I am totally confused - When I removed pretty much everything and put the offending code in JSFiddle, it works fine - http://jsfiddle.net/FusGB/
However, in the site, almost the same identical code does not work: http://ezpcinternal.com/sports/index.html (Menu to the left)
What is happening is the first item is doing the effect, then the rest just appear suddenly.
I have been racking my brains over this for the past few hours with no luck - based on the fact that it works in JSfiddle completely confuses me.
It works in IE (tested 8 and 9) - but after the slide up, it reappears for a very short time then disappears (annoying) - and it doesn't work in both Chrome and Firefox.