This professional player, icon of his club, played a match alone on the pitch without realizing it.
There are many unusual stories in the world of sport. In football, you will always find invasions on the pitch, automatic watering that goes off, a crampon lost due to a sole… Sometimes the weather also plays bad tricks.
In Great Britain, we’re not going to lie, it’s better to have an umbrella in your hand rather than sunglasses, especially when winter approaches. One Christmas evening, December 25, 1937, Boxing Day was in full swing on the other side of the Channel. Several championship matches have been postponed due to the terrible weather. Thick fog, rain, in short English weather.
This will not prevent officials from confirming the match between two legendary clubs, Chelsea and Charlton Athletic. Except that after the kick-off, the mist grew in intensity from minute to minute, forcing the referee to finally interrupt the match in the 60th minute, and definitively send the two London teams to the locker room with the score 1- 1.
Problem, Sam Bartram, Charlton goalkeeper, remains on the pitch… Lost in this very thick fog, the Charlton goalkeeper no longer saw his teammates and had not noticed that the match had been interrupted!
The guard in question returned to this very unusual event at the time. “The more the minutes passed, the less I saw the numbers of my teammates. A police officer suddenly approaches me and says: ‘But, my God, what are you still doing here?’ He tells me that the meeting had ended twenty minutes ago… When I returned to the locker room, my teammates had showered and dressed again, burst out laughing. A great moment of solitude.” This meeting will finally be replayed in April 1938 without the fog which had disappeared.
This very rare and unique event has become part of the legend of Boxing Day in England. For the record, Sam Bartram was not destined to be a goalkeeper. Initially a defensive midfielder, he was supervised by Charlton recruiters when he played as an amateur, but the problem was that his performance was completely missed. It was finally after the goalkeeper’s injury that his coach decided to put him in the cages. He subsequently produced an exceptional performance, disgusting the opposing attackers. Which will offer him a contract with Charlton, which will remain his club throughout his career.