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Stories

The Origins Of The Football League

321 OriginsThe first season 1888/89
by Mark Metcalf
Amberley, £14.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 321 November 2013

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In 1888, during the early days of professional football, clubs began to look for a way to secure a regular income beyond that generated by occasional cup ties and friendly matches. It was Aston Villa director William McGregor who proposed the solution, suggesting that “the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home and away fixtures each season”. As the Football League celebrates its anniversary 125 year later, Mark Metcalf’s extensively researched book examines the inaugural season of the game’s oldest league competition.

The Origins Of The Football League opens with a brief but useful primer on the state of football in 1888. It was an evolving game in which there were no penalty kicks or goal nets, and goalkeepers could handle the ball anywhere within their own half. But growing interest and attendances allowed the League’s 12 founder members to flourish. Indeed, 11 of the 12 still play League football today – the exception is Accrington (not to be confused with Accrington Stanley), who folded in 1896.

The book traces the 1888-89 season via a series of match reports, many of which are taken from contemporary newspapers. These early reports have, as Metcalf puts it, “a certain symmetry to them”, typically detailing the weather and pitch conditions, while studiously recording who won the toss before presenting a fairly perfunctory account of the play. “The visiting right made an attack that was cleared by Bethell,” reads an opening-day report for Bolton Wanderers v Derby County, “and in two minutes from the start Kenny had scored a fine goal for the Wanderers. A protest for offside was raised in vain.” That Kenny Davenport goal was, the author reveals via some detective work involving kick-off times, the first League goal.

Without wishing to spoil the book’s ending, the story of the 1888-89 season is also the story of Preston North End’s “Invincibles”, who won the League without losing a game. “The feat North End have accomplished, gaining 18 victories and four draws [is] a record for which no comparison can fairly be found,” one reporter wrote. Preston also beat Wolves 3-0 in the FA Cup final to claim the first football “double”. That was hard lines for the fearsome Preston full-back Nick Ross, who missed the triumph by moving for a single season to Everton.

Ross is profiled in the book’s comprehensive gazetteer, alongside hundreds of other players ranging from the well known, such as Johnny “All Good” Goodall, who scored 21 goals in 21 games for Preston in that first season, to the virtually unknown, such as the mysterious W Mitchell, who played one game for Blackburn Rovers, scored two goals and was never heard of again.

The comprehensive nature of The Origins Of The Football League may be both a blessing and a curse. For the casual reader, a book that contains hundreds of consecutive match reports, many of which are relatively inconsequential, might not represent much of a page-turner. But as a book to dip into – and as a reference work – it’s a valuable and timely record of the birth of one of football’s most important institutions.

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Saturday Afternoon Fever

321 SatAfternoonA year on the road 
for Soccer Saturday
by Johnny Phillips
Bennion Kearny, £9.99
Reviewed by David Harrison
From WSC 320 October 2013

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Johnny Phillips is a product of Sky’s Soccer Saturday conveyor belt constructed to provide Jeff Stelling with a never-ending stock of earnest reporters, ready to update the nation with breathless goalflashes. That was until Phillips briefly lost it on-air at the end of last season and went from calmly “delivering his own brand of footballing brilliance”, as Stelling’s foreword generously describes our man’s contribution, to a demented comedy figure screaming a match update in a ludicrous high-pitched falsetto. Those 20 seconds in May elevated him, we’re told, to “an internet sensation with millions of hits”.

To be fair that Watford v Leicester play-off semi-final did deliver the most extraordinary climax and Phillips performed manfully, albeit squeakily, to keep it together and provide any sort of factual assessment, what with flares going off and a fair old pitch invasion gathering pace behind him.

In many ways those Vicarage Road scenes served as a perfect bookend to the season Phillips had enjoyed as he travelled the land on behalf of Sky. The cynic might suggest that if you’re about to release a season-long diary, national exposure along those lines does no harm. But whatever criticisms one may choose to level at this undemanding tome, cynicism would not feature.

Phillips has chronologically documented 24 trips he made during the course of last season, starting in August with a delightful little story about how celebrity Spireite the Duke of Devonshire invited his local team to train within the magnificent 100-acre gardens of his Derbyshire ancestral seat, Chatsworth House. What Capability Brown would have thought is anyone’s guess but it’s a charming tale with which to set the ball rolling.

What follows is distinctly mixed but this is the archetypal bedside book, in that the reader could happily flip from one month to the next and back. There are short stories based around key characters within smaller clubs who rarely make headlines – the likes of Fleetwood, Mansfield, Forest Green and Met Police – as well as tales of football people.

The chapter on Brentford’s troubled goalkeeper Richard Lee is revealing if hardly original and the story of Port Talbot ambulance driver and former Swansea striker James Thomas is another pleasing read, while the piece on Lee Hendrie is refreshingly upbeat. The most interesting essay covers the rise and fall of Gretna, intertwined with the story of the club’s late benefactor, the extraordinary Brooks Mileson.

Phillips is a Wolves fan and indulges himself to some degree with a reflective piece on his lengthy relationship with them but the section on finding his club and recollections of 1980’s terrace life will strike a chord with many. This is no Sports Book of the Year contender. Some of the grammar is painful – “The esteem in which he [Benítez] is held by Liverpool fans is considerably high” is a particularly gruesome example – but it’s nevertheless an engaging effort with nothing to dislike about the author. The book, we’re told, was conceived on a train journey from South Wales to London. It could be read within a similar timespan – and there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Christmas feasts

wsc299 Jon Spurling goes back to Boxing Day 1963, when 66 goals were scored in the First Division

As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.

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Trap door

wsc299 After their first leg play-off win, Lee Daly reflects on Ireland’s Euro 2012 qualification campaign

Despite the Republic of Ireland scoring four goals in their away victory against Estonia in the first leg of their Euro 2012 play-off, the most ambitious Irish performance of the night was from fan Conor Cunningham. He managed to sneak past security into the stadium and make it onto the pitch, disguised in an Estonian team tracksuit top. Cunningham sat in the home team dugout and celebrated with the Irish players after their victory. He became an overnight media sensation and made several appearances on radio explaining he was as surprised as anyone that he wasn’t found out until after the final whistle.

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Letters, WSC 297

Dear WSC
In answer to Jamie Sellers’ enquiry (Letters, WSC 296), no, David Needham and I are not related, although I pretended he was for a while at junior school. Also, when I went to Forest games and the Trent End chanted “Needham! Needham! Needham!” during corners (he was renowned for nodding them in), I would step forward, raise a hand, shout “Thank you, fans!” and then do that breathing-on-the-fingernails-and-buffing-them-on-the-lumber-jacket thing that boastful kids were wont to do in the late 1970s.
Al Needham, Nottingham

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