Monday 13 June 2016

Bonus Badmouth - Ronnie Moore

The temptation to lay in to certain players  and blame them for a decade of failure in the 70s is great and one I can't resist.
 
If Ronnie Moore was still playing for Cardiff City now, and say by magic he remained perennially 25, I doubt if his goal tally would have reached double figures yet. He would be stubbornly on nine goals since 1997. For a striker,  this is unacceptable. Forget Cornelius, City paid nearly £100,000 in 1970s money for this, perhaps their worst ever striker.   That's £401,116.18 in nowadays cash. Andy Saville scored more.
 
A Google search for 'Ronnie Moore scores for Cardiff City' returned this image.
Ronnie scores

Wikipedia skirts the issue, somewhat, 'After a season at Cardiff City, Moore moved to Rotherham United in 1980, where he went on to become one of the club's most prolific ever strikers.'
 
Fair play, Ronnie would run all day. Usually, away from the irate fans chasing him down the street after another barren performance.  But his style of play was more 'tiresome' than 'tireless'
 
Stephen Hawkin would have been more effective up front, at least the ball might have deflected awkwardly off his wheelchair and deceived the goalkeeper once in a while.

For reasons known only to football fans, Ronnie was a popular figure at Ninian Park. I hated him. Rumour has it that City fans took to wearing badges stating, 'I saw Ronnie Moore Score'. It should have read 'I saw Ronnie Moore and Swore'.

Little known football fact: Ronnie was heavily featured in a BBC football documentary from 1999 called 'Rubbish in the 70s", or should have been.
 
Not much better as a manager ...

Friday 10 June 2016

Bonus Badmouth - Frank Burrows 1989


At the beginning of the 1989  season, manager Frank Burrows was asked to set about building a team that could at least stay in Division Three.

The alternative, should he fail, was that Cardiff City would give up football and move to premises in Caroline Street and sell kebabs. It was deemed likely to be more profitable and attract less violence.

Despite deliberating over a possible move away from Ninian Park throughout the summer of 1989, Frank Burrows began the season still in the 'Hot Seat' (the result of faulty wiring).

During the pre-season, Frank Burrows was tasked to prepare a ‘dossier’ on all forthcoming opponents, outlining what he knew of their strengths and weaknesses, key players, danger men, etc.
 
He presented a fixture list.

In an inexplicable oversight, Frank Burrows was not even nominated for Manager of the Season for 1989.

Frank Burrows was a popular figure in Cardiff, if you  consider the number of fans then supporting the team being numerous enough to qualify anyone as 'popular'. It has not been mathematically tested but it seems likely that on a pro-rata basis, given the population of Cardiff and its environs, Cardiff City were the worst supported team in the UK from 1985 to 1991.

It's been said that Clemo and Burrows fell out over money. This is not true. They both agreed there wasn't any. It was rumoured that a rare 1977 Cardiff City Subbuteo set (including broken goalie) was worth more than the current 1989 playing squad.


Better times
With a transfer 'war chest' that he kindly described as 'hopelessly inadequate', Burrows relied on the whole hearted but diminishing talents of aged Internationals such as George Wood (a bona fide City legend) and Alan Curtis ( a true great of Welsh Football and a Premiership manager in 2016, no less) and untried youngsters such as former Newport County midfield enforcer, Steve Tupling (Google him, you'll be the first person who has).

Tupling was said to be the least naturally gifted player at the club. He worked tirelessly on never improving his game thus earning a transfer to Hartlepool United. He became a role model to many who reasoned that if he could make it as a pro, then so could they (even if they were in their forties, grossly unfit and in hospital on life support).

Mark Kelly was another whose claims to have been a professional footballer remain unsubstantiated. He was a player whose performances stubbornly remained mediocre. Either the coaches couldn’t coach him or he was un-coachable. Kelly was a master of the cross-field run and exciting lay-off to the fullback. Incredulously, he was transferred to Fulham in 1990 for a fee. Don’t worry; this was a pre-Al Fayed Fulham languishing in the Third Division with little money and even less sense.

