Bobbing Along in the 80s and 90s: newport county

Showing posts with label newport county. Show all posts

Friday, 10 June 2016

Issue Three

Issue 3 and I still couldn't glue my paragraphs in straight. I have an astigmatism in the eye and can't play darts or snooker or cut wallpaper straight either.

This was always one of my favourite editions although I can now see its many flaws. Despite being a 'monthly' publication, there's an element of repetition starting to creep in. Indeed, there was a list of people and organisations that we felt duty bound to be rude about in every issue.

City Chairman, Tony Clemo, gets off quite lightly here (I bet he was relieved). Alun Evuns, head of the FAW at the time, didn't. In retrospect, it's all a little unfair.

This cover features the debut of the 'Bobbing Along Banner.' Note the black box denoting the cover price. This was a nice bit of future proofing as price increases could be slipped in without drawing attention to themselves.

No-one has ever asked me what the influences of 'Bobbing Along' were so I will tell you. It owes a debt to Woody Allen, Douglas Adams, George Orwell, Spinal tap, The Goodies File, Foul! magazine, The Rothman's Football Yearbook (indispensable) and Cardiff City - in that order.

Please forgive the occasional misspelt word in the magazine as there was no such thing as a spellchucker in those days.

Tony Hancock, featured on the 're-vamped' cover, is a personal favourite.

Bobbing Along contributor, Bob C, consulted his Oracle to predict the likely outcome of staging Wales vs West Germany at Cardiff Arms Park. Unfortunately, he gazed into the crystal ball and saw only his own distorted reflection.

Question: Is the author presenting his own opinion here or merely the inferred 'opinions' of his imagined readership? If yes, that's tabloid journalism.

According to Bob, there is only one type of football 'supporter'. He enjoys, and will not accept anything less than, the real 'football experience', which is standing in a decrepit stadium and yelling.

One may conclude from this lofty criticism that I have moved from one part of the 'football demographic' to another in the twenty years since this was written.

There is also criticism of the pricing policy, which just comes over as tightfisted, and of the view from the cheap seats being inferior to the expensive ones, which is just silly.

And that shrill opening line. 'Thank you very much the FAW'. Who wrote this? Margo Ledbetter. The editor should resign.

In the event, this match was a major success and not the dystopian nightmare predicted. It was a sell-out with little reported crowd misbehaviour (I think the only arrests were Germans) and it began a period of relative success for the Welsh Team. In fact, they were undefeated at the Arms Park from 1989 until 1993 during which period they beat both Germany and Brazil in successive games.

Who could have predicted that?

With its circulation flagging several days after the event and anxious to provide a novel and unique 'angle' on the Hillsborough disaster, The Sun newspaper published a malicious and obnoxious series of lies libelling an already traumatised group of supporters.

Proof, if proof needed, that newspapers actually despise large sections of their readership. The feeling is mutual.

Read on to learn why I hate 'The Sun' and why the price of the Daily Mirror went up by 2p.

As mentioned previously (i.e. all the time), there were considerable objections to the Government's planned Football ID scheme and it was important to campaign against it.

After the Hillsborough disaster, I was straight on to my MP and included both my letter to him and his reply. This is for two reasons. Firstly to encapsulate the entire argument for and against and to avoid having to type the whole thing up again.

That's not strictly true. I wanted Ian Grist to feel embarrassed about the opinions he held before the Hillsborough disaster and see if he had the courage to change his views.

This was naïve. No politician operates that way.

Reading over this again, I find Ian Grist's exasperated reply quite shocking but illuminating. He too, like The Sun, has contempt for football supporters and blames them for the disaster. Maybe politicians secretly despise the people who vote for them.

But he also has a valid point in that many football clubs failed to provide decent spectator conditions. Clubs treated supporters with contempt as well.

As discussed earlier, writers for this magazine preferred to watch football in a dilapidated un-safe ground as opposed to a modern seated stadium. So perhaps we football fans had contempt for ourselves, too, because we put up with it.

The irony, of course, is that Football has changed so much in the last 20 years that everything we feared about the ID scheme has come to pass without an ID scheme being in place.

This is a not half bad two pager about a 6-1 home defeat by Sheffield Utd in 1977. It tries to show that this shameful drubbing didn't happen out of nowhere but was the logical outcome of a dispiriting series of events.

Manager, Jimmy Andrews comes across as a good bloke but a poor judge of players. By the time these events occurred, Andrews had not only 'lost the dressing room' but the 'plot' and probably the 'will to live'.

