John Fashanu | Vital Football

John Fashanu

8

89spartans_12/03/77

Vital Squad Member
Just watched Fash the Bash’ on good morning Britain. What an interesting story. He spoke about his brother Justin who was gay.
Fash told us that he had paid Justin a very large sum of money to stop him from ‘coming out’ as gay. Fash and his family were worried about the stick they would get about the gay thing.
Justin told his story to the press anyway and there was a huge fallout with john and the family over this.
Justin then killed himself.

From the time I can remember what a big joke it all was. Justin was the butt of all the jokes. I can remember watching saint and grievsie, a great programme at the time on football. The first that didn’t just tow the line.
Justin had just signed for the Irons. Which led to Grievsie joking that ‘Justin fashanu had only signed for West Ham to ‘stiffen’ up the back four.’
Imagine that today?

I really liked john though as a person. Really friendly feller. He was at my house the night before he transferred to Millwall. Amazingly he didn’t know anything about the move the night before. His word on it at the time.

Poor Fash and his brother Justin.
 
Is Men's football the last sport which is so backward on this??
All these years later and I still can't think of another openly gay male footballer...

I would hope too that the "terraces" have moved on but I doubt it.
 
Did anyone see Fash on SAS: Who Dares Wins, the other night? He's a bloody psycho (along with Tony Bellew, possibly an ever bigger psycho). As part of some brutal game they were playing, he had rapper Locksmith (no, I had never heard of him either) in a death grip neck hold and was within seconds of doing him some serious damage.

As for Justin, he had the world at his feet when he signed for Forest, but it all seemed to go wrong for him after that. I don't think he and Brian Clough really clicked, unsurprisingly.
 
The Imposter said:
As for Justin, he had the world at his feet when he signed for Forest, but it all seemed to go wrong for him after that. I don't think he and Brian Clough really clicked, unsurprisingly.
Click to expand...

My story, in response to johnolbe's question (see above) may shed some light on this but you'll have to wait until Jules publishes the Q&A.
 
The Imposter said:
Did anyone see Fash on SAS: Who Dares Wins, the other night? He's a bloody psycho (along with Tony Bellew, possibly an ever bigger psycho). As part of some brutal game they were playing, he had rapper Locksmith (no, I had never heard of him either) in a death grip neck hold and was within seconds of doing him some serious damage.

As for Justin, he had the world at his feet when he signed for Forest, but it all seemed to go wrong for him after that. I don't think he and Brian Clough really clicked, unsurprisingly.
Click to expand...


I went once to a Cloughie talk in Coventry.
Public event.
He got onto Justin Fashanu and came out with some vile comment..."signed Fashanu for a million only to find out he was a f'ing black gay c###".
A local reported at meeting challenged Cloughie only for him to go down and seize the reporters notepad and lay into him until he was nearly in tears...

Was not a nice evening.
 
I remember going out on a double date with John Fashanu when I was 16. He was seeing one of the older Jackson sisters from Hykeham, I was seeing the youngest.

All we did was chat footie for a couple of hours, and I was dumped the following day 😆
 
It's sad what happened between Fash and his brother.
Footballing wise though, frrom what I can remember with Fashanu as an Imp - and like Tony Cunningham before him - he took a lot of physical punishment (probably verbal as well in the 80s). But he just absorbed it and gave it back in at least equal measure. Good player for us.
 
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