A blue plaque in honour of the great Brian Glover/Leon Aras is being unveiled tomorrow in his home town of Barnsley by Ken Loach: https://www.barnsleychronicle.com/article/23733/brian-glovers-plaque-to-be-unveiled

That is, bouts where one or more of the participants just walked away from the ring and went back to the dressing room. Did they ever make for a satisfying conclusion? And who were the worst offenders? I notice that Kendo seems to have chalked up a lot of these towards the end of his1986-1993 run.

This montage has just been posted on YouTube today and dates from exactly 54 years ago. At the outset there's a brief clip of one of that Saturday's bouts: John Lister's site says that the matches that day were Mike Eagers vs. Alan Colbeck, Sayed Saif Shah vs. Lee Sharron and Steve Clements vs. Jose Rodriguez. The keen-eyed amongst you might be able to discern which of those pairings are shown here! However, what I think is really interesting is that further into the compilation, at around 4:14, there's a caption titled "Professional Wrestling Result". Clearly that afternoon's coverage had been live and had ended before the last bout's conclusion!

Clearly he went on a good few years too long (and I've no doubt that there'll be a few of you who'll argue he should never have started to begin with!), but was there any point at which the blue-eyed version of Shirley could have hung up his boots without being held responsible for the decline of British wrestling? The 1981 Wembley bout with Haystacks (despite its rubbish, flower-strewn finale) seems to have been the high watermark of his popularity - everything after that looks like diminishing returns.

In a recent interview with Peter/Kendo, he pointed out that the Kamikaze Crash was never quite as devastating as it looked, and that he himself was more at risk of getting hurt than the wrestler on the receiving end! I've always thought that the splash, whether delivered by Daddy or Stax, was never a particularly dangerous move, but that both Martin's elbow drop (which he seemed to prefer later on in his career) and Shirley's double elbow back drop (as practiced on John Quinn at Wembley and Tony Walsh countless times elsewhere!) had the capacity to cause some damage if not done carefully.