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.