In reality, as the season drew to a close, the champagne was not on ice, it was still on the shelves at Threshers. City's performances rarely rose above dismal and defenders proved to be something of a 'Get out of jail free card', with Plautnauer and Abraham chipping in with face saving goals throughout the month.

Word of warning: Do not rely on this round-up as a definitive history of City action in April 1989. Some matches are not in their chronological order, some matches were not played in April and others are missing altogether. City fair ratcheted up the points at a rate of 0.8 per game whatever order it happened in.

Manager, Frank Burrow's, having given up on a play-off spot in August, gave inspirational team talks said to end with the words, 'Remember, if we go a goal down, that's it.'

Remarkably, one win out of the last 5 matches was enough to avoid relegation.

How does a team that has done absolutely nothing all year celebrate the conclusion of another season? In a relentlessly upbeat and hopelessly old fashioned way, of course.

A fairly tedious round-up of 'things to bitch about' to end Issue 3. If I was able to time travel, I would visit the 1989 me and deliver the following prepared statement.

'Listen mate, if you don't like football, don't go.'

My 1989 self would answer, 'Listen mate, the problem with doing a magazine is that one must have an opinion on everything, even if it's not your own.'

Bonus points go to those that can identify the reference to Deep Purple on this page.

Issue Two

Undeterred by overwhelming public apathy, work on Issue 2 began almost immediately. Sales of issue 1 were encouraging. I wasn't exactly thinking of giving up my day job but had I had a paper round I might have given that up. It cost more to produce than I was charging. This was before the days of cheap printers from Currys and Letraset wasn't cheap, either (or is that either?).

This time more voices were heard as a steady flow of additional contributors (two) came forward to help out. This allowed the number of pages to increase from 10 to 12. Even so, the last two pages were something of a stretch to produce and not particularly good.

In a recession busting deal, the cover price remained at 40p.

In hindsight there was probably no good reason to rush out an issue so quickly other than the pleasure in writing and producing it. Selling the mag was a pain. Had I known then about the internet I would have sat on it for twenty years as copies of Issue 1 are rumoured to fetch anything up to 45p on eBay.

This is quite a heartfelt tribute to the old Newport County from a contributor. He used the pseudonym Bob C as he worked on the Echo at the time and feared being sacked for writing for a competitor. Everyone knew who it was, anyway.

Newport County were an even worse run club than Cardiff but it still bit painfully to see them first go out of the Football League and then go out of business in 1989. Cardiff easily could have gone the same way.

Newport were always the poor relations of South Wales' football which literally made them destitute. In a 68 year Football League career, they were the highest placed club in Wales once. There was no real historic rivalry between County and Cardiff despite the close proximity of the Clubs. In fact, I don't think the teams contested a Football League match between 1939 and 1982. During that period Newport had a massive travelling support - mainly to watch Cardiff every other week.

When 'hostilities, resumed in the 80s the popularity of the 'local derby' was such that it didn't have a name and could attract crowds as high as 5,000.

Newport were more a retirement home for Cardiff City has-beens than rivals. If you finished as a player at Cardiff you went to County. It was the law. Scholars of the game knew there was a real crisis at Cardiff City when players started coming the other way such as City legend Roger Gibbins. Legend? Even his most avid fans (close family) would only describe him as OK.

The team photo was hacked from an old County match programme I had and blended in with Tippex. It features future (at the time of the photograph), former (at the time of writing), future (also at the time of writing), and former (as of now) Cardiff manager, Len Ashurst. He led this Newport squad to promotion from Division 4. During his second spell at Cardiff, despite a bigger budget, he couldn't repeat this feat because he was rubbish.

The return of Dai Tongwynlais, mythical City legend of the 1940s. The man who could hit a ball harder and further with his face than many could with their boot.

While at Newport County, Dai once scored the 'perfect hatrick'. One off the left ear, one off the right ear and one off the nose. He was carried from the field shoulder high to an awaiting ambulance. How much would Dai be worth in today's transfer market? Frankly, nothing.

Given that funds are currently being raised to erect a statue of a player whose idea of training was to run laps of the Ninian Park pitch with a fag on, Dai doesn't seem too far away from the ideal City hero.

In this article, Dai reminisces fondly about football's heyday in the 1940s and Stanley Matthews' scrotum.

