Do you have your league ladders ready for the new season then?
League Ladders
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Do you have your league ladders ready for the new season then?
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Ooh…is “Shoot!” still going then?
I see Ipswich are predicted to finish 15th….but optimistic don’t you think?
No that’s where they finished last season Freddy, I’ve put the teams where they ended last season (apart from the promoted and relegated clubs obviously).
Ah, silly me. Still…a bit optimistic!
And now with the unrivaled romance of the Scottish Highland and Lowland leagues:
Inverness Clachnacuddin
Whitehall Welfare
Wick Academy
Forres Mechanics
Gala Fairydean
Vale of Leithen
Buckie Thistle
And of course, the one and the only:
Civil Service Strollers
Big fan of The Clach!
A few thoughts coming from looking at last year’s league standings:
When did Coventry get so shite? I must have missed all this.
Is it “uh oh” time for Aston Villa and Dundee United?
The only leagues with more European Cup winners than the EFL Championship are the Premiership, Serie A and the Dutch top flight.
It’s quite nostalgic to look at the lower reaches of the 4th division and see Newport there.
Coventry got shite at about the time they moved to the Ricoh Stadium. They have since been taken over by SISU, a hedge fund which doesn’t give a flying one about the club, and become tenants at the ground, which is now owned by Wasps, a bunch of London egg chasers who moved to Coventry for some unfathomable reason (almost certainly financial rather than sporting).
For a full briefing on when and why Coventry got so shite I can put you in touch with my son-in-law if you like. His is a world of pain.
Fortunately he lives just round the corner from Brisbane Road, home ground of the even-more-shite National League Leyton Orient.
…and after about 3 weeks of fiddling about with the little bits of card you give up and realise life is just too short…and anyway you’ve lost Aston Villa somewhere in your bedroom….
T’was The Tiger in my day. Each year I would start off with a complete England and Scotland set. On Sunday morning (remember when all games were on Saturday?) I would borrow Dad’s paper and painstakingly update the four English and two Scottish leagues. This ritual rarely lasted beyond Christmas. By then the flimsy cardboard name-thingies had more or less disintegrated because of the constant shuffling up and down.
But for a time I could tell anyone interested (not that anyone was) that Accrington Stanley was currently 17th in Division 4 and that Brechin City had edged ahead of Montrose on goal average (remember when calculating goal average needed an abacus, a slide-rule and a PhD in Applied Mechanics?).
Thanks for the goosebumps, Hawkfall!
Here’s how things looked in 1972. As you can see I was not as interested in Scottish football.
Celtic MIA presumably?
Maybe they had a European game.
Yebbut Bristol City weren’t in Div 1 until 1976…!?
Middlesbrough weren’t in Division 1 in 1972-3. We’d been in Division 2 (with 1 season in Division 3) since about 1954 by then. We won Division 2 by 15 clear points (with 2 for a win) in 1973-4 under Jack Charlton.
I think it’s quite likely that various teams have fallen out over the years and may not have been replaced in their correct league as was in 1972. My main surprise is that my team of choice were not top of Div 1, but 5th in Div 2.
Looking at those positions they are more or less the final league placings for 1978-79. Obviously Workington and Southport had departed the league by then.
Reason that jumped out at me was because my team, Barnsley, were promoted that season. We had 21,000 at the Tuesday night match against Champions Grimsby and clinched promotion with a 2-1 victory. Great night. I was 9 and that was my third season following the Reds. We had taken Allan Clarke from Leeds as our player-manager the previous summer and he revolutionised the club. Within another 3 years we were within one game of clinching promotion to the first division (it was a 1-0 defeat at home to Norwich in February, I think, that did for us – had we won that we’d have gone up) and that was in an era when teams could get promoted and do well, as Swansea and Watford had proved. With players like Mick McCarthy, Ian Banks and the God that is Ronnie Glavin we’d have done well too, as we proved by knocking a few first division teams out of the League Cup the following year.
Ah, for a moment there I was transported back to a time when football was a sport, and I forgot that I am going to be watching yet another season where teams in our division just blow us out of the water financially. How can we keep hold of players when they can get 10-20 times the salary at teams that are below us in the same division?!
On another note, and remaining on a 1970s Shoot free-gift theme, I am currently on holiday in Malcesine in Lake Garda and tomorrow there is an exhibition of Panini football stickers in the town. How fab is that?
I think a concerted campaign for the reinstatement of divs 1-4 is called for.
I’m off to rest up bedsheets to make the banners.
Bring back the Divs !
I remember those things, but what was the point? Were league tables not published in newspapers in those days? Surely they were?
