Match Of The Seventies - 1974/75

All is quiet in the football world (apart, that is, from the financial crisis engulfing Rotherham United - more of which at a later date - and Celtic getting beaten at home by Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup), so it's time for another episode of Match Of The Seventies. This one is from the 1974/75 season, so it features a very angry Brian Clough, West Ham United and Fulham supporters turning the FA Cup final into a celebration of hating Chelsea, Manchester United in the Second Division (tee hee!) and Kevin Keegan & Billy Bremner getting naked at Wembley. Well, nearly.

Match Of The Seventies - 1973/74

We're up to 1973/74 on "Match Of The Seventies", and what a peculiar season it was. Tonight's episode features Leeds United's record-breaking unbeaten run, Liverpool tearing Newcastle United a new hole in the FA Cup Final, England failing to qualify for the World Cup, Spurs fans rioting in Rotterdam at the UEFA Cup final and (be still, my beating heart) Denis Law back-heeling Manchester United down in a last day of the season Manchester Derby (before the pedants write in, results elsewhere guaranteed that United were already down - Law's goal was merely the icing on the cake). What a strange season.

Match Of The Seventies - 1972/73

Match Of The Seventies - 1970/71

Many years ago, the BBC produced two (relatively) light-hearted TV programmes about football in the 1970s and the 1980s. Some enterprising soul has seen fit to put them up on YouTube so, over the next few weeks I'm going to be putting them up on here. Each episode is divided up into four ten minute long chunks, and they should show up on here in the correct order. Thanks, then, to the original uploader, and a quick message to any watching BBC lawyers - if you're really that concerned about this copyrighted material being available on the internet, why not release them for sale on DVD, hmm?

Munich: 50 Years On

The European Cup was created, in many ways, because it could be. The end of the Second World War left Europe with a sizeable quota of aircraft to be converted for commercial use. This, combined with the boastful claims of Wolverhampton Wanderers (who claimed to be the champions of Europe after friendly victories against the likes of Dynamo Moscow and Honved of Budapest) led to the creation of the European Cup. Real Madrid had won the first two competitions in 1956 and 1957, but in 1957/58, Manchester United loomed large on the horizon. Matt Busby's team had won the Football League Championship in 1957, and going into the spring of 1958, they were strongly placed - in the quarter-finals of the European Cup against Red Star Belgrade, in fourth place in the League again and in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup, they also provided the possible backbone for a future England team, with several already established international players such as Duncan Edwards and Roger Byrne.

Having won the First Leg 2-1 at Old Trafford, they drew the Second Leg in Belgrade 3-3 to book their place in the Semi-Finals. On the return journey home, the plane made a scheduled stop-off to refuel in Munich - not uncommon in an age when passenger aircraft were considerably smaller than they are now. After refuelling, the plane attempted to take off twice in exceptionally, but was unable to get sufficient speed to take off. On the third attempt, the plane overshot the runway and crashed into the fence surrounding the airport, and then into an empty house. Initial reports blamed pilot error, stating that his failure to de-ice the wings of the plane prior to the take-off attempts, but it was later confirmed that the blame was most fairly to be lain at the door of fate. It was eventually confirmed that a build up of slush on the runway meant that there was no way that the plane could have reached a great enough speed for the plane to take off. Manchester United lost seven players, their coach, their secretary and their trainer. An eighth player, Duncan Edwards, died fifteen days after the crash. Eight journalists also died, along with one supporter, one steward, a travel agent and the co-pilot. Matt Busby's condition was so bad that, as a Roman Catholic, he was read the last rites. He, however, survived, although he wouldn't be fit to manage again until the start of the following season.

United's match the next Saturday was cancelled, but they had to resume shortly afterwards with an FA Cup Fifth Round match against Sheffield Wednesday. With Busby in hospital in Germany, it was left to his assistant Jimmy Murphy (who had not travelled with the rest of the squad because he was coaching Wales in an international match against Israel) to take over the team. His patchwork team was made up of stop-gap signings such as Ernie Taylor from Blackpool and Stan Crowther from Aston Villa, alongside a mixture of youth and reserve team players lined up on a night of almost overwhelming emotion at Old Trafford. Indeed, one of the most haunting images of the Munich Air Disaster is the United programme that night - such was the extent to which no-one knew who would be playing that night, that the United team list was left blank, with empty spaces for spectators to fill in, should they choose to. United won the match 3-0, but their season would crumble away as an under-experienced squad won just won more League match that season, finishing in ninth place. In the European Cup, they lost the semi-final over two legs against Milan. In the FA Cup, they made Wembley and the final against Bolton Wanderers, but lost this match 2-0.

The Munich Air Disaster is emblematic of its era. This was the early days of mass flight, and accidents were more commonplace than they are now (the famous Torino team of of the immediate post-war years - "Il Grande Torino" - were killed in an air crash in 1949). The black and white Pathe News footage of the aftermath of the accident lends it a strange, faraway feel. Similarly, one could hardly imagine a football club allowing the sort of chance that was taken in attempting three take-offs in such appalling conditions as happened on that day. Footballers weren't considered the valuable commodities that they are now in 1958. Munich did, to a point, form part of the myth that made Manchester United the club that it is today. The wave of sympathy that Munich elicited would bring in a generation of supporters that would be the beginning of the process that has resulted in them being the biggest football club in the world. The loss, however, was that of the whole of English football, so if you are asked to keep quiet for one minute either tomorrow night or on Saturday afternoon, there isn't really much of an excuse if you don't.

A Video Of Coventry City Tearing Liverpool A New Hole

Strange, really, but at the end of such an eventful week, what I really want to do this evening is sit down and have a couple of delicious, cold gin and tonics. It's also been a stressful week. I may turn up back on here later on this evening, full of gin and fraternal love, but for the time being here's a video from December 1983 of Liverpool (about who's current woes I have quite a lot to say) coming up against what I can only presume was an unexpectedly feisty Coventry City side in the First Division. Commentary comes from a pre-histrionics John Motson.

The Christmas Rush

The last few days have been eerily quiet. The week before Christmas is always like the calm before the storm - the League Cup quarter-finals like the first big, inky spots of rain before all hell breaks loose and the storm that is the Christmas schedule starts. In case you're unaware of what I'm talking about (and there are some of you that might not), Christmas is the time of year that football in Britain goes a bit insane. Between today and January 1st (that's just ten days), our footballers will play four matches. One today, one on Boxing Day, one next weekend and one on New Year's Day. Somewhere around one-tenth of the season's league fixtures will be played and, in ten days time, we will all emerge, bleary-eyed and hungover, and everything might just look a bit clearer than it does now.