In the absence of anything else to write about, here's a not played for laughs piece about the then near past of 1979. It celebrates City's best finish in the 2nd Division until 2009. It's incredible to think that a year in which we lost 7-1 at Luton and 5-0 at Brighton was considered a stand out season.

There were next to no books on Cardiff City in those days, although John Crooks had done great work putting together a compendium of results and players. These were bargain bin for a while but are now extremely rare and can fetch a good price online. So a piece like this was quite a rare read and I must have done a fair amount of research to complete it. I don't recall anyone particularly saying they liked it though.

There's also a small, bit on this page about Paul Wimbleton getting a haircut which is awful. In retrospect, I wish I'd put John Sadler there.

I did not agree with the Thatcher Governments' plans to introduce an ID scheme for football fans, In fact, nobody outside the body of Tory MPs in the House of Commons did either. I spent a considerable amount of time and effort chasing down various local politicians (well two, in fact) and soliciting their views on this burning issue. In the classic confrontational political style of the day the Conservatives were for it and Labour agin it. Nobody knows the view of the Liberal Democrats as nobody bothered asking them.

I note with interest that future Welsh Assembly First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, admits to not having been to a football game in 20 years. I remember he had a bit of a 'jumpers for goalposts' reverie for football that I found both patronising and unconvincing. This was in 1989, so he had effectively not been to Ninian Park since the 1960s. He was, however, he had his hand out first tickets for the 2008 FA Cup Final.

My local MP, Ian Grist, also claimed to be a lapsed football fan. Here he claims football was 'a delight of my own boyhood'. This is hard to believe as he was from Southampton. (By the way, did he infer from my letter that I was about 11?)

Intensive labour was avoided here by the conservative use of the House of Commons logo nicked from a letter I received from Ian Grist (pleading with me to stop writing to him). The list of local MPs was ripped out of the Phonebook and glued in, with spit by the look of it.

This is a round up of contemporary football action involving the Bluebirds exploited for comedy value. Believe me, it wrote itself.

It's also quite informative. For example, City recorded their highest away win of the season that month, 2-1 at Gillingham. March the 11th 1989 is still remembered as a day of infamy in the Gills history.

Nicky Platnauer gained quite a reputation for free-kicks after scoring one.

In an inexplicable oversight, manager Frank Burrows was not even nominated for Manager of the Month for March.

This was an attempt, and not an altogether successful one, to explain why the relationship between Cardiff and Swansea had soured after once being so cordial. Hooliganism at these games embarrassingly made the national news and this was one of the few fixtures where away support was banned altogether. Things would get worse before they got better.

Here we look back to an intensely ill-tempered Welsh Cup tie in the 1960s as the beginnings of the history of hooliganism surrounding this fixture. In retrospect, I'm not so convinced. There has always been a history of violence in any situation where frustrated men take sides and goad each other. Like the Battle of Hastings, for instance.

In fact, football evolved from inter-village fighting (and fighting people from other parts of the UK has been popular since the Civil War). So, the association between football and getting your face filled in was there from the start. This was the 'association' in Association Football.

More likely hooliganism arose from the fashionable appeal of committing unmotivated and supposedly victimless crimes you could get away with, coupled with the ability to afford to travel all over the country taking your imagined grievances with you.

Indeed, just like an edition of 'Shoot! for two reasons. Firstly, like us, 'Shoot!' dedicated a measly one page to Scottish Football each edition. References to Welsh football were even harder to spot and were usually along the lines of, 'Man Utd's Mark Hughes is unfortunately Welsh and ineligible to play for England.

Secondly, it is just like an edition of 'Shoot!' because the graphics were lifted directly from that publication. The words, however, were mine.

This was a comment on the yawning gulf between the 'haves' and 'have nots' of Football that existed in 1989, or in any other year before or after that I can think of.

Once I had got the thought in my head that the only tenuous similarity between Stirling Albion and Liverpool was that they both played at Anfield (Annfield in Stirling's case), the other 'similarities' between the clubs came naturally.

I wrote this years earlier for a short-lived University magazine that ran to one edition. I remain convinced that I am the only person in the world to have read both magazines this article appeared in

This article brings back fond memories of bounding up to the Club shop after the game to see what City goodies were on sale. If you were lucky, it was closed.

This was a reasonably funny piece by a contributor who didn't want to be named then and certainly doesn't want to be named now. He handed me a type written page and I stuck it in, this time with prit, making this the most quickly produced page in the magazine's history. I would have shown this article more respect if I had used it to dab up some spilt coffee. I must have been tired.

