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There's a Totton & Eling team tab hidden somewhere in this old scrapbook page! See if you can spot it! |
So, you would dutifully start the season doing just that, but after a few weeks it became a little, well, boring. So, you would take them all out of the ladders, put them in a pewter tanker, shake them up, and draw out ties for the British Cup (which was surely just around the corner in reality - you were just doing the draw before Bert Millichip could get his hands on his 128 numbered balls and do the first-ever real draw). "And Coventry City will play Hibernian, in surely the tie of the round..."
The team tabs were slathered in useful information from the mid-70s onwards. The club's name would be in its colours on the visible part, but underneath, on the invisible iceberg-like bit, would be the name of their ground, year of formation, nickname, and most intriguingly, their record gate (e.g., Pompey's was 51,385 v Derby County - I've been in 40,000+ crowds at Fratton Park, but that ain't going to happen ever again!). I would learn all of these things off by heart and would wish that one day I could be in a record attendance.
Well, I may have done this at last, after 40 years of trying. The 230 at Totton & Eling's Millers Park for their FA Cup tie with Weymouth might well have been a ground record (probably not a club record - they must have bettered that at Southern Gardens in the 1940s or 1950s. I don't know for sure, and I don't expect anybody else does!). Anyway, to celebrate, I made a Totton & Eling team tab with the following vital information:
Totton & Eling (red lettering on a black background - club colours)
Millers Park
Formed: 1925
Record gate: 230 (in invisible brackets afterwards: "I was there!")
The Millers
I added it temporarily to an old scrapbook, just to see what it would look like (see illustration above). It looks good there, in amongst all the Sun soccerstamps!
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Terry Paine, circa 1971. |
Good stuff Andy!
ReplyDeleteTerry Paine was a great player - shame he was a Tory though!