When foreign players started coming into the British game in the mid-1990s, there were some complaints. An Italian footballer, say, would no more be expected to play on Boxing Day than he would be expected to go water-skiing. On much of the continent, the players are starting to wind down for their Christmas break. The stories of players complaining were probably over-stated (and there are as many British players that complain it as there are foreign players that complain about it), but you do find yourself thinking, "Well, you know, if this is all a little bit too much like hard work for your £20,000 a week, there are other career options available". Similarly, you will get the occasional manager who complains about the poor little dears being over-worked (Alex Ferguson is usually pretty good for this sort of thing), to which you find yourself thinking, "Well, Strawberry Nose, it shouldn't be that difficult - after all, you have got a staff of sixty-odd players". There is much to look forward to over the next ten days, not least of which is the Arsenal-Spurs derby, which kicks off the whole thing at lunchtime.

At this festive time of year, we should probably spare a thought for Lawrie Sanchez, who was sacked as Fulham's manager yesterday. Actually, he might have quit. The rumours are somewhat conflicting, but the effect is largely the same. Before you start feel too sorry for him, though, it's worth remembering the cautionary tale of Derek Dooley. Dooley was a Sheffield Wednesday legend. He scored sixty-two goals in sixty-one matches for them but, in 1953, he broke his leg during a match against Cardiff City. This was pretty unusual, even in the 1950s, but gangrene set in and Dooley had to have the leg amputated. So here, then, is a man that has literally given a limb for this football club. It seems right that such a servant should be rewarded with a job for life at Hillsborough, and by 1971 he had risen far enough up the ladder to be appointed the club manager. In the early 1970s, Sheffield Wednesday were a club in free-fall. How much of this was down to Dooley I'm not sure. As a man that had given a leg for his club, though, he probably didn't deserve his fate, which was to be sacked by Wednesday on Christmas Eve in 1973. Pleasingly, the story has a happy ending. Dooley swapped sides and joined Sheffield United in their commercial department. What a magnificent poke in the eye it was for Sheffield Wednesday that he rose up through the ranks, becoming managing director and, eventually, the chairman that took The Blades into the Premier League in 2006. He has since stepped down, but stays on as vice-president in his retirement.

On the off-chance that I don't get back on here over the next couple of days or so, I'll take the opportunity now to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Well Fielded

Not for the first time over the course of the last few months, my thoughts have been turning back to Enfield again over the course of the day. Some of you will already have read it, but for those of you that haven't, here it is again:

Enfield 1-0 Lincoln City - FA Trophy Quarter-Final 1988: Enfield had a pretty awesome cup team in the early to mid 1980s, and knocked a string of League clubs out of the FA Cup. By 1988, though, their star was on the wane. When the Conference finally won the automatic promotion and relegation place, at least half of the clubs in the Conference turned professional. Crowds jumped up immediately, and clubs like Enfield were left standing still. By 1988, they'd lost the majority of their best players and were struggling to hold onto a mid-table place in the Conference.

Against this, they played Lincoln City (who had unluckily become the first team to be relegated the year before and were in the process of going straight back up into the Football league) in the FA Trophy. A section of the travelling Lincoln supporters had smashed Enfield Town before the match - proper bricks through shop windows stuff, and the atmosphere was pretty tense. Southbury Road had no segregation at the time and, when Enfield supporters went to change ends at half-time, they were confronted with lines of police officers with their arms linked to prevent the Lincoln supporters from getting at them. It was a deeply unpleasant atmosphere in many ways, but with about twenty minutes to play, the Lincoln goalkeeper spilled a corner and Nick Francis, I think, scored what turned out to be the only goal of the match. At the end of the match, with the Enfield supporters having been retired to a safe distance by the police, the Lincoln supporters went insane, ripping up the perimeter fence behind the goal.

It felt more like a giant-killing than any of those FA Cup wins ever did, and Enfield were never going to win the FA Cup. In 1988, they went on Wembley won the FA Trophy. Lincoln were back in the League a couple of months later, but this was Enfield's last hurrah - they were relegated from the Conference in 1990, never to return.

I mention it now because now, at more or less the least convenient time possible, I'm idly thinking of paying Enfield Town a visit again. I covered the subject of my relationship with Enfield FC once before on here, and I have also mentioned the fact that I have felt strangely dislocated from really "supporting" anyone since I moved from North London to Brighton a year and a half ago. The very thought of it fills me with a degree of dread. Enfield is one of those rare parts of London which, handily, isn't served by London Underground. The journey from Brighton is a particularly tortuous one - an hour's train journey to Victoria, a transfer to Liverpool Street, and then another half hour on the train out to the northernmost tip of London. Enfield FC were the first team that I saw play (along with their opponents that particular day, Carshalton Athletic). All I have to do is pick a convenient date. You never know. It might do me good.

The Ten Most Significant Figures In The History Of The England Football Team

Our very good friend Little Dotmund is our guest writer this morning, and he has decided to pore over who are the 10 most significant figures in the history of the England football team, "in chronological order, so as to avoid arguments", he says.


1. HERBERT CHAPMAN
Reason for inclusion: Tactical revolutionary

The greatest pre-war manager in English history, Chapman won titles with both Huddersfield Town and Arsenal. But it was his approach which was the key here. Whilst everyone else was completely insular in their thinking, Chapman was constantly hungry for new ideas. He pioneered the use of floodlights after seeing a match in Austria lit by car headlights. He devised the W-M formation which became the mainstay of football thinking around the globe until the Danubian School shook its foundations. He could have spared England the slow decline, had he not caught a fatal case of pneumonia, watching the Arsenal third team play on a freezing cold winter's evening.

2. NANDOR HIDEGKUTI
Reason for inclusion: First man to show England they were completely backward-thinking

I could have picked any member of the great Hungary team who came to Wembley in 1953 and gave England a complete hiding, not to mention their visionary coach Gustav Sebes. I picked Nandor Hidegkuti for two reasons, though. Firstly, Hidegkuti scored a hattrick that day, the first goal coming in the 1st minute. Secondly (and more significantly), whilst Ferenc Puskas played a more conventional centre forward role on the pitch (albeit so well that he was impossible to keep down), Hidegkuti played in what is now called The Hole. This tactical innovation pulled England's game-plan apart, and sounded the first warning shot that just THINKING we were the best wasn't enough.

3. SIR ALF RAMSAY
Reason for inclusion: Coached England to what will probably be their only World Championship title

No list like this would be complete without Sir Alf. In the team beaten by the Hungarians in 1953, he went on to a stellar coaching career built around his own revolutionary playing system, 4-1-2-1-2. For Sir Alf, the system was paramount, the players picked to fit around it. Jack Charlton was famously included not for being the best player, but for being the best player for Ramsay's tactical vision. Sir Alf Ramsay laid the blueprint for international success which has been completely ignored with flying colours by every single one of his successors.

4. JAN TOMASZEWSKI
Reason for inclusion: First in a long line of scapegoated opposition players blamed for England's abject defeat, so as to not have to admit internal failings.

