Ex-Premier League striker Leroy Lita has opened up on the time a fan attacked him on a night out before a top-of-the-table clash in the Football League
Leroy Lita, a former Reading player, has disclosed that, one night out, he was the victim of a horrific attack by a Bristol Rovers fan.
Speaking with Undr The Cosh, Lita—who currently plays for Nuneaton Borough in the Southern League Premier Division—discussed his difficult history and the incident that kept him out of the starting lineup for the Royals’ pivotal game against Sheffield United.
“The club said we shouldn’t have been out,” he remarked. We were only boys. I had a scar from when I got glassed. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so we took the nearby, inexpensive cab. That’s what our goal was.
The striker, who is valued at £1 million, also discussed his affinity with Rovers supporters and his time spent playing in Bristol.
“Danny (Wilson) used to know when you’d been out,” Lita continued. “You would actually go to war with that gang of diverse characters—they were a drinking bomb fear as well. We were never indoors.”
Lita remembered another wild outing in Bristol’s Harbourside, where he got into a fistfight with more Rovers supporters.
“We went down to the waterfront, Jermaine Pennant and Jonathan Fortune and all the Bristol City boys,” he added. When I went to meet some of them, two boys jumped me. John Harley fled while I was with him—look at that expression! He was from Chelsea, I knew. That was also done by a Rovers supporter.”
Lita started his career in Premier League Chelsea. After relocating to Bristol as a teenager, he scored 31 goals in 85 games for Bristol City. However, in the 2000s, it was evident that he had a tense relationship with Bristol City’s opposition supporters.
In the podcast, he also talked about how he “just kept turning up” to training sessions in South London and how no one ever said anything about it.
He declared: “I went to Chelsea and stayed there for a year because I’m a fan of Chelsea. As a trialist at Chelsea. One year. I simply kept showing up. simply kept showing up. They didn’t remain silent towards me. No one told you not to come. I simply kept showing up. I attended each session in full.”
“Every week, I would take two days off from school to train with the first team and reserves.” I thought this was really clever. After school, they would come get you and transport you to the digs, where you would practise alongside the first team stars. I thought, “This is really great.”
But Lita’s time in the academy wasn’t over; a year later, he was living in the southwest of England after Chelsea let him leave in 2001.
“I was feeling like I had a chance when I reached my 16s, but one Thursday following practise, Ted Dale, the academy manager at the time, dragged me into the small training area office and said ‘yeah, we’re not taking you on, the reason are you’re a bit too little’ blah, blah.”
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