Search: ' Plainmoor'

Preston promoted, Torquay saved by ground rules, Bosman blew the game right open. Ed Upright looks back

The long-term significance
There were signs of things to come everywhere. The FA Cup third-round draw was turned into a 20-minute peak-time show and the Premier League signed a £743 million TV deal. Jean-Marc Bosman won his restraint of trade claim, changing the transfer market for ever. More than 100 full international players born outside the UK played in England, prompting Rothmans to include a list of foreign players. In the bottom division, Wigan became the first English club to field three Spanish players. This certainly worked in Wigan’s favour – Isidro Diaz and Roberto Martínez finished as the club’s leading scorers.

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Nick House and Torquay are bidding farewell to the basement for at least a season or so, but while it's a sweet enough feeling he can't deny that it's a lot less grim than in years past

It’s more than 40 years since the sage of the sixth form, already a football fan of a certain outlook beyond his years, passed judgment on the league to which we had returned in 1972: “Northern teams play industrial football; southern teams are more cultured. You see it at Plainmoor every other week. Dirty northern bas­tards all of them.”

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Leroy Rosenior is settling in well as the far south-west's latest black manager, but Nick House is puzzled by the route that took the former striker to Plainmoor

It’s fair to say Leroy Rosenior’s appointment as Torquay United’s first-team coach – manager in old money – met with some scepticism. The concern was simple yet forceful: was he any good? Reports from travellers were decidedly mixed: acclaimed as part of a trio at Bristol City; steady at Gloucester; hardly a suc­cess at Merthyr

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When Hereford went down to the Conference, Richard Butler was among their fans who despaired. But now he's starting to enjoy it

An air of cautious optimism prevailed among Hereford United fans prior to our first match in the Football Conference after 25 years of League football. We felt devastated by the events of May 3, 1997, when a 1-1 draw with Brighton on the final day of the season condemned us to the drop. 

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Dear WSC
The article in WSC No 144 about the strange man who looks after the FA Cup reminded me of another story involving the same trophy. Back in 1980, I was working on Record Breakers (look, we’ve all got rent to pay) and I suggested we do an item about football that involved getting all four major trophies (the League, the Charity Shield, and the FA and League Cups) into the studio. Come the day the championship trophy and the Charity Shield were delivered by Securicor from Liverpool. Both were in highly polished wooden boxes as you would expect. The League Cup was delivered from Molineux, also by a security firm and also in its own polished wooden box. The FA Cup, however, was delivered from West Ham in a black cab – wrapped in a pillow case. To cap it all, the cabbie turned out to be a right miserable bugger. Handing me the pillow case he said, “I’m a West Ham fan and this is the first time I get a call to go there. Do I pick up anyone involved in the club? No, I get a fucking pillowcase to deliver.” I didn’t tell him what was in the pillowcase. It’s always given me great pleasure to think that there’s a London cabbie out there who’s missed a great opportunity to say, “’Ere, you’ll never guess what I had in my cab the other day…" One of the carpenters in the studio was a West Ham fan. Heartbroken at the way his club had treated the FA Cup, he built a mahogany box for it. The Cup was returned to the Hammers in the box. Ten years later, Spurs won the cup and it was brought into the LWT studios where I was then working. It was still in the box built by the BBC carpenter.
Robin Carr, Chesham

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