Tomaszewski - "The Man Who Stopped England" - was the goalkeeper of the Poland team who came to Wembley in 1973. England needed to beat them to qualify for the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. England's torrid qualification campaign had included a 2-0 loss to Poland in Warsaw in 1972, Bobby Moore emblematically scoring an own goal and gifting the second by failing to control a pass. The Wembley match in 1973 has gone down in English football legend, Tomaszewski repeatedly keeping the English attackers at bay with some spectacular goalkeeping. Poland then made an incisive breakaway following Norman Hunter's failed interception and scored. England equalised through an Allan Clarke penalty late on, but it wasn't enough. History records, with typical English arrogance, that it was Tomaszewski's other-worldly performance which kept an England team otherwise guaranteed qualification to the World Cup at bay. History does not record the fact that the Poland team went to West Germany the following summer and finished third in the tournament, beating Brazil in the third-place match, as well as having the tournament's Golden Boot winner in Grzegorz Lato.

5. DON REVIE
Reason for inclusion: First England manager to resign

Revie had Sir Alf Ramsay's impossible shoes to fill, so in retrospect his was always going to be a thankless task. History has been unkind to Revie - he's remembered as the coach of the most loathed successful team in English football, his 1970s Leeds United machine, - and a failed England manager. The fact of the matter is, no-one could have done a better job with the players he had. They were individually good but collectively dreadful - a fact further emphasised by the fact that for their club sides, the same players were part of teams bringing home European silverware as a matter of course. Revie makes the list because he was the first man to see the England job as just that, just another job. And when he had grown sick of taking the flack in that job, he went off and found one he liked better.

6. KEVIN KEEGAN
Reason for inclusion: The ultimate Great English Hope

England will be all right. We have got Keegan. We have got Gascoigne. We have got Gerrard, Rooney, Owen, Lineker, John Barnes, Beckham. Brazil were not all right because they had Pele, they were all right because they had a team. And amongst this team were players like Jairzinho, Pele, Gerson, Tostao, Garrincha, Clodoaldo, Rivelino, Vava, Carlos Alberto... It's a widely stated MEDIA FACT that any of the current English players could walk into any team in the world, without stopping to realise that for most of them, it would be their first ever experience of the team ethic. Keegan is the first in a long line of English players who were brilliant, but not brilliant enough to win games all on their own. He's also one of the few I feel sorry for, being as he was so clearly focussed on helping England to do well. The current players occupying the Keegan position seem fairly content just to help themselves. The less said about his time as England manager the better, really.

7. BRIAN CLOUGH
Reason for inclusion: First person to be passed over by the FA for non-footballing reasons

Brian Clough is arguably the greatest ever English football manager. Along with Herbert Chapman, Clough is the only manager to win the English League with more than one club, a feat made all the more remarkable in Clough's case by the fact he did it with hyper-unfashionable teams from the provinces. The FA took one look at him and thought he'd be outspoken and controversial, make waves in the national game, completely turning it on its head. He'd be a PR disaster! They were, of course, right, as Clough later admitted himself. They are also the most asanine reasons a FOOTBALL Association could ever give for not appointing a national FOOTBALL team manager. England's loss was Nottingham Forest's gain - Clough went on to win consecutive teams with the team in the late 1970s. Just consider that for a moment. Really consider it.

8. BOB PAISLEY
Reason for inclusion: First person to not want the wretched England job at all

Bob Paisley is the most successful English club manager of all time. Whilst England were floundering like a beached whale in the 1970s, the Liverpool team he and the rest of Bill Shankly's Bootroom team had assembled completely straddled the world. For all this, he never dreamed of managing the England team, that poisoned chalice which had already done for the career of Don Revie. Fair enough, says I.

9. MATTHEW LE TISSIER
Reason for inclusion: Best English player to only win eight caps (EIGHT)!

He was frequently overweight, often lazy, and he smoked. He played for unfashionable Southampton, who were perpetually on the cusp of relegation from the top flight. Without Le Tissier, though, Southampton WOULD have sunk without a trace. He scored 162 league goals for the Saints, in an era when the rest of the whole team combined managed about 7 per season. He was a luxury player, perhaps, but he was a complete genius on a football pitch, able to conjure something out of absolutely nothing. His England career spanned 1994 to 1998, under Venables and Glenn Hoddle (who, you might have thought, would have been more sympathetic to a player of Le Tissier's ilk). He should in fact have won 100 caps, starting in the Graham Taylor era. He could have player Le Tissier on his own in midfield and it would have been more effective that Platt, Palmer, Sinton and Daley.

10. SVEN-GORAN ERIKSSON
Reason for inclusion: First overseas coach of the England national team

An unexpected piece of sensible thinking from the otherwise bewildered FA. The fact that Sven failed to win absolutely everything, ever (including Rear of the Year), however, has allowed the FA to slip back into their normal fug of lunacy. "We had a foreign coach, it didn't work, so we'll just get the first English bloke with a UEFA Pro licence who walks through *that* door to be our next manager. Oh, hello Steve".

How Many Candles?

During the summer, there were audible gasps when Puma released Spurs' kits - alongside the white home kit and very, very dark blue change kits was a white and sky blue halved number, which looked like a Blackburn home shirt that had been left out in the sun for too long. All became apparent in the accompanying press release - this was Spurs' "125th Anniversary Kit", based on the shirts that they wore when they were founded in 1882. They were worn just the once, on the first of October, as Spurs fought back from three goals down to earn a 4-4 draw against Aston Villa. Now, a hundred and twenty-five years is a long time. It's almost certainly longer than any of us will last. However, there is an even more significant birthday taking place this month - step forward Sheffield FC, the oldest football club in the world, who are one hundred and fifty years old this month.

Take a moment, if you will, to consider just how old Sheffield FC is. They predate Tottenham Hotspur by a full quarter of a century. In fact, Sheffield FC are older than the Football League, the FA Cup and international football. In fact, Sheffield FC are older than the FA by six years. They're older than the laws of the game themselves. They are, in footballing terms, the first creatures to step forth from the primordial gloop of "mob football", in which hundreds of men would batter seven bells out of each other in the name of sport, and try to make sense of a game that was in its infancy. The first question that one asks when given such a fact is a pretty obvious one - who did they play against? Well, the answer to that is a pretty obvious one - until other clubs started to form, they had to (no sniggering at the back) play amongst themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Oldest Football Club In The World's history is fairly well documented. When first formed (they were, like many that would follow them, a cricket team in search of ways to keep themselves fit in the winter), they first sat down and drew up a list of rules. The "Sheffield Rules" were the first properly unified set of rules for playing football and formed the backbone of the FA's laws, first published in 1863. In the 1870s, they introduced a solid crossbar to replace the tape that was used by most other clubs, and also claim to be the first club to introduce heading the ball into the game.

