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Paddy Mulligan recalls the not so successful early days of pre-match dressing room music

One of the pre-match features at a Premier League game now sees players marching into stadiums ar...



Paddy Mulligan recalls the not...
Soccer

Paddy Mulligan recalls the not so successful early days of pre-match dressing room music

One of the pre-match features at a Premier League game now sees players marching into stadiums armed with their headphones and trooping into grounds in silence.

That is quite a recent phenomenon given the advancements in technology which has seen humans go from the unwieldy boombox to the Walkman and then to the modern day iPods and whatever you're having yourself.

But that doesn't mean that there weren't fledgling attempts to introduce the power of music to dressing rooms.

Newstalk Rewind podcast contributor and ex-Ireland, Chelsea and West Brom defender Paddy Mulligan shared some memories of those early efforts in the 1970s.

"Those earphones should be banned. You're going preparing for a game. You shouldn't be listening to anything, only what's being told to you by the manager or by the coaches or by your fellow colleagues," he told Oisin Langan and myself.

"I'd be walking into the dressing room with no earphones and I'll tell you why. I remember at Crystal Palace, Malcolm Allison brought in a guru who started playing music on the coach and in the dressing room before the game. This was supposed to get us going. I didn't understand that. I just walked out of the dressing room and thought 'I can't listen to this sort of rubbish,'" he recalls, adding that it "pop stuff" that went along the lines of "boom, boom, boom" (not the Vengaboys song of a similar name though!)

But did it have a net benefit for the team? Not quite as Paddy said in one sentence: "We got relegated!"

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