When Carolyn got nicked...

The bizarre time of when Mansfield's CEO left the game in a police car.

Carolyn Radford (nee Still) - wild and crazy, eight years ago today! Photo: Paul Currie.

As an experienced traveller who has seen nearly 1,000 competitive football games - plus dozens upon dozens of youth, reserves and Under 23s fixtures as well, it's probably no surprise that I've got quite a few bizarre/funny stories to tell.

There's the time when Barry Richardson took revenge on a heckler at Chesterfield's old ground and covered someone in bovril after he'd been called 'sh*t'. There's the surreal occasion when a camel (a real one!) turned up to watch a youth team game in Rainworth. Or, one during my time at Mansfield, when we forgot the kit for the last match of the season at Bristol Rovers, had to wear their away strip, beat them 1-0 and relegated them from the Football League - thus resulting in carnage. Or another where bailiffs turned up at the stadium and players/staff were hiding expensive equipment in every stand before the heavies could get upstairs to reclaim what they were owed. Or, again, when 'Sammy The Stag' had too many whiskeys and started abusing the manager at a Fans Forum event which led to his resignation once he'd sobered up!

However, today (2nd May) is the anniversary of one of the more plainly mental things I've ever witnessed at a football match - so funny because it was so surreal. It was when Carolyn Still; Mansfield's wild former Chief Executive (who according to media speculation was previously known as 'Luella' at the Lucy Brookes Agency in Leeds before she met and married the multi-millionaire chairman) got arrested at a Play-Off Semi-Final live on TV.

Officially, she was arrested due to 'a minor altercation with a police officer' but, as hundreds of York fans who were in the Main Stand at Bootham Crescent that night will be able to testify, she did a hell of a lot of things prior to her arrest that drew attention to herself. It probably didn't help her that the game was a televised Play-Off Semi-Final First Leg but, in fairness, the football wasn't the main subject of conversation amongst anyone on the train home afterwards.

To give a bit of a back-story, this was Carolyn's first season in football and she was making mistakes left, right and centre. She was unpredictable, wild, and having received a less than positive response due to her sudden appointment as Chief Executive by the mainstream media, she, at one point, wanted to ban all journalists from the stadium; in the end, it just went as far as banning them from receiving a free programme for a few games. On another occasion she came into the main office and boldly announced 'I now declare this to be a paperless office' - all well and good perhaps but electronic team-sheets hadn't really caught on back then, plus how the f**k do you get a player to sign a contract in a paperless office?

Bootham Crescent - soon to be demolished but a very memorable ground!

Fast-forward to the end of the season and she was wilder than ever and, where possible, you'd do everything you could to avoid her because you never knew what to expect. The problem at this game was that the Press Box was jam-packed full and with a 6,000 near-capacity crowd, the hosts created an overflow press area within the Directors Box - meaning, unfortunately, she ended up sat about two f**king seats away!

Bearing in mind she was Chief Executive and meant to be 'responsible' in representing the club, she was clearly 'worse for wear' when she emerged just before kick-off. Resembling Nookie Bear, with her eyes bulging and going in about 32,541 different directions, I knew at that precise moment this would be a long night and her regular ear-piercing screeches of 'COME ON MANSFIELD' at 27,000 decibels from the first whistle, coupled with getting up and down like a human yo-yo at various points and 'going for a wander' within the stand, suggested that I had every right to be worried the village where she resided was short of its idiot for the evening.

She also let out a big 'WOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOO' when we opened the scoring midway through the half which was cringe-worthy, embarrassing, and not appreciated whatsoever by York's directors sat just a few seats away from her. With just a quarter of the game played, she'd already managed to p*ss off nearly everyone else around with the exception of the chairman, of course, who was just happy to have his dolly-bird alongside him.

At another point, during one of her strolls, she told the Family Section to 'F**k Off' which, as you'd imagine, didn't go down very well and got her quite a bit more attention than what she was already receiving from startled stewards. They'd realised who she was (and picked up on the fact she was a lunatic) but they were seemingly scared to kick her out... and it just prolonged the entertainment!

During the half-time interval, having thrown a strop at York's directors for celebrating their equaliser, she tried to get on the pitch to speak to the TV cameras and make an 'announcement' to the 1,500 or so visiting fans. Unfortunately, she was denied; a shame as it'd have been hilarious to watch her potentially 'Do a Delia!' and look even more stupid but to a bigger audience. In yet more drama, she couldn't resist shouting and swearing at Mark Cooper (the well-travelled manager) claiming that he wasn't fit to run Premier Sports - not realising that he was just a pundit in a suit and not the actual producer.

After half-time, it was eerily quiet for quite a while until she re-appeared - leading to many 'here comes the entertainment' type comments amongst us lot in or around the press area. Nevertheless, she quickly disappeared again before word filtered through that she'd finally been asked to leave. Then, even later on, came the p*ss-funny news that she'd been arrested for an 'incident' outside the ground involving a police officer - and it surprised absolutely nobody!

Quite a few of us who'd been in the press box were on the same train home afterwards and it was a comedy journey as most of us 'discussed' events. The game itself was barely mentioned and that, by the way, ended in a 1-1 draw with York going on to win the second leg.

Where the action happened and directors were deafened by horrible screeching!

The mother of all sh*t storms unfolded in the following days with national papers having an absolute field day due to her being 'escorted' to the nearest cop shop. Her then-fiance, the chairman, tried to play the incident down, which fooled nobody, and the club tried to blacklist every journalist or photographer who'd said bad things about her in print or had photographs published.

Even better, the local Safety Advisory Group wanted to postpone the second leg (scheduled for the following Bank Holiday Monday) as, somehow, her name was on the safety certificate for Field Mill. They claimed, given the events, she was neither a fit or responsible person to be named on the certificate and so it got changed rather promptly to ensure the game went ahead and wasn't played behind-closed-doors or anything. But SAG did, in my opinion, have a very, very, valid point!

Arguably the funniest thing in all of this was Sophie Hicks (one of York's directors and a fellow female in football) made a comment to one of the papers that Carolyn 'seemed a little bit distressed' during the course of the game. It was the understatement of the century and, whether it was intentional or not, it seriously wound up a few people in the boardroom at Mansfield like you wouldn't believe! Pretty much everyone else found it to be hilarious when the directors weren't around but it was like adding fuel to an already burning fire.

Luckily, or sadly from an entertainment perspective, this crazy behaviour was never fully-repeated in the rest of my time at Mansfield. The closest she ever got to a repeat was an appearance on the terraces at Nuneaton Town the following season (when, again, she hit vocal cords so high that it was akin to a cat being strangled). Unless the TV cameras were in attendance, she wasn't really around the club on a day-to-day basis very much either in the 3-4 years afterwards.

She did, however, apply to be on the FA Council some years later, only to be rejected and that came not long after a scandal which involved the club and 'One Call Girls' so I can only imagine she didn't sell herself well enough to prospective voters during the election campaign...