Strictly an amateur club, they were always likely to suffer with the rise of professionalism in the 1880s. They did, however, get closely involved with the formation of Sheffield United in 1889 and remained a powerful amateur club for some time, winning the FA Amateur Cup in 1904. Since then, they have fallen somewhat from grace, although they did manage a trip to Wembley in the 1977 FA Vase final, where they celebrated their 120th anniversary by Billericay Town to a draw before losing the replay at Nottingham Forest's City Ground. After over a century of homelessness (they initially used Bramall Lane, but moved out when Sheffield United moved in), they bought their own ground in 2001, when they purchased The Coach & Horses pub in Dronfield and, more significantly, the Sunday League pitch behind it. It now plays host to a smart 1,500 capacity stadium. They played in the Northern Counties East League until the end of last season, when restructuring moved them into the Unibond League Division One South - three divisions below the Conference. A quick glance at the league table seems to indicate that they are enjoying their first season at their new level - they currently sit in second place in the table.

Being the oldest football club in the world is, of course, completely unique, and the club are making the most of their unique anniversary. Not only have they lined up a friendly match against their older siblings Sheffield United (not unexpected - they played both United and Wednesday in the pre-season), but they have also managed to managed to secure a home friendly against Internazionale in two weeks time - the significance that Inter are also celebrating their 100th anniversary this season. This is being tied in with a high profile membership drive, alongside having already been awarded the FIFA Order Of Merit at FIFA's 100th Anniversary celebrations in 2004 - the only other club to have been awarded it are Real Madrid. That such a small club could have existed for such a long time is a remarkable fact, and a tribute in itself to supporters and committee members that have been driven to never let the club die - and with money coming in from these celebrations coupled with a team that still seems to be on the up on the pitch, it's entirely plausible that the world's oldest football club might yet have its brightest days ahead of it.

A recent Financial Times photo-shoot of the glamorous world of Sheffield FC

When Did Goalkeepers Get Any Good?

Some of you will probably already be aware of the fact that I spend far, far, far too much time watching DVDs of old football matches. I'm no great football analyst (you'd noticed?), but the one thing that I've noticed is that the goalkeepers were terrible. This is something that has bugged me for quite a while - when did goalkeepers develop the ability to actually do what they're paid to do? Because, for a considerable period of time, they didn't.

I was reminded of this whilst watching a video of a Manchester derby match from about 1972. With United leading narrowly and time running out, City got a corner which swung into the six yard area. It should have been a routine catch for Alex Stepney - he was under no pressure, and the angle of the ball meant that it wasn't even above head height, but he still managed to spill the ball straight in the direction of Francis Lee, who lashed the ball into the roof of the goal. I don't wish to turn this post into a slagging off session about Alex Stepney (well I could, but that's not really the point that I'm trying to make) - it's a pretty common occurrence on any football video from before about 1985.

The fact of the matter is that goalkeepers used to not be very good, and it's worth remembering this when we look at the argument about England and their goalkeepers. Paul Robinson is having a wretched time of it at the moment (even incurring the wrath of Steven Gerrard in a post-match interview on Wednesday night - though, curiously, he omitted to mention the own goal that he missed himself with the score at 1-0), but the cover isn't up to much, either. David James can be best described as "accident prone", whilst the very mention of the names Robert Green and Scott Carson makes me wince. They're probably better than many of the goalkeepers of the past, though. Gordon Banks' save against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup, for example, was a magnificent piece of goalkeeping - an extraordinary feat of agility - but I seriously think that its brilliance was magnified by the fact that most goalkeeping at the time was so dreadful. You see five or six saves that good every season in the Premier League now.

Robinson, Green and Carson are probably inferior to, say, England's 1982 World Cup goalkeeping trio of Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence and Joe Corrigan, and this is a real problem for England. Clemence was accident-prone, and Shilton always seemed to have a problem getting down to low shots because of his build. The rest of the world has moved on. Balls are lighter, shots are more fierce and, at the other end of the pitch, the goalkeepers are better - no longer the strangely flapping beasts of yore with an aversion to catching the ball. In this respect (as with many others), England has stood still.

Burns Night

Tomorrow afternoon at 4.00, England will kick off at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow against Russia and, in case you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks or so, it has an artificial pitch. If you've been reading the mainstream press over the last few days, this pitch will be give Michael Owen third-degree burns and cause John Terry's knee to explode and cover everyone present with (so far unnamed) "fluids". Yum, indeed. The truth of the matter is, however, that most British journalists' experience of artificial turf is limited to the brief fad for ripping up the grass and replacing t with the peculair bouncy carpet which blighted the game in England during the 1980s, and the fact of the matter is that the technology involved has moved on quite a bit since then. It is, therefore, a very apt time to take a review of the history of something that was once heralded as the future of football, and might yet prove to be the "pitch of the future".

Artificial surfaces, you won't be very surprised to hear, came from the USA, and the first Astroturf pitch (that particular name is a brand name, although it has gained a more generic usage since then) was installed at the Houston Astrodome (from whence Astroturf took its name) in 1967. It was a common sense application of science in its first incarnation. The Astrodome had a roof, making it almost impossible to maintain a grass surface, and artificial grass was an ideal solution. As any groundsman will tell you, grass pitches require an awful lot of maintenance and, by the 1970s, artificial pitches were starting to spring up at outdoor stadia as well, fitted by teams that were attracted by the new fad's low maintenance costs and durability.

There was something inevitable about the spread of artificial pitches to football. Anybody that has watched a match from the middle of winter in Britain in the 1970s would be able to tell you that the vast majority of pitches lost their grass by the middle of October and became little more than mud baths. They weren't helped by the clubs themselves, who appointed groundsmen whose idea of groundskeeping seemed to be to sprinkle some grass seed every once in a while and hope for the best, whilst coping with frost by shaking salt or grit over the grass to make it defrost, and who treated waterlogged pitches by applying liberal amounts of sand to them. Wembley stadium's once-fine pitch was converted into a pretty accurate recreation of Southend beach every spring in the late 1960s, with tonnes of sand being poured onto it every March after "The Horse Of The Year Show", rendering it close to unplayable. Other clubs such as Fulham suffered from their location - the desire to have a flat, green pitch hadn't been very high on the list of priorities of those who chose Craven Cottage as the location for their stadium, and the ground's close location to the Thames gave it terrible drainage, meaning that it usually resembled the Fields Of The Somme (circa December 1915) by the end of September. Clubs simply didn't seem (as with, with the benefit of hindsight, so many other things) care. I remember one edition of "Match Of The Day" in the early 1980s when the whole show was taken up with very extended highlights of a drab match between Manchester City and Stoke City, because City had under-soil heating, and everyone else was either frozen or rained off.

The first club in Britain to take the plunge was, of course, QPR, who dug up the pitch at Loftus Road in 1981 and replaced it with a green carpet made by a company called Omniturf. Almost immediately, it was heavily criticised, and not just by what one might describe as "traditionalists". Managers and players queued up to criticise the stress that it put on potentially fragile joints like the knees and ankles, and there were numerous reports of players picking up serious burns after being hauled to the ground and/or skidding across it. Coupled with this, the football played on it was absolutely rotten. The ball's bounce was too true and too high, and high bouncing balls would more often than not pick up speed off the surface, fooling even the most experienced of defenders and goalkeepers. QPR, perhaps unsurprisingly, adapted to it very quickly (as this thrashing of Middlesbrough from 1982 demonstrates neatly), and they won promotion to the First Division in 1983. Several other clubs (from memory, Luton Town, Oldham Athletic and Preston North End) also installed them, but they were banned by the Football League in 1988.

