Search: ' Lincolnshire'

Would you rather have a night out in Boston or Wrexham? Pete Green reviews the 2006-07 season in what should surely be called Divisions Three

“Oooh, isn’t it a poor league this year?” This is a phrase recited annually, by supporters in every league, regardless of any real variation in standards. And so it was in the fourth division last season. True, the best weren’t half as good as Carlisle last time and poor Torquay looked set for the drop as the leaves fell from the trees. But, for the most part, the sides on the bottom rung plodded on much the same as ever. Darlington and Notts County failed again to fulfil the unreasonable expectations of sides with gates of four to five thousand, and Lincoln broke their own embarrassing record by losing in the play-offs for the fifth year in a row.

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A surprise quartet won promotion from the bottom division, remembers Simon Willis

The long-term significance
The season began with referees being instructed by the Football League to clamp down on foul play, especially the tackle from behind. As a consequence, bookings and dismissals reached record levels, as did players’ appeals against their cautions – a disciplinary points system was introduced the following season. Some club chairmen demanded the resignation of League secretary Alan Hardaker, saying they hadn’t been consulted over the new interpretations. “We are getting away from common sense and instead finding chaos,” said PFA chairman Derek Dougan. Many referees duly became more lenient as the season went on, but the days of blatant clogging were slowly coming to an end. A transitional era for the game was to be recorded by the alternative magazine Foul!, launched by Cambridge University students in October 1972.

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Scunthorpe’s promotion from the last regional Third Division. By Geoff Wallis

The long-term significance
This season sounded the death knell of the two regional divisions that had occupied the third tier of English league football since the early 1920s. The top division of the Southern League had been absorbed into the Football League as the Third Division for the 1920-21 season, adding the suffix (South) when its northern counterpart, drawn from a variety of minor leagues, was formed a year later. Only one team from each Third Division was promoted each season, while the bottom club in both sections had to apply for re-election. For 1958-59 the two regional sections were merged, with the top and bottom halves forming new Third and Fourth Divisions respectively, thus introducing the delights of Tyneside to Torquay United fans and the hotspots of Colchester to their Bury counterparts.

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Dear WSC
While it was an otherwise fairly accurate piece culminating in stating what many of us believe (WSC 232), which is that Neil Warnock is an “offensive gobshite”, Pete Green lets himself down by recycling that old rubbish about Warnock spending his career “picking up ailing clubs off the floor and setting them back on their feet”. Not quite true. In the late Nineties, Stan Ternent guided Bury Football Club from the then Division Three to Division One with successive promotions, and kept us up in Division One while luminaries such as Manchester City were relegated from it (oh how we laughed when we beat them at Maine Road in the process), before buggering off to Burnley and leaving us to the mercy of the “Red Adair” of lower-league football. Warnock’s tenure at Gigg Lane started off in patronising fashion, referring to us as “a smashing little club”. He flooded the team with under-performers he had dragged with him from his previous clubs, turned up at Gigg Lane wearing a Sheffield United club tie while we were paying his wages, got us relegated to Division Two, then skulked off to Bramall Lane, taking some of our better players with him and paying peanuts for them into the bargain. Bury were then relegated to the bottom division, went into administration and nearly out of business. So please spare us the revisionist history about Warnock. If the truth be known, Stan was the Man who turned the Shakers around – Warnock destroyed his work. And yes, I will be looking for Sheffield United to be humiliated in every match they play next season
Howard Cover, Liverpool

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Ian Plenderleith takes a mischevious delight in a site dedicated to ugly players, assesses the mixed credentials of players seeking to blag themselves a club on another, and savours a Gaillic nostalgia trip

Ugly Footballers is puerile and pointless. The perfect football website, in fact, and my favourite to feature this month. Taking the tired old concept of footballers’ haircuts a few steps further, the site shows and shames the worst of the game’s gurners, including current and past domestic and international stars, referees and players’ wives too.

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