1 Roy Race What a man, what a hero, what a career. Since September 11, 1954, Roy “Of The Rovers” Race has been player, player-manager and manager of Melchester Rovers, Britain’s most noble football club, scoring more last-gasp goals than any other player. He made his England debut in 1963, scoring twice against the dirty South Americans Caragua in a 3-1 win. One of the questions most asked by football historians is whether England would have won the 1986 World Cup had Race not been kidnapped in the wake of the military coup in Basran. Oh, and he also found the time to manage England and AC Monza in Italy. As if all that were not enough, Race survived a shooting and has known tragedy when his beautiful wife, Penny, was killed in a mysterious car crash a decade ago, two years after his left foot was amputated following an incident with a helicopter. A teetotal family man (wife’s death notwithstanding) and, until he disappeared along with Match Of The Day magazine in 2001, a credit to the game of football. Mind you, after packing all that in, the old boy was probably grateful to be given the chance to sit down and have a well-deserved rest

2 Alf Tupper They don’t make ’em like this any more. In truth, they didn’t make them like that then, either. Better known as the Tough Of The Track to Victor readers, the decidedly feral Tupper often slept rough but had a full-time job as an apprentice welder. And boy, did he have a unique training diet. Not for Alf a life of healthy eating. Oh no. Salads and properly cooked, wholesome food didn’t figure in his regime. Instead, he ate only fish’n ’chips, but in his spare time the working-class warrior raced sly toffs and perfidious foreigners who attempted to cheat our hero before he beat them at the tape, always with sufficient breath to gasp his nonsensical catchphrase: “I ran ’em all”. During one road race he took a detour, not to relieve his bladder, but to rescue a trapped pensioner up an in-no-way-stereotypical northern chimney. And, yes, he still went on to win

3 Sir Harry Flashman In Flashman’s Lady — first line: “So, they’re talking about amending the leg-before-wicket rule again” — shortly after Harry Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was expelled from Rugby for “beastly drunkenness”, the cad found himself bowling at Lord’s. Naturally, George MacDonald Fraser (in real life a former sports writer) ensured Flashman took the first recorded hat-trick, in 1842, with the help of a little gamesmanship. Kent’s hitherto indestructible cricket heroes Felix, Pilch and Mynn fell in succession as Rugby Past & Present swept to victory. Afterwards, Alfred Mynn asked him to join his team, Mynn’s Casuals, for whom Flashy took five for 12 against an All-England XI. “The only thing that Rugby taught me,” he mused, twirling his moustache, “was survival and cricket”

4 Billy Dane As the readers of Scorcher discovered in 1970, young Billy Dane lived with his dear old gran and was hopeless at football. Then, in dear old gran’s attic, he found a pair of boots that once belonged to Dead Shot Keen, England’s finest striker of the 1920s. Even though Billy was a child, the boots fitted perfectly and when he wore them he played sublimely. That should have been that, and a successful career beckoned, but gran couldn’t stop accidentally throwing the boots away, school bullies couldn’t stop teasing him and those pesky old bits of leather couldn’t stop falling apart

5 Skid Solo Supported by loyal mechanic Sandy McGrath and bewildered apprentice Sparrow Smith, Tiger’s lantern-jawed Formula One hero was the last genuine gentleman racer in a sport that was in the process of being usurped by international criminals, cheats and hucksters. Obviously, such chicanery on the chicanes would never happen in real life. Perhaps uniquely in comic book fiction, in 1982 Solo suffered a genuinely lachrymose demise, crashing while distracted by the ghost of his closest racing pal in motor racing, who had recently died during a grand prix. After weeks in a bandaged coma (prompting doubtless scurrilous rumours that the artist had fled Tiger) the wheelchair-bound Solo was last glimpsed as he was carted off to an uncertain retirement

6 Billy The Fish Fulchester United were a team of many talents, not all of them human. With fins flailing and mouth agape, half-man, half-fish Billy “The Fish” Thomson’s shot-stopping abilities were never in doubt when the chips were down. Nor was leaping like a salmon or swimming through the air a problem, but for some reason he always had trouble with back-passes. His crowning glory came in the shape of a mullet reminiscent of Chris Waddle in his prime. Hardly surprisingly, his teammates were also far from perfect. The invisible striker Johnny X often went missing in the box, while Brown Fox, the Native American woman, was far from brave. Cameos from Shakin’ Stevens and Mick Hucknall added dubious glamour, but at the end of the day, a team fielding a goalkeeper who breathes through gills is always going to struggle.

7 Bella Barlow Poor Bella. In Tammy comic for girls, she lived with her grotesquely unpleasant Uncle Jed (who forced her to go out to work cleaning windows) and her equally nasty Aunt Gert (who forced her to do housework and ensured that her life was never-ending misery). However, Bella was a brilliant gymnast, and despite all of the obstacles that her horrid aunt and uncle put in her way, not to mention a dragon of a coach and the usual small matters of blackmail, imprisonment and unsporting rivals, she made the Montreal Olympics in 1976. A generation of girls cheered, and a generation of boys wondered when a generation of girls would put down their comics to pay them some attention

8 The Amazing Wilson A Wizard character, the Amazing Wilson’s origins were obscure, but some catastrophe meant he had to wear a tight black woollen costume and live outdoors. Oh, and he was immortal, unbeatable in any sport and “invented” the Fosbury flop, shortly after winning the Ashes for England. His existence was akin to the life of an ascetic monk, which, this being 1943, helped wartime propaganda with its hints that if we exercised, dressed in homo-erotic fashion and were immortal, the Nazis would be beaten

9 Jonathan E In 2018 Rollerball (think Blackburn playing American football on motorbikes) will be invented to quell the masses and give them the ultraviolence they crave. There are no rules. Or at least that’s what the 1975 film, adapted from William Harrison’s short story The Rollerball Murders, predicted. Naturally, the world had a saviour, a man who would destroy the system and who was nice to women. Jonathan E, Rollerball’s top exponent, retained his essential decency even though he was a mass murderer. E refused to retire, despite the orders of his boss, who said: “Rollerball was meant to demonstrate the futility of resistance; no man was intended to become bigger than it.” E disagreed

10 Bagger Vance Based on the Hindu saga Bhagavad-Gita, Steven Pressfield’s golf-is-life novel The Legend Of Bagger Vance saw golfer Rannulph Junuh falling into decline after making a mess of things during the first world war, only to be rescued by his spiritual caddie, Bagger Vance, over 36 holes with Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen. As if Junuh didn’t have enough problems, the match was arranged by his love, Adele, to save her father’s ailing golf resort. The Robert Redford-directed film starred Will Smith and was so cheesy, it should have been sponsored by edam