.

⚠️ The content is quite disturbing so we urge caution before watching

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA A quick note on the music played in the background. It’s ‘Broken Wings’ by Mr Mister. Dr. Ritter requires an emotionally affecting song to be used to help break down the subject’s resistance. “Something with a very special, very personal resonance to carve him open like a fish.”

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA Broken Wings was Terry’s first dance with his wife at their wedding reception - which was coincidentally enough held at the clubhouse here at Greyhound Lane. I’m sure many of our older fans will remember that special occasion very fondly indeed.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA One unfortunate side effect is he will now never be able to hear the song again without becoming potentially suicidal and/or psychotic, which is a real shame since their 30th wedding anniversary is coming up later this year.

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

CAUTION:

DEEPLY DISTURBING FOOTAGE OF AVERSION THERAPY

⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

@TaffGoose @GaryLineker @walkers_crisps @UEFA One final thing: There’s been some suggestion in local non-league football circles that Terry is now “in a vegetative state”. That is not true. He’s a gibbering wreck, but he’s not in a vegetative state.

Thank you.