People could barely look at me for days afterwards without chuckling John wasn't annoyed He didn't say anything to me. He couldn't speak without laughing at me.That taught me, in front of all those people for the first time, that you have to go along with it. There would be no point in bursting into tears or anything like that.It might have helped in the end, because when I went back to Wembley the next year I won three events. The incident has stayed with me but you keep getting reminders in this sport even when you think it's all going well.Only a couple of weeks ago I was in Glasgow. There, he stopped, I was thrown off and ended up minus Chatterbox outside the ring, dumped on my bottom and sitting next to the course builder I was asked if I wanted to go back I decided against.At least I wasn't among the spectators They laughed Actually, everybody else laughed too.

My horse, Chatterbox, decided he wanted nothing to do with this at all. Just before he should have been jumping it, he veered away and went towards the boundary boards. I was 15 and riding for the first time in the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley. I was nervous enough as it was and John, my brother, gave me last-minute instructions about the course and how I should ride it. Things seemed to be going pretty well and it looked as though I might get round without mishap, which is all I could expect really Getting close to the end I came to the combination. One of the world's most famous show jumpers, who is riding in the Olympia Championships, recounts the time a horse took control of him rather than the other way round, and put him in his place "ONE of the great truths about showjumping is that you can beup one day and down on your backside the next.

Knowing where to start with the mistakes is the difficult bit but I learned the lesson pretty early in my career. If so, he said, could he have some to glue on to his players' boots Belle Vue thought he was joking.. The most bizarre was that of the Doncaster Rovers trainer Wally Ardron who wrote to Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester asking how it was that Polar bears never seemed to have difficulty standing up on ice. Could it be, he asked, that the fur around their feet had some special property that stopped them slipping. Groundsmen were convinced that their pitches would take years to recover and people came up with ever more eccentric ideas to allow their teams to resume playing.

The non-League, part-timers Gravesend and Northfleet, from Kent, who in spite of being used as an unofficial nursery club by Arsenal had never progressed beyond the first round, were drawn away to Carlisle United in the third round. The tie was postponed six times, by which time it was known that the winners would meet Sunderland. Gravesend won at Carlisle but lost in a replay to Sunderland.For professional players the long freeze was a time of boredom. Few clubs had indoor facilities and training grounds were frozen. Hot-air blowers and braziers were hired, but without much success. Jimmy Armfield, then at Blackpool, recalls that he and the club's goalkeeper, Tony Waiters, would try to get the pitch ready for the next game and keep fit at the same time by skating from one end of the Bloomfield Road pitch to the other.When in March most of the country thought the freeze would never end, clubs began to get desperate. On one day alone (9 February), 57 English and Scottish league games were called off, and only seven were completed.Some FA Cup matches were postponed time and again.

For much of the time football was more or less out of the question, especially around Christmas. Over the whole icy period over 400 league and cup games in England, Wales and Scotland were postponed and the English season had to be extended to the end of May. In England the first severe frost had come on 22 December and the first frost-free night was not until 5 March. Perhaps, though, it prepared Spurs for their Cup- winners' Cup-tie in Bratislava which was played in the snow. Although they lost 2-0, they won the return leg 6-0 and eventually beat Atletico Madrid in the final Over most of Europe Christmas Day had been white. Burnley were the team Spurs had beaten in the previous season's Cup final.