Artificial pitches started their revival in 2003, when SPL club Dunfermline Athletic had one installed at their East End Park stadium. Dunfermline's pitch had been fitted by a company called XL, and was light years ahead of the pitches used in England during the 1980s. There were, however, still considerable complaints from other SPL clubs (most notably Dundee United, Rangers and Celtic) and, in 2005, they were banned in Scotland. Most notably (and this was quite possibly a significant factor in the decision), Dunfermline's defence seemed largely one of self-interest - they cited savings made on training and maintenance, as well as the reduction in postponed matches as being the biggest single reason why they should be allowed to keep it. This wasn't the sort of argument that was going to bring the chairmen of other SPL clubs round to their point of view.

FIFA and UEFA, who both initially banned artificial pitches just after the FA did, have started to allow matches played on recommended artificial pitches again. Borussia Monchengladbach, in Germany, have one and, most notably of all, there is now one in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Considering the harsh climate in Moscow during the winter, it's understandable that they should have one. However, the decision to allow them to use an artificial pitch for the match between Russia and England is a controversial one. More notably still, all this talk of the 2008 European Cup final being played on plastic is nonsense. For one thing, UEFA are still concerned that the Luzhniki doesn't have the electronic turnstiles that would have prevented much of the chaos at last year's final in Athens, and have said that they might yet reverse the decision to play it there. For another thing, the UEFA website confirms that a grass pitch will be laid for this match.

So, do England have anything to worry about? I have myself played on both types of artificial pitch, and there is no question that the new generation of pitches are a massive improvement on the pitches of the 1980s. The blades of "grass" are longer, and the pitches have a sub-layer of sand and rubber which lessens the bounce of the ball. If you didn't think about it, you'd almost imagine that you were playing on grass. And here lies the rub - if England are beaten by the pitch tomorrow night, it won't so much be the pitch itself that does the damage as the players' psychological reaction to playing on it. Will a couple of players pause for a second before making that vital tackle? Such reticence could cost them the match. Theoretically, a better pitch (and the majority of Russian players don't have much more experience of it than England's players) should suit better footballers. In this respect, it's down to England's players to prove that they can overcome their concerns over the pitch and demonstrate that they are "better footballers". Their multi-million pound contracts would seem to indicate that, in theory, they should be. I wouldn't wish to be drawn on whether they actually are or not.

The Story Of Football In Milton Keynes

On Tuesday night, Milton Keynes Dons (and that, I guarantee, is the only time that they will be dignified with the use of their official name on here) won 2-1 at Mansfield Town to continue their (hopefully temporary and much despised) stay at the top of League Two. They moved into their 30,000 capacity stadium during the summer and their crowds have risen accordingly, but the question remains the same: who are these people? I've asked this question to more or less everybody I know that might have the answer, and they are singularly at a loss. Children that support them, I can understand. They are easily impressed by shiny things and, in their innocence, have easily malleable brains that will succumb to the marketing machine behind the club. But adults? There must be at least a couple of thousand of them, and the only rational thing to think about them is that they fall into one of three categories. The first category is people that had no prior interest in football (at least not live football), but started going along because it was an entertainment option. A bit like going ice skating. The second category is people that are presumably so passionate about Milton Keynes that they refused, as a point of principle, to go to any football matches until they had a League club in their town (I don't think there were many of these). The third sort are those that supported other clubs but jumped ship like rats when something closer to home came along. Traditionally, football supporters in Milton Keynes made the short trip to Luton Town or Northampton Town, or alternatively travelled south to London to follow the big Premiership clubs. I don't know that I'd want to watch a football team whose support consisted of those sorts of people.

That particular corner of Buckinghamshire, you could be forgiven for thinking (if you believe the club's own hype) was absolutely gasping for a football club, but the fact of the matter is that it has had several, one of which started playing in the nineteenth century, but the locals weren't interested. First up were Wolverton FC, who played at Wolverton Park of the outskirts of what would become Milton Keynes (there's a picture of it as it was in the 1990s - the stand to the left is believed to be the oldest football stand in Britain, though in the last photograph that I could find of it, it looked like this and was due to be demolished). They were, initially, reasonably successful, and played in the Southern League alongside the likes of Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, but crowds dwindled and the club slipped slowly down the ladder. As recently as the late 1980s they were playing in the Isthmian League but, after a series of increasingly desperate name changes (Wolverton Town (MK) and MK Wolves), they folded in 1992, frustrated at a lack of interest in the town. They reformed last year.

So, okay, let's give the people of Milton Keynes the benefit of the doubt here. Wolverton is nearby, but for all of the name changes, it wasn't Milton Keynes. Maybe the town never had a successful team because it never had a team based in the town itself. Well, no. Not really. Because there was another team in the town that played at a higher level than Wolverton for a number of years, but they also failed because of a continual losing battle to attract people to go and watch them. Formed as Bletchley & WIPAC in 1956, they changed their name to Bletchley Town a year later, joining the Southern League in 1971 and changing it again to Milton Keynes City in 1974 (to clarify, let me just remind you all that Milton Keynes is not, in any sense, a "city" - Wiki says this on the subject: "In its planning, the government of the day intended Milton Keynes to be a "new city" in scale, it was referred to as such in contemporary supporting papers, but was gazetted in 1967 as a New Town. It has used the term "City Centre" on its buses and road signs for many years, mainly to avoid confusion with the centres of its pre-existing constituent towns" - yeah, right). Milton Keynes City played in the Southern League brought about by massive financial problems. Their league record was admirably abysmal. They reformed briefly in the late 1990s, playing at Wolverton, but folded again in 2003. On top of these two clubs, nearby Stony Stratford Town and New Bradwell St Peter play in the South Midlands League, and Newport Pagnell Town play in the United Counties League.

So, Milton Keynes had plenty of chances to build its own team but, to put it bluntly, it couldn't be bothered. Seven thousand or so its residents, though, were more than happy for someone to steal someone else's club and give it to them, though. Finally, in August, they handed over the history of Wimbledon FC to the London Borough of Merton, with the Football Supporters Federation allowing their supporters club to join their organisation and ending the call for away fans to boycott matches there. Is anyone heeding their calls? Well, not many, no. Once you cross off the local team winning, and Chelsea/Manchester United/Arsenal/Liverpool losing, Franchise losing still gets the biggest cheer in any clubhouse or pub in the country. Most people still hate them. And the next time one of their supporters tries to tell you that Wimbledon fans don't "deserve" their club, you might wish to ask them what exactly they did to deserve theirs.

If In Doubt, Write A List (Part 2)

Well, we managed something of a discussion on here last night and today, and following on from that, here are the next three in this very brief series. As per part one, these are my favourite players, and not the ones that I rate as the best of all time. And, to save any arguments, none of tonight's selection are Welsh or former Liverpool players (I jest, of course). Now, on with the show!