Poor Mark Kelly. How easily and often those words go together!

Then there was Paul Wimbleton, renowned for his speculative and inaccurate long range shooting.

Indeed, if you read in the 'paper that he'd hit the wall from a free kick it was natural to assume it was the toilet wall at the Canton end. 

Wimbleton had been voted 'Player of the Year' the previous season but his form dipped to such a low that pre-match news that he wasn't playing was said to add as many as a thousand to the gate.

No goals this season but credited with an 'assist' after returning the ball for a throw in. Became a novelist after leaving football, penning 'Nineteen eighty Three'. He unsuccessfully sued the estate of George Orwell for plagiarism.


Paul Wimbleton - according to Google
Wimbleton's consistent performances earned him a shock transfer to Bristol City (a bigger shock to them, believe me) where he helped their promotion bid by being injured for the bulk of the season.
 
Ian Walsh? Even his most avid fan and, perhaps, father would describe him as 'alright'. If he were a Subbuteo player you would have flicked him off the pitch and not bothered flicking him back on. Rumoured to be on less money than the YTS lads.

Statistically,  a bloke in the crowd made more of a contribution to City's season than Ian after  being hit in the face by a wayward Walsh shot. Now a pundit with BBC Radio Wales.
 
Paul Wheeler? Pretend 'super sub'. The kind of pointless substitution you make in a game of 'Championship Manager 2' in the 89th minute because you are either bored, haven't got a clue or have to be seen to be doing something when you're three nil down. Wheeler was a player whose level of performance occasionally rose above risible.  His Wikipedia page says he joined Cardiff after a trial. It doesn't mention if it was a trial for crimes against football.
 
Steve Lynex? Often put in the kind of performance you would expect from a man who had had some bad health news the previous day. 

A DVD of edited highlights of his career at Cardiff (duration: 4m) is shown as a 'Scare them straight' video for wayward young professionals at Premiership clubs. Lynex was blown up at a Bonfire Night Party after finishing with Cardiff. Accident? You tell me.

Kelly, Tupling, Wimbleton, Walsh, Wheeler, Lynex? Their commitment was never in doubt, and they never let the opposition panic them into playing football.

Nigel Stevenson is also a former Bluebird 'great' that many older supporters will remember as a 'defender'. Some say he was unfairly treated that season and wasn't given the opportunity to show what he could do (which was irreparable damage to our fight against relegation).


Nigel Stephenson's current whereabouts  are unknown. Contributed to the successful fight against relegation by leaving the club. 

He stepped down to non-league with Merthyr, a unique move in that it was generally thought to strengthen both teams.

Many familiar phrases routinely used by football scribes were first coined in relation to Stephenson's performances. These include 'wrong footed'. 'missed tackle', 'given acres of space by', ' then finished easily', 'own goal'.
 

The relationship between the players and supporters was often strained and it was said that most fans saw a ‘meet the players’ session as less of an opportunity to get an autograph and more of a chance to get a punch in. 

There were some good players, of course, like Jimmy Gilligan, Ian Rodgerson, Nicky Platnauer and, perhaps, Terry Boyle. Not world beaters as we wanted them to be but adequate.

Jimmy Gilligan is now something to do with England. He lives there.

Terry Boyle, signed for Swansea the very next year. It was a record breaking transfer for the Swans in that it generated more complaints to the Swansea Evening Post than any other transfer in living memory. Alan Curtis joined him Boyle at Swansea and is still there.
 
Instead of taking City to the next level, this team took Cardiff back to the Division Four the following season when they were relegated.  The squad was the subject of death threats before a European Cup Winners Cup game against Derry City, many of them from their own fans.
 

Jimmy Gillian
 
It is fair to say that this period was one of considerable financial penury at Ninian Park. There were many cutbacks. Indeed, Chairman Tony Clemo even had to give up his pre-match superstition of leaving £50 on the floor of the referee’s dressing room which had brought much luck in the past. Results, unsurprisingly, suffered.

