Herd wrote:
The funniest was that even Bertie Mee got stuck in once the fists started to fly !
Reckon Mee could handle himself, he was an ex-Army PT instructor.
Jon Spurling wrote a paragraph about it in "Rebels For The Cause" where he reckoned John Roberts was in the thick of the action.
Also found this on the Guardian website
http://www.theguardian.com/football/200 ... h-part-one
"It is not uncommon for a fight among footballers to be referred to as "handbags". It is less common for it to actually be caused by handbags. But that, apparently, is what was behind the 1970 fight between Arsenal and Lazio players in and outside a Rome restaurant after a 2–2 Fairs Cup draw. The Italian club presented the visiting players with souvenir leather bags, which were derided as "effeminate". Arsenal's players started to throw the bags around the restaurant, but then a Lazio player grabbed one, threw it into Bob McNab's face and, in the words of Arsenal's Frank McLintock, "we all piled in. For a while, it was like the wild west". Uefa swiftly banned post-match socialising. "Looking back," the Arsenal defender John Roberts said later, "those purses were lovely." SB