1. Socrates (Brazil): Well, a 6'4" heavy drinker who smoked forty a day and trained as a doctor (hence, of course, the nickname) was always going to be something of a shoo-in, wasn't he? The debate over whether the 1982 Brazilian team was better than the 1970 one is probably for another time and place (and it usually comes down to whether one was ten years old during the 1970 or 1982 World Cup), but the case for the 1982 vintage is a strong one. Of course, they demolished New Zealand (who wouldn't have done?), but they also murdered a decent Scotland team, saw off the USSR, and comfortably beat Argentina before losing to Italy in possibly the greatest World Cup match of all time. In 1986, perhaps past his peak, he still took the time to score against Spain and Poland before Brazil went out against France in the quarter-finals.

In the 1980s, we didn't see much of foreign football on the television, and this wasn't far short of what we saw of Socrates. He had one decent season at Fiorentina in Italy, but the tail end of his career was blighted by a restlessness that saw him go from club to club before retiring in 1989 and returning to medicine. His performances on the rare occasions that we saw him were so alien that he might as well as have come from a different planet. We're often told that "football is a simple game", but have made such brilliance look so effortless as Socrates. He drank, smoked, had a fantastic beard, and captained Brazil with as much style as anyone in the history of their game. Oh, and he even turned up in the English non-league game, when we was lured to Yorkshire to play one match for Garforth Town in the North East Counties League at the age of fifty. Twenty-two years after that World Cup in Spain, the ground sold out in hours. What a man.

Socrates vs the USSR in 1982

Socrates' Greatest Hits

2. Allan Cockram - St Albans City: In non-league football, you'll be unsurprised to hear, there aren't many flair players. You'll get the occasional great goalscorer, and the scene is over-flowing with colourful characters, but better players tend to get dragged to a higher level. Every once in a while, though, one slips through the net, and Allan Cockram was one such player. Having started out as a professional with Spurs, Bristol Rovers and Brentford, before dropping down to Farnborough Town and, eventually, St Albans City. His like had not been seen at a moribund Clarence Park for a number of years, and for those of us that gotten used to the likes of the hatchet-faced Bob Dowie (Iain's uglier brother) and the supremely hapless Alan Paradise (I've never seen a player with less hap), well, they might as well have dropped Diego Maradona onto the pitch in front of us. There was plenty wrong with Cockram – he couldn't tackle for toffee and seemed to occasionally lose interest if he wasn't getting much of the ball, but this was thoroughly out-weighed by his passing, shooting and free-kicks that seemed to be on a parallel with anything seen on “Match Of The Day”.

It couldn't last, of course. Brentford came calling again, and coughed up £40,000 (I think – I'm doing this all from memory) for his services. In 1989, he played for The Bees in an FA Cup Quarter-Final at Anfield against Liverpool (and almost 100 in total) before leaving for brief spells at Reading and Farnborough Town (again), before surprisingly resurfacing at Clarence Park in 1992. He is still remembered with some affection by Brentford supporters. He enjoyed an Indian Summer with St Albans, starring in the midfield of a team that nearly won a place in the Conference (which they wouldn't have been able to take), and taking over as manager. Cockram's St Albans team was attacking to the point of recklessness (they scored 96 and conceded 81 in 1994-95), and ridiculous results became part of our staple diet. The highlights of the season included: an 11-1 win against Hillingdon Borough in the FA Cup and an 8-3 win against Kingstonian in the league. They scored at least four goals in nineteen matches in all competitions, and conceded four on eight occasions. There were seven goals in a match on twelve occasions. Also, this was the season that the Isthmian League allowed itself to be used for a FIFA experiment on kick-ins to replace throw-ins, but Cockram led a small group of managers that refused to implement it (they were, in all matches, voluntary), and played brilliant, exasperating football. He loses brownie points for chasing the dollar to briefly-enriched Chertsey Town, but left soon after and is now out of football altogether. I can think of a few good reasons why he should have been invited back to Clarence Park as manager in recent years.

Allan Cockram's Brentford team in 1984

3. Steve Bull - Wolverhampton Wanderers: Just in case you were thinking that it was all fancy dans. Wouldn't all clubs love to have had a Steve Bull figure in recent times? Discarded by West Bromwich Albion for £50,000 in 1986 to their bitter Midlands rivals, Bull would go on to break more or less every record in the book, and showed unshakeable loyalty in a relatively unfashionable club in an era when footballers were starting to first learn the happiness that a bulging wallet could bring. Consider, if you will, some of these figures: 306 career goals in 13 years, 52 goals in the 1987-88 season alone (and a further 50 the following season), 18 hat-tricks, 13 England caps and 4 goals (he also hit the post for England against Holland at Italia 90). Amazing stuff. In December 1999, he was awarded an MBE - not far off unheard-of for a player that only ever played a handful of games in the top division of English football. And the thing about Bull is this: he was a complete throw-back. With never-changing cropped hair and a thick Black Country accent, he was regarded by some (including Graham Taylor, who never picked him for England and repeatedly tried to sell him against his wishes while he was the Wolves manager) as merely an unsophisticated thug, but this couldn't have been further from the truth. He was just quicker-witted, faster and stronger than everybody else, had a right foot which seemed to have received an iron implant and was excellent in the air, as well.

In the end, though, it all comes down to my opening question. These days, only the big clubs, who can offer the financial package to match the aspirations of the players, can allow said players the luxury of letting emotion into their career moves (or lack thereof). Steve Bull may just turn out to be the last of the old style "professionals", and we should all mourn their passing.

The Only Steve Bull Compilation on YouTube

If In Doubt, Write A List

It's Monday night, and Spurs are celebrating their 125th anniversary by proving how far they've fallen since the glory, glory years through the medium of getting beaten at home by Aston Villa (the question now is whether Spurs will be able entice Jorge Ramos or Jose Mourinho to sort through the rubble of the last few weeks - my guess is "no", and they'll end up with Steve Coppell if he gets the sack from Reading). Over the last few weeks, though, I have been thinking about footballers. I've said on here before that I don't really notice whether a shortage of authentic left-footed players seriously affects England's chances of winning or whatever (it doesn't stop me expressing an opinion though, of course), but I do (like everyone else) notice players. So here (in three bite-sized portions) are my ten favourites of all time.

Note that I use the word "favourite" rather than "best". I don't believe that it is really possible to say with any authority whether Pele was better than Maradona, or whether Gerd Muller was better than Bobby Charlton or whatever, but we're all entitled to have favourites. Looking down my little list, I note that there is a preponderance of "flair" players and non-league players in it (proving conclusively that I am indeed a "pretentiously anti-elitist, Conference/non-league football loving cunt" - not that I would ever have denied such an insightful statement). You can probably draw other conclusions from it, too. I'll leave that up to you. Anyway, here's the first three - the rest will follow later in the week (providing I don't forget, which is something that isn't beyond me by any means).