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.

An unforgettable line-up for all the wrong reasons, which strangely looks as bad on paper.  There were, of course, to be worse Cardiff teams but they were kind of likeable, so everything is forgiven by 2016 (kind of)

Burrows would return in the late 90s to oversee another promotion and then take the club to the brink of yet another relegation before bailing out again. His stint in charge from 1998-2000 being unique in that he both enhanced and damaged his reputation with City fans.

 
In fact, Burrows spent his first three months back in charge in 1998 watching other teams (as did most City fans) on the look out for new players.

 

FAWs Decision To Stage Welsh International at World Class Venue was Wrong


FAWs Decision To Stage International at World Class Venue was Wrong

I no longer really agree with this argument, featured prominently in Bobbing Along Issue One,  against the Welsh FA moving International games to Cardiff Arms Park (as was). Yes, it did affect the Welsh Clubs (and their 'pay at the gate' turnstile operators) financially. But at this time Ninian Park, the Vetch and The Racecourse were all disgraces as International venues.

By 1989 Ninian Park was falling to bits with great swathes of the ground closed and next to no remedial work being done. Visible ground improvements consisted of occasional patches of wet cement on the terraces. The whole Ninian experience was akin to sitting in a condemned rollercoaster - you felt it could collapse at any moment.  

 
The walk to the ground later inspired a popular mod map in Call of Duty: Urban Warfare.

 
The Welsh FA even had the audacity to try to price us out by charging £7.00 for tickets against West Germany. Believe me, this was big money for a football ticket in the days when you would expect to comfortably finance a night out with a bird for under a tenner.  Economists describe this as ‘opportunity cost.’

 
A 'Bobbing Along' contributor later predicted a nightmare experience of drunken crowd trouble and police brutality at the home of Welsh Rugby and the whole editorial team threatened to boycott the event - thus denying the FAW of a 38,000 sellout and £21.00 and perhaps even preventing the drunken crowd trouble, too. Who knows?

 
We later relented and loved every minute of it. Some Wales' games have rightly moved back to club venues as new grounds have been built and no actual cash now exchanges hands. However, back in 1989, there was absolutely no infrastructure in Welsh football although we had a good team.

Photo nicked from Football grounds of Great Britain. I do not know who holds copyright on this picture. Ironically, I hold copyright on 'Bobbing Along'

Cardiff City's Rivals of '89


An overview of our 'rivals' at the time Bobbing Along was first published - some no longer exist.

 


The excitement in the City when the fixture list was published  in July 1989 was palpable as people realised they could go on holiday during any week of the season without missing anything.

Bolton, Blackpool, Fulham, Reading, Wolves, Wigan and Sheffield United have all played in the Premier league since 1989 (but still have that air of being rubbish about them) but there was little to attract the casual fan.

 After a poor start to the season, performances rose to the level of adequate and relegation was avoided. 

 
A singular highlight was seeing Steve Bull turn out for Wolves. He didn't score but had more shots on target himself than both teams managed between them. Some predictions did come true as Southend did indeed move to a new league. Football results were photocopied from a newspaper and enlarged to disguise lack of text.

Bonus Bad Mouth - Championship Manager 2


The transfer of Kevin Bartlett inspired this rant if not the whole magazine. Written from the viewpoint of a committed fan, with little or no understanding of the financial realities at the club, or perhaps, living in denial of them.

Bartlett was a very effective, pacey striker whose transfer cost the team a top half finish but probably did keep the club in business. Even so, a potential Bluebirds legend is now a mere footnote in the club's history.

Bartlett was transformed by Burrows from a hopeless, injury addled non-leaguer to middling First Division striker with Notts County. Frank Burrows was adept at resuscitating the careers of forlorn players struggling to stay in the game. Paul Wimbleton and Jimmy Gilligan are other examples.
 
He had to be; fit, in form players wouldn’t dream of coming to the club.

