And now the classified football results
When the final whistle blows at a game on a Saturday afternoon, most of us follow the same old routine. We head in the direction of the club house and after sorting ourselves out with a drink, we spend the next few minutes watching either Final Score on the BBC or Soccer Saturday on Sky Sports to find out the final scores from the professional game around the country.
Obviously it would be great if we could be regaled each Saturday with all the Vodkat League scores on the telly, but that aspiration has, unfortunately, to be tempered by a hefty dose of realism. However, it may come as a surprise to many that a number of our clubs have in fact experienced being featured in the classified results round ups on national television and radio.
In the glory days when “doing the pools coupon” each week was a commonplace feature of British life, the pools companies occasionally dipped down into non-league football and featured a few fixtures from leagues around the country. I can’t say for certain how often this happened or over what time period, but I can share some documentary evidence of one such instance, on the 24th April 1976, when fixtures from the Cheshire League and Lancashire Combination were used.
If you click on the links on the left hand side of this page, a copy of the pools coupon from that day as printed in the Daily Mirror will be displayed. I’ve done two versions, one in JPEG format and one in PDF format, so hopefully everyone will be able to display it on their PC’s. To display a PDF you need Adobe Reader installed, which can be downloaded from the Adobe website at www.adobe.com.
Going back to this newspaper cutting, I first came across this when I was at Ashton Town, and doing some preparatory work on the club’s 50th anniversary. Some of the long standing members brought down photos and newspaper cuttings that they had accumulated, and a copy of this pools coupon on the day in question was one of those.
As part of the exercise, some of the memorabilia was framed and put on display in the club house at Edge Green Street, and anyone who has been there in recent years will have seen the range of newspaper cuttings on display.
I had long forgotten about the pools coupon item until we held one of the League’s pre-season meetings for club officials at Ashton Town in August. Emil Anderson, the Atherton Collieries Secretary was having a look at the various pictures, and when he noticed that Colls were on the pools coupon, he commented that he’d like a copy for himself as he had been unaware that this had ever happened.
Thanks are therefore due to the former Ashton Town Chairman Len Riley, who dug out the original and did me some copies to distribute around the various clubs featured over the past month or so.
To those who I haven’t given a copy yet, my apologies, but as ten clubs are featured it will take me time to get around everyone, and I’ve only had the copies for a few weeks. That knowledge prompted me to share the document with all and sundry on here and let anyone who wants one print a copy for themselves.
As can be seen, the fixtures from the Lancashire Combination and Cheshire League feature some familiar names. Someone somewhere may be able to confirm if these were full league programmes for the day or if certain games were left out, but if so there were not many.
Nine fixtures from the Cheshire League are shown, and a quick check through a book I’ve got (Non-League Football Tables 1889-2003 edited by Michael Robinson) revealed that the Cheshire League had 22 teams in season 1975-76, and the only four not featured are Winsford United, Burscough, Ashton United and Prestwich Heys. The current Vodkat League clubs who do appear are Darwen, Formby, New Mills, and St Helens Town, with several former NWCFL clubs also in there too.
The Lancashire Combination comprised 18 clubs in 1975-76, and with eight fixtures used it means only two clubs are missing, those being Wigan Athletic Reserves and Maghull. Current Vodkat League clubs in this list are Atherton Collieries, Bootle, Bacup Borough, AFC Blackpool (then known as Blackpool Mechanics), Ashton Town and Nelson.
To avoid any sharp eyed readers querying why I appear to have missed Colne off the list, I would point out that in season 1975-76 it was Colne Dynamoes who were competing in the Lancashire Combination, the present Colne club was formed in 1996. Again, several other clubs who later competed in the NWCFL are also featured in the fixtures, and the team named as “Skelmersdale” were in fact Skelmersdale United Reserves.
I passed a copy of the cutting to Billy Singleton, Secretary of AFC Blackpool, a few weeks ago, as Blackpool Mechanics are one of the clubs on the fixture list. He told me that he would have been a player at Lytham at the time this fixture list was used, and they were at home to Blackpool Wren Rovers on the day. Billy felt that since the game was being featured nationally it would have been mentioned at the time, but he has no recollection of it, so it’s possible that others who were involved in the games will be in the same position.
One final point – why did the pools companies decide to feature the Lancashire Combination and Cheshire League in the first place? I can actually offer some explanation for that as the reason lies in the Scottish League fixtures.
In 1975, the Scottish Leagues were restructured from two divisions of 18 and 20 into a Premier League of ten teams, and a First and Second division of 14 teams each, and the season of 1975-76 was the first season that format was used.
However, some bright spark decided that in the First and Second Divisions, each team would play one another home and away just once – meaning a total season’s worth of fixtures comprised just 26 league games. To make up for the fact that the last round of scheduled league fixtures was on the last Saturday in February, a competition known as the Spring Cup was brought in.
The 28 clubs were put in groups of 4 and 5, round robin home and away fixtures were played, and the top eight teams progressed through to quarter finals. That meant that for around half of the Scottish League clubs, the season finished in early April! As an aside, strangely enough I was actually at one of the Spring Cup quarter finals on the day in question, watching my team Hamilton lose 4-0 to Airdrie in my early days of following Accies when I was at school.
The lack of Scottish fixtures obviously meant the pools companies were short of fixtures to use for their coupons, and presumably that is why they dropped down into non-league. Not surprisingly the Spring Cup only lasted one season, and was booted out in favour of teams in the Scottish League Divisions One and Two playing one another three times a season, giving them 39 league fixtures instead of 26.
If anyone out there has other old newspaper cuttings featuring some of our clubs getting national recognition, please let me know and we can hopefully feature some other stories in future issues.
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