PHIL STANT
THE STRIKER’S WAR
Phil Stant played with Kerry Dixon at Reading and then scored freely for the likes of Hereford, Cardiff and Lincoln. He also saw first-hand the horrors of the Falklands War. Forty years on, he tells FFT why forgetting simply isn’t an option
Words Richard Edwards
“I always remember this lieutenant running around handing out grenades because we were expecting a counter-attack on our location. I just remember looking at him and saying, ‘I’m missing the f**king World Cup for this s**t’.”
Forty years ago, a teenage Phil Stant was a regular for Reading’s reserves. He was also in the army, stationed at Aldershot and combining a potential football career with one in the services. Before April 2, 1982, the thought of heading off to war had barely even crossed his mind.
“Our main training was all focused on the Cold War and a Russian invasion of Europe – that’s all everything was geared around,” he tells FFT. “We had The Troubles in Northern Ireland, but when the Falklands came up, most of us squaddies were saying to each other, ‘Where the bloody hell are they? I’ve never heard of them’. Many were thinking, ‘Why would the Argentines invade Scotland?’”
It might have made more sense had Ally MacLeod’s side lived up to their manager’s billing and stopped Argentina from winning the World Cup four years earlier. But now?
As the United Nations did its bit to quell tensions, and Stant and his colleagues began studying their globes, it became clear a year in which England would return to the World Cup for the first time since 1970 would be memorable for very different reasons.
For Stant, who had spent 1981-82 in the Combination League with Reading’s reserves and would go on to thrive at a number of Football League clubs including Hereford, Mansfield and Cardiff, life would never be the same again. It’s a reality he acknowledges readily, as the UK marks the 40th anniversary of a conflict which claimed the lives of 258 British soldiers in the South Atlantic.