Search: ' Bert McGee'

Damning evidence about the state of their ground makes tough reading for Owls fans, admits Tom Hocking

In late 1898 officials from The Wednesday FC learned that the lease on Olive Grove, their home for a decade, could not be renewed. The land was needed for a railway expansion and they had until the end of the season to find a replacement. With few locations available they settled on High Bridge, Owlerton. The plot of meadowland to the north of Sheffield was uneven, a long way from the city centre and poorly served by public transport.

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The fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday and the club’s former chairman, Dave Richards, have differed wildly in the past 20 years, writes Tom Hocking

When Bert McGee, who had been the Sheffield Wednesday chairman since the mid-1970s, stepped down in 1990, it was left to a local businessman and fan of the club, Dave Richards, to continue his predecessor’s good work. Over the following two decades, Richards’s rise in football was as meteoric as Wednesday’s fall. The contrast has been so remarkable it prompted the Guardian’s David Conn to call Wednesday “the picture of Dorian Gray in Sir Dave Richards’s attic”.

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Footballers’ autographs are big business these days. Al Needham went to an exhibition at the NEC to snub Jimmy Greaves and see what an old Tony Woodcock would be worth

The first autograph I ever got was a signed photo of Tony Woodcock kneeling behind the League Cup, in exchange for my Dad moving house for him. I would dig it out now, but I chucked it away when he was transferred to Cologne. I filled up assorted notebooks with autographs purloined at the Nottingham Forest training ground and outside dressing rooms after matches. Brian Clough always wrote “Be good” after his name, Martin O’Neill always had a face like a smacked arse when he did his and John Robertson always said: “Jesus, not you again.”

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The former boss of Creation Records, Alan McGee, recalls how Robert Fleck lured him to StaMford Bridge and tells how football rescued him from drugs – or was it the other way round?

Did you become a Rangers fan solely because of your upbringing? It must have been at the time when Celtic were the dominant club in Scotland.
When you’re seven it comes down to who you hang around with. I was at a  Protestant school in the late Sixties. I knew some Celtic fans too but the first league match I was taken to by my dad was to see Rangers – although I actually saw Celtic first, in a pre-season match against Queens Park. We lived near Hampden and they were the local club. I used to watch them too for the first couple of years that I was interested in football. You could go when you were ten and you felt safe with a space of your own in this big ground.

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