Oh, foolish boy! No daytime TV and no computers: instead endless hours as the rain once more pours down moving cardboard up and down the league tables
I had a friend of a friend once, nice chap if a bit obsessive, who couldn’t wait for Saturdays to come round. Instead he invented a complicated dice game the rules of which were only understood by me, er I mean him.
New leagues were formed, Aberdeen 6 Tottenham Hotspur 4 was a real thriller I seem to recall, and those League Tables fair hummed with nail-biting excitement.
Those pesky kids don’t know what they are missing…
I remember that match – Spurs put out an understrength side and were soon 2-0 down, but fought back bravely to lead 3-2 with 20 mins to go….then there was THAT penalty (you’d think the ref had rolled a dice, the decision was so wrong) and they caved in after that, despite a consolation goal in added time. Never forgotten the injustice of it all…..
Are you trying to argue that the referee, Angus McTaggart from Aboyne (a distant 15 miles from the Granite City) was in any biased? Shame on you Sir, shame!
In the 1960s/70s my Dad created his own football leagues consisting of the elite from both England and Scotland so the world would finally know if Rangers and Celtic could cut it playing against the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United. He would write out all the fixtures for the season in the summer time and then use the actual results of the week’s matches as a basis for the scores in his ‘fantasy football matches. For example:
Reality:
Liverpool 3 – 1 Leeds United
Celtic 5 – 0 Hearts
Spurs 1 – 1 Manchester United
would become:
Spurs 1 – 0 Hearts
Liverpool 3 – 5 Celtic in his league.
Derbies and FA Cup Finals were often recreated using Subbuteo.
I spent years making up my own leagues using team tabs and Subbuteo. You think of the mess that the current computer system makes of the fixtures (“Plymouth away on Boxing Day?!??”), well I used to be able to work out a full fixture list for my 22 team league (Basically, all the first division teams, with Barnsley replacing one I didn’t like. Leeds then.) when I was 8 or 9 years old. I took it all very seriously!
Ah…anyone remember Logacta? A dice based footie game…I bloomin’ loved it. It was just amazing how many times the dice rolled the right way for Ipswich to complete a league and European Cup double. Mind you, we were actually quite good back then.
My therapy is going well so I can now open up and reveal that between the ages of 10 and 15 I ran my own, admittedly imaginary, football club. We were based on the outskirts of Manchester and thanks to my inspired leadership we did The Treble four years running. Years before Football Manager or FIFA 2017 I had a squad of around 20 players whom I was forced to rotate due to unexpected injuries, loss of form, the odd kidnap etc. I played the games in my head on the way to and fro school, it was truly amazing how many injury-time winners we managed. A fluid 4-2-4 system, a star striker in Geoff Arnold, a young infuriatingly erratic but sometimes match-winning Irishman called Liam O’Malley , a solid centre-half Terry Kirkpatrick who always trod a thin line between hardness and thuggery, an overlapping full-back…
What’s that you say, Nurse – time for my meds?
I have only just retired having reached my 50th birthday. I started playing for my club – whose home stadium has a capacity of 200,000 – and then England at the age of 8. I have lost count of the goals I have scored and the amount of World Cups I have held aloft.
I remember David Hepworth saying on one of the Word podcasts that he believes every man has a sports game going on inside his head. In his case, it involved him as a fast bowler.
He’s probably bowling to me as I dig in and plod on to my double century – it’s the start of the third day and I’ve been batting all game. I spent many a day watching Boycs!
As one living outside the U.K. I found the value of the league ladders was that they allowed you to feel like a proper football expert for knowing what colours lower league teams wore. Barring some headline-grabbing cup run, this information would remain out of reach, for despite the possibility of upward mobility that the very name “ladder” appeared to contain, there seemed to be a breed of team doomed to occupy the dark, sun-deprived waters of the lower depths in perpetuity. (Around the same time, in school, we read Stephen Leacock’s essay “A, B and C: The Human Element In Mathematics, which contrasted the fates of the three characters of familiar algebra problems, where A is a man “of great physical strength and phenomenal endurance” who nonetheless gets the best equipment for every task, while C is always bringing up the rear no matter what challenge is proposed, even though you might think, just once, he could at least finish ahead of the apparently easygoing and moderately capable B. Reading about the endless humiliations of C, one couldn’t but think of the lot of such as Aldershot and Halifax.
One might further speculate that C’s misery would only be relieved by being retired in favour of some fresh-faced “D”. When the re-election vote was finally done away with and automatic relegation from the lowest rung of the ladder became automatic – from this distance at least – it seemed like some kind of mercy for the perpetual punchbags of the lower leagues.
The downside, of course, was that you couldn’t just keep re-using the same league ladders year after year..).