After the exertions and excitement of the Prague re-fight, I’ve changed direction having caught a glimpse of the following amongst the pile of books my brother-in-law handed to me last year.
So far it’s proving to be an excellent read. I like Moorehead’s writing style and he presents a very rounded view of events and decision-making in the Italian campaign. This is particularly surprising to me because the book was first published in 1945.
Nice.
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| Author: Rob McIlveen. Publisher: the Mariners Trust |
Meanwhile, on Saturday the above arrived in the post. It might just put the Moorehead on the backburner. I’ve had a few quick flicks through it, and it’s one of those books that I both want to dive in and devour, but also savour slowly. For those of us born within sight of Dock Tower and above the age of five fifty years ago, the subject matter is the story of an unforgettable season and cast of characters. A season that folk my age and older will never stop banging on about. Without wishing to sound too artsy-fartsy, turning the pages is a very Proustian experience. 1971-72 was the first season I started going to watch football matches. I briefly dreamed last September/October that 50 years on the championship winning feat would be repeated.
One thing that stands out, as of wider footballing interest. The teamsheets show numbers 1-12, only. Just 1 substitute. No squad numbers either. If you were picked to play at left back, you wore the number 3. If you weren’t picked for a game you didn’t have a number. The match I went to on Sunday had players with shirt numbers in the 30s and 40s. Each team got to play 3 substitutes picked from 5 players ‘on the bench’.
Of a more self-indulgent nature, I offer up the following. In a pre-season friendly game Grimsby best Japan 7-2. Japan have come on a long way since then 😄.
Something I don’t remember from that time is this:
Not long after the Japan game I was persuaded to go along to watch a match. My uncles and grandad had been trying to encourage me to go with them. I was a strange kid though. Very shy. All those strangers in an enclosed space. In the end it was my eldest sister who persuaded me.
I was hooked. Talk about exciting. It was love at first sight really. And a lifelong love. Yes it wasn’t the First Division (today's ‘Premier League). No Georgie Best or Geoff Hurst. But I quickly got a sense that this was ours. It was better than following United, or Spurs or Leeds.
In amongst the book’s match-by-match accounts (every league and cup game) are pen portraits of the players and staff. Here’s a snippet of the one on the late, great Matt Tees. My first football hero. He’ll be familiar to older Charlton and Luton fans. Lawrie McMenemy, Town manager at the time, had this to say about his first encounter with Matt:
“When I walked into the dressing room, I thought a sea fret had drifted off the beach, and then it cleared slowly – to reveal Matt Tees sat in the far corner, extinguishing his pipe!!” (Quoted in https://football.sportingmemories.net/memory/2881-lawrie-mcmenemy-matt-tees/?addcomment )
Of slight build, and not particularly tall, Matt wasn’t the typical brick-outhouse British centre forward. But he knocked in 29 goals that season. It seemed many of them were headers, and Matt had the ability to leap in the air and hang there until the ball reached him. Sadly in later life he suffered from dementia. You may have seen him in a documentary presented by Alan Shearer a few years ago, about the link between heading footballs and dementia.
One final delightful touch in the book is a photograph of every Matchday programme from that season. Home and away.
I really know very little of this other version of football…
ReplyDeleteThere are other versions? 😉
DeleteI'll have to keep an eye out for the Moorehead book, which I'd not heard of before. Glad to see you've got on book on Grimsby Town to savour at your leisure:).
ReplyDeleteIt’s particularly good because I wouldn’t have bought the Moorehead book myself.
DeleteChris
Excellent. It is, of course, a well known fact that Proust was himself a devoted Mariners fan, so your reference is entirely appropriate. Another club managed (briefly) by the immortal Bill Shankly, so a noble tradition indeed. Thanks for a splendid post.
ReplyDeleteIt is rumoured* that after his National service, Proust spent several months in Cleethorpes, hiring out deckchairs on the prom. It was whilst there that he went along to watch Grimsby play in the inaugural season of the Football Alliance (what became League Division 2). The famous Madeleine cake was originally a plate of cockles in the first draft. The fact said cake being shaped like a seashell is not a coincidence.
Delete* By me
Good looking pair of books, I remember May 1971 and dust motes dancing in the light from the french windows of our home in Hornsey ,my 15 year old brother with his shaven head wearing a butchers coat daubed with red cannons and Arsenal slogans and a captured West Ham scarf around his wrist, the year of the double, oh well, last night we used 4 substitutes and still lost!
ReplyDeleteBest Iain
Ah yes. The days when ‘DMs’ meant something much less friendly!
DeleteChris
I remember Lawrie McMenemy but as a TV pundit I think. Re the pipe smoking anecdote, I recall Jimmy Greaves telling a story when on "Saint and Greavesy" of how, when playing top level for Spurs (in the Sixties?) he would come in at half time for the fifteen minute break and get through two or three cigarettes before going back out to play the second half! (And if you tell that to the young people t'day, they wont believe a word...!)
ReplyDeleteAh yes. I was watching a ‘repeat’ of a First Division match from the 70s and I thought that today’s part-time footballers are more athletic than top professionals of that era.
DeleteChris