1. John Jacobs (Enfield): Nowadays, I'm fairly certain that there is a goalkeeper manufacturing plant somewhere, which churns out 6'4" tall behemoths to a template designed by a board consisting of Sepp Blatter, Jimmy Greaves and TV Chef Rustie Lee. Back in the day, though goalkeepers came in all shapes and sizes. Paul Cooper knocked on the door of a place in the England squad (and was arguably only kept out because England had, in all honesty, a surfeit in top-class goalkeepers in the likes of Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence, Joe Corrigan and Phil Parkes). Down in the Alliance Premier League, Enfield had John Jacobs. From memory, Jacobs stood barely 5'7" tall, but made up for what he lacked in height with extraordinary agility. He turned up at Southbury Road at the start of the 1980s, a period that coincided with the most spectacularly successful period in the club's history. He was present in goal for the 1982 FA Trophy Final, and was the regular goalkeeper choice the next season as they won the Alliance Premier League championship. My favourite Jacobs moment (and anyone seeking to correct my booze-addled brain on this can feel free) came from the semi-final of the 1985 FA Trophy against Wealdstone. Wealdstone had already won the first leg 2-0 at Southbury Road, so most Enfield supporters made the short trip across Middlesex with fairly heavy hearts. Wealdstone were too good to let that sort of lead slip at home. Enfield took an early lead but had been unable to build on it. In the final minutes, Wealdstone striker broke clean through on goal, whereupon Jacobs ran out of his goal and launched himself at Cordice in the style of Bruce Lee, almost kicking his head clean off. He was, of course, sent off and Wealdstone went to Wembley, but it was a strangely satisfying moment. He was transferred to Dagenham that summer, to be replaced by the superior (and more orthodox) Andy Pape. On the last day of the 1985/86 season, he scored directly from a drop kick for The Daggers to keep them in the Conference and relegate Wycombe Wanderers instead.

2. Michel Platini (Juventus & France): I'm just too young to really be able appreciate Michel Platini in his first incarnation at St Etienne, but Platini might just be my favourite professional footballer of all time. He played with such grace, and such elan. The 1980s were the first time that foreign club football was ever shown in any depth at all on the television (and this was largely limited to grainy goal round-ups from Italy on "Football Focus"), and Platini featured heavily. He wasn't merely a player, either. He was a leader, too. Any right-minded individual would have thought that he surely would have peaked at the 1982 World Cup, when he took a brilliant French team to within a whisker of the final. In 1984, though, he single-handedly won France the European Championships, scoring an astonishing nine goals in just five matches, including the winner in the semi-final against Portugal and the opening goal in the final. He also gains brownie points from me for, as the president of UEFA, overseeing the brave decision to award the 2012 European Championships to Ukraine and Poland. I could probably forgive him anything for that night in Marseille in 1984. Here's a compilation of some of his best moments.

3. Ian Rush (Liverpool & Wales): I don't know if I'm alone in this belief, but was Ian Rush one of the most under-rated of the last thirty years? I think he might have been. Maybe it was because his success came during the darkest period in the history of English football. It could have been because he was Welsh (this isn't meant as a provocative statement - there's every chance that Gary Lineker wouldn't have played half as much for England if Rush had been English, and it also meant that he never played in the finals of an international tournament). Perhaps there was just something too anonymous about him (fair enough, he was tall and had a moustache, but the only thing that anyone can remember him saying was his comment - possibly apocryphal - that living in Italy was like living in a different country). For a couple of years in the early-to-mid 1980s, though, Ian Rush was awesome. He first sprang to most people's attention when he bagged four goals in a televised 5-0 Liverpool win at Goodison Park in 1982, and for about three years that was it. Every time he played, he scored and (famously) every time he scored, Liverpool won. He seemed to have been computer-generated - tailor-made to dovetail with Kenny Dalglish. He was good enough for Liverpool to play a series of relatively mediocre players such as Craig Johnstone up front with him. He was the Ultimate Striker. I recall a live match against Aston Villa at Villa Park in about 1984 when he scored a magnificent hat-trick on a pitch so frozen that it looked like it was concrete that had been painted green and brown. After his disastrous sojourn in Italy, he was never quite the same. He managed over a hundred goals after his return to Liverpool, but was slowly being superceded by the likes of John Aldridge and Peter Beardsley (and his post-Liverpool career at Leeds and Newcastle was ill-advised, to say the least. For three or four years, though, the was the man, and that's coming from someone that really hated Liverpool. Here's a YouTube look at his Liverpool career.

Part two of this to follow tomorrow morning.

Edit: Wow. Spurs came back to draw 4-4 against Aston Villa. I still think Jol's living on borrowed time, though.

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 6)

Southport, possibly more famous in sporting terms as the home of the Royal Birkdale golf course, suffered the ignominy of becoming the last town to lose its Football League status in 1978. Southport fell victims to the Seaside Curse, which saw the likes Barrow, New Brighton and Workington lose their place amongst the lower reaches of English professional football before the introduction of automatic promotion and relegation with the Conference, but their continuing presence in senior non-league football is a testament to the hardiness of the club and the durability of non-league football.

Formed in 1881, they played for forty years as a non-league club. They created an unwelcome first when they were bought out by a tyre company in 1918 who changed their name to Southport Vulcan after their company (the experiment only lasted a year before being quietly dropped - it did, however, leave them as possibly the first senior English club to adopt a sponsor's name into their club name) before, in the great Football League expansion of 1921, being co-opted into the new Third Division North.

Initially, whilst their League form was unimpressive, they did briefly gain a reputation in the FA Cup, becoming the first team from Division Three North to make the quarter-finals in 1931 (though they did contrive to lose 9-1 to Everton once they got there), but they remained a bottom division club until 1967, when Billy Bingham (who would, of course, go on to lead Northern Ireland to the last, umm, twelve of the 1982 World Cup finals, beating the hosts Spain on the way) took them up into Division Three, where they lasted three years before being relegated back to the basement. In 1973, they were promoted back up again, but the board sacked their popular manager Jimmy Meadows just after Christmas, and they were relegated back into Divisions Four. This time, there was no way back. The mid-1970s were a bad time for smaller English clubs. Crowds had dropped to well below 2,000 in an era with very television money and almost no sponsorship money at all. In 1978, they were replaced by Wigan Athletic (Wigan were voted in having finished in sixth place in the Northern Premier League, though they had barely finished outside the top two or three for the previous ten years).

At the end of their first season in the Northern Premier League, the Southport management made an almost fatally bad decision in the summer of 1979, when they rejected an invitation to join the newly-formed Alliance Premier League (which would later change it's name to the Conference). They cited concerns over extra expenses for travel, but failed to consider the fact that they were effectively awarding themselves relegation. They spent most of the 1980s struggling to keep themselves solvent, and failed to make the Conference until 1993, when they won the Northern Premier League at the fourteenth time of asking. After a couple of seasons flirting with a Conference championship challenge, they became mid-table regulars, managing a first Wembley appearance in the 1998 FA Trophy final (losing 1-0 against Cheltenham Town) and dumping Notts County out of the FA Cup in 2002, before being relegated again in 2003. This time they were down for just one season, winning the Conference North in 2004, but they were relegated back at the end of last season.