A Bluebirds' badge has been shamefacedly tacked on the end, serving the dual purpose of reminding readers that this was a magazine about Cardiff City and that it had run out of material.

All this was nicked. I found the advertisement featuring Stanley Matthews with a fag on in an old 1950s film magazine.

This ad has not been doctored at all. I can say, with some certainty that Matthews never smoked. Incredibly, it's claimed here his choice of brand is part of his training regimen.

There follows another advert to fill space. It bears no contextual relationship to anything else in the magazine either before or since.

I also pasted in some stats about Cardiff City because I thought this was the kind of thing people wanted to read.

There was no internet in these days and facts like this were hard to come by, so I felt I was doing a good service.

This is a lie, of course, at the time I could have happily read a book containing nothing but attendance figures for hours on end.

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Spytty - The Mutt's Nuts.

Lush

Newport County 2 Mansfield 0

In their previous game, Mansfield Town won 8-1 and their manager was awarded a sparkling Aston Martin as a show of gratitude by a gratuitous chairman.

Everyone knew about it. It was in all the papers.

When the Mansfield away support at Rodney Parade was announced as "90", a ready wit in the crowd shouted, "Did you all come in the Bentley!"

It was symptomatic of an evening where the crowd were by equal measures rabid, noisy, easily angered and only partially informed. All the necessary ingredients of a 'good atmosphere."

Early in the game, a ball was smacked into touch with such force that, had it hit someone, it would have qualified as attempted murder. It was met with the words, "Beautiful, beautiful football."

In all fairness, this might have been the same bloke as before. It was shouted with the full conviction of a spectator who readily confuses the concept of 'whole-hearted support' with shouting something totally wrong about football every time they open their mouth. All grounds have one.

The rest of the ground had a more 'realistic' assessment of the County and chipped in with a rendition of "We're by far the greatest team in football the world has ever seen." By far?

This is why Wales will never qualify for the World Cup finals; our supporters often lack the objectivity required to quantify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the team in comparison to their opponents that is necessary to correctly predict the likely outcome of the contest.

In truth, County were far from the worst football team the world has ever seen (Cardiff City with Russel Osman in the team win that one) and deserved the win.

They featured shaven headed, talentless talisman and 'crowd favourite' David Pipe. The crowd constantly bayed for him to get forward and create 'something'.

David Pipe - seriously

He responded by rarely crossing the half-way line and got a telling-off from the ref when he did. His contribution to the game seemingly measured by the fearsomeness of his grimace. He rated highly in this area.

Christian Jolley, wittily referred to as 'Bambi' (by you know who) each time he lost his footing, lost his footing and Newport were awarded a penalty. They scored.

Jolley then scored the decisive second goal. He celebrated his excellent but slightly greedy effort by running to a corner of the ground populated by imaginary fans to share his moment with no-one.

Jolley was one player, along with goalkeeper Lenny Pidgeley, you felt might develop well at a higher level club. But as he came from a higher level club in the first place this feeling may well have been illusory.

Lenny Pidgeley will probably remain confined to non-league by dint of his silly name.

Keeping the crowd entertained during the boring bits was Spytty the Mutty.

The mirror test of self awareness

Spytty has the perfect combination of personality traits required to become a first class club mascot or nuisance on the Corporation buses. These include:

A complete lack of self-awarenes.
Fanaticism (in a bad way).
The inabilty to distinguish between good attention and bad attention.
The propensity to react to a football match in a manner unlike any other person in the ground.
A basic mastery of mime.

Indeed, Spytty's miserable and disconsolate slow walk around the pitch with his head in his hands after a County near miss was so moving I genuinely felt like putting an arm around him to comfort him.

As he sank dramatically to his knees, I wasn't sure if he was reacting to some bad health news he'd had earlier in the week or a corner awarded to Mansfield. It was impossible to tell.

The problem was Spytty's mime session was that the pace was somewhat slower than the game. In fact, he was still shuffling around the pitch shaking his head forlornly because Jolley was flagged offside when everyone else was celebrating County's second goal.

At one point he looked so emotionally hurt, dabbing at imaginary tears with his oversized ears, I thought that perhaps one of the Mansfield players had said something mean to him in an off the ball incident.

It wasn't difficult to imagine Spytty being on suicide watch had County lost the match.

Fortunately, they didn't.

I would sincerely love to see County back in the Football League and the sooner the better. From this showing, everything is definitely 'going in the right direction' and much of the infrastructure is 'in place'.