I'm not sure but I think City got a measly £60,000 from West Brom for Bartlett so I was further aggrieved years later when they were touting him for £935,000 on ‘Championship Manager 2’.

Speaking of ‘Championship Manager’, it’s worth pausing to consider a review of the game I wrote a year or so later. Of course, the franchise has improved immeasurably in its various iterations.  In my mind, it achieved the very height of realism in 2012 when a friend boasted that he had taken Newport County to the Champions’ League title.

This, of course, is the appeal. For, in their heart, what football supporter doesn’t believe that their team could compete with the best if only the right man was in charge? (i.e. me.) Why else would you support a team?

As it happens, I was asked to provide the player ratings for 'Championship manager 2' for Cardiff City which I promise I did fairly and dispassionately. It would be a tough ask to start the game in Cardiff City mode.  Almost unplayable.

A fact I can attest to, as on the day I received my free copy of the game as reward I flunked to a 4-0 opening day home defeat to a Jason Peake inspired Rochdale.  Peake put in a performance to rival Ryan Giggs that day.  Peake's ludicrously over rated attribute ratings in the game also rivalled Giggs. Whoever set the Rochdale player ratings was a bloody cheat.

Here's my experience of playing an earlier Atari ST football simulation game called 'Football Manager'.
 
Eddie May Ousted As Jimmy Case And Bryan Robson Sign For Cardiff In Early Hours Drama!

I recently spent a week in bed ill and the only relief from the pain and the delirium was a computer game called “Championship Manager". You are the manager; you pick the team, buy the players then you sit back and watch them lose. A bit like Eddie May really, except he's called the Coach, of course.

I quickly ousted Eddie May from the hot seat. He was only keeping it warm for me, and set about the job of taking City from the bottom of the League to the top. One of the good things about Football manager is that it lists the real players. Yes, Pikey, Gibbins, Blakey, Cohen, they were all there. They stormed to an opening day's 3-0 defeat at Northampton.

The players have a rating of between I and 9 on all of their abilities. Most of the City players' ratings were pathetic twos and threes with a very unhealthy dose of ones. It was a shame but they had to go if City were to get anywhere.


To add to all this realism I put in a speculative bid for Carl Dale only to be met with the dreaded response "Carl Dale is not interested in joining your team." Well, sod him then. I was also peeved to find out that Notts County were asking £935,000 for Kevin Bartlett - cheeky buggers.

I mimicked the tactics of Len Ashurst. I sold freely to avoid a cash crisis and brought in players of no fixed ability for pitiful sums. The City roared lo 24th in the table, were knocked out of all the cups in the 1st rounds (In the FA Cup by non-league Welling -at Ninian Park, shee!) and reduced league attendances to crisis level. I was sacked.

Like Len, I returned, promising the 'Midas touch' to an imaginary press conference. Some shrewd transfer work built up a sizeable stash at the bank and there were deals that brought the likes of Jimmy Case and Bryan Robson, no less, to the club. We flew to promotion, pausing only to take the Autoglass Trophy and the F.A. Cup. A unique treble.

At this stage the computer was losing its grip on reality as Arsenal were relegated to the Second Division and Everton to the Third. However, Blackburn were League Champions.
Flushed with success my softer side emerged, I brought back Nathan Blake (on reflection, I might have bought Noel Blake by mistake as players were only identified by their initials) for old times sake and even bought Ken De Mange. He scored some important goals from midfield. And we appreciated those goals but a £500,000 bid from Plymouth saw Ken pack his imaginary bags.

I was on the verge of a play-off place to the First Division when I noticed that it was 4.30am. I had also developed a habit of cheering loudly at victory and swearing at defeat.

To heighten the reality, I had taken to supplying my own crowd noises.

With the sound of parents and neighbours alike beating on the walls and calling for quiet, I accepted the Manager of the Month Award and retired to bed.

The picture of Kevin Bartlett was photocopied from a newspaper and enlarged to the point where cheapness disguises itself as art.

 

Issue Four

















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.