The Football League and the Conference eventually negotiated automatic promotion and relegation in 1987, and this was expanded to two places in 2003. The experiences of the promoted clubs have varied widely. Some, such as Wycombe Wanderers and Yeovil Town, have established themselves in the League, whilst others, such as Kidderminster Harriers and Rushden & Diamonds, have had a go before falling back through the trap door. Although it still results in a considerable amount of wailing from the supporters of clubs struggling on (what is now known as) League Two, the Conference is stronger and more professional than ever. A number of former League clubs have stabilised in the Conference, whilst a couple (most notably Doncaster Rovers and Carlisle United) ended years of crisis with a stabilising couple of years in the Conference before re-emerging in a considerably better state than they had been for many years. We'll probably never see the heroics of the Wimbledon team that went from the Southern League to Division One in less than a decade again, but we have meritocracy now at the foot of the football ladder now, and the more idiosyncratic decisions of the Football League's re-election committee are now, thankfully, largely merely footnotes in the history of the game.

Six Of The Best - Former Southport Legends

Stan Mortensen - Still the only scorer of a hat-trick in an FA Cup Final (for Blackpool in 1953), Mortensen played a season for Southport just four years after his unparalleled achievement.

Bill Perry - The man who scored the winner in the aforementioned 1953 FA Cup Final also played one season for Southport, in 1962-63.

Mark Wright - The 1992 FA Cup-winning Liverpool captain managed Southport in 2000/01, before being sacked amid rumours of racist abuse. He then repeated the trick five years later at Peterbrough United. Classy.

Jimmy Melia - The man who took Brighton & Hove Albion to the 1983 FA Cup final (and also played nearly 300 matches for Liverpool) had a short and unsuccessful time in charge of Southport in 1975.

Luther Blissett - The former Watford striker (and the man who unwittingly gave his name to "The Luther Blissett Project" - Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about) played for Southport in the 1990s.

Andy Mutch - Steve Bull's often forgotten striking partner at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the late 1980s and early 1990s topped and tailed his playing career at Southport, starting out there in 1984 and playing his final match there in 1999.

If You Don't Want To Know The Score, Look Away Now

Right, so, football on the television. Nothing else has influenced the way that we all watch football as much as television. It still seems difficult to believe that, as recently as the early 1980s, there were only about three live matches on the television (typically the annual England vs Scotland international match, the FA Cup Final and the European Cup Final), but it's true. In less than three decades, we have gone from the League going through something approaching an existential crisis over whether to allow clubs to have sponsors' names on their shirts while the cameras were there to record what was going on to having matches beamed into our living rooms twenty-four hours a day from all over the world. You'll need to right click and save the files below, by the way - almost all will play in any media player, but a couple will require something that plays Real Media files - I would suggest Media Player Classic for these purposes.

The BBC were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first people to football on the television. In 1937, just over a year after they went on air, they broadcast Arsenal playing Arsenal Reserves, and followed that up with the England-Scotland match and the FA Cup Final between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End the following year. Broadcasts were sporadic until 1960 often on "Sportsview" or "Grandstand" (which offered a full results service at 4.45 on Saturday afternoons), when ITV signed a deal to show 26 matches with the Football League. It wasn't terribly successful. The first match between Blackpool and Bolton didn't bring good ratings, and had a very negative effect on the crowd. Clubs started to withdraw access to the grounds, and the scheme was quietly dropped after the League tried to negotiate drastically higher appearance fees for the clubs. A couple of ITV regions experimented with highlights in 1962 and 1963, but the BBC finally got around to covering the game properly in 1964 with "Match Of The Day".

"Match Of The Day" has become an institution in the years since then (rather too much for my liking), but in its first incarnation it was a rather humble affair. It was the highlights of one match, introduced by commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme from the stadium to save on money. The early credits demonstrate its humble beginnings (this curio, from a documentary about the history of Manchester City, shows the last day of the 1967-68 season with a quick explanation of how, even though City needed just a point to win the League, the cameras went to Old Trafford to record the United match instead), but by 1969, ITV had received something of a shake-up and was taking football more seriously. The format of "Match Of The Day" would remain unchanged until 1983. There would be highlights of two matches, introduced by Jimmy Hill, and with a round-up of everything else that had happened in the Football League with Bob Wilson (no action - just Bob sitting behind a desk telling you what had happened). Which matches were to be broadcast would be decided several weeks beforehand (and, to prevent crowds from falling, was kept secret until just before the programme started), and the BBC and ITV took it in turns to have first pick of the matches. Here are some opening titles from 1982 (note the BBC's traditional use of Loftus Road - the nearest ground to Television Centre - for the specially recorded segments).

Highlights ended in 1983, when Spurs played Nottingham Forest in the first live First Division match on ITV. The BBC and ITV shared live duties until 1988, when ITV won a four year exclusive contract to exclusively show League football, while the BBC were left with just the FA Cup. In 1992, though, with the formation of the Premier League, it was back on Saturday nights, providing highlights of every Premier League match played on Saturday afternoons while Sky showed the live action on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights (these opening titles, from 1993, show the BBC already becoming pre-occupied with the show's "heritage" - on top of their grandiose "BBC Sport" ident, the titles feature some of the show's great moments from the past, including Jimmy Greaves, George Best, Justin Fashanu and Glen Hoddle). They lost these rights on 2000 to ITV (more on the debacle that was "The Premiership" tomorrow night), but won them back in 2003, returning "Match Of The Day" to its traditional 10.30 Saturday night slot. Throughout this period, "Grandstand" (here's a little something from 1980, an Olympic Grandstand from the games that Britain chose not to boycott and won a couple more medals than they might have done had the USA bothered to show) had continued to be the ballast of the schedules, featuring "Football Focus" (the weekly preview insert that ended up outliving "Grandstand" itself) and the "Final Score" results service.

It hasn't all been about the League. The FA Cup final has been an annual event on British television since before even I was born (here are 1980s pop stars Marilyn and Boy George looking mortified in advertising it on the BBC - note the withering sarcasm in George's voice). As TV coverage has expanded, so the range of football that the BBC shows has grown with it. They now also cover the African Cup Of Nations as well as the World Cup (there'll be a World Cup special on here in a couple of days) and the European Championships (here's how we saw Euro 96 and Euro 2000 in this country on the BBC). Currently, they are showing the Women's World Cup from China (I sat and watched the England team maintain a proud tradition by losing to the USA in the quarter-finals last Saturday). I'm scared about what ITV will do to the FA Cup when they get their grubby mitts on it, but the BBC have got used to sporadically losing their football broadcast rights over the years. It'll be back on there when the next contract runs out.

Tomorrow night: ITV.