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.