The Lockdown - Sorting Out All The Programmes

April 19, 2020

The current lockdown in the attempt to control the spread of Covid-19 has resulted in large numbers of us staying at home and with too much time on our hands. For many, this is the opportunity to perform some of those tasks that we have postponed for just about for ever. In my case, the garage had a huge pile of old football programmes gathering dust or starting to fade, whilst more recent ones and over thirty years issues of When Saturday Comes were cluttering up the spare bedroom.

As an accountant I like order and structure, although that could also be down to my birth-sign, and with a number of empty boxes lying around from the recent essential home deliveries of wine, gin and meat from the butcher, there was also an opportunity to show some long neglected green credentials by re-cycling these rather than throw them away.

The first step was to gather all the programmes on the floor in the living room to try and establish the appropriate filing methodology, and with the wife being unimpressed by the mess being made, there was plenty of what can be termed “encouragement” to complete the task at hand.

It quickly became obvious that immediate progress could be made by collecting together the clubs with a large number of home programmes, namely Crawley Town ( from 1969 ), Brighton and Hove Albion ( from 1980 ), Sparta Rotterdam ( 1996-2001, when I lived in the Netherlands ), Thame United ( from 2002 ), KVK Tienen ( 2004-2008, when I lived in Belgium ) and more recently Oxford City and Chinnor Rugby Club.

The rest could be categorised as either English Football Clubs or Foreign Football Clubs ( sorted alphabetically then by date ), Internationals, Cup Finals and Tournaments, and finally Rugby and Other Sports. One box would suffice for the entire WSC catalogue. Deciding the process was easy but the project took far too long to finish as I started to look at the mountain of nostalgia in front of me.

Probably like many supporters, my programme collection reflects a significant portion of my life and a whole range of emotions. The first match I attended at Crawley was against Romford in August 1969 as the club played its first ever home match in the Southern League Premier Division at their old Town Mead ground, and I have faithfully recorded the 0-0 score line on the programme. There are a couple of older programmes which I must have bought from the club shop in later years. In fact, I used to buy a lot of other programmes when I was young but unfortunately, apart from the Crawley ones which for some reason survived, these were all thrown away when my parents moved house.

The Crawley programmes are in a poor state, as I have written all over them, usually updating the league tables as well as recording team changes and the scorers. I was amused to see that once, where the opposition team line up was left blank I had recorded the scorers in a 0-3 defeat as Cheat, Robber and Swindler. I can’t remember the match but clearly felt that my team were hard done by. Good to see I haven’t changed much over the years !

Programmes involving Brighton re-live memories familiar to all fans who have travelled up and down the country supporting their team. There are the occasional ( but not many ) joys of great results, such as the 2-0 Cup win at Newcastle, which I remember as the coldest day of my life, wearing only a trendy lightweight jacket as it was a nice sunny January morning when I left Sussex, so I spent nearly all of the second half just watching the clock ticking towards 90 minutes hoping the game would soon finished so I could go somewhere warm ; a 2-2 cup draw at Liverpool after being 2-0 down with 20 minutes to go with John Barnes frequently embarrassing John Crumplin ( never mind we lost the replay ), the nervous 2-1 win over Bristol Rovers to clinch promotion in 87/88, and Graham Pearce’s 89^th minute winner at a hostile Leeds. 

There are the satisfactory ground out away wins at far flung destinations eg Carlisle, Lincoln, Rotherham, Hull & err…...Wolves, satisfactory away draws on the way to promotion eg Cardiff twice, Swindon, Wycombe, Brentford, abject performances at Stockport, Crewe, Swindon, Derby & Birmingham and hopeless defeats where relegation seemed inevitable eg Barnsley, Millwall, Reading, Portsmouth, Leicester and MK Dons to name a few. And don’t mention the 1991 play-off final defeat at Wembley ! These kind of experiences aren’t just limited to matches watching Brighton though.

There are matches where I remember little except the score, and a few where I have no recollection whatsoever of the match, and not because I had been drinking ! There are players I can’t remember, and others who I had forgotten played in those seasons. There was also the comedy of Kevin Morton and the 5 penalty match at Palace, even though we lost to the Forces of Darkness ! Accordingly though, my memories have been restored.

There are some events for which I have no programme as an aide-memoir. Where no programme was issued, usually matches played in Europe, I have a few newspaper cuttings of a match report the following day. Not that I can understand much Portuguese.

Then there was the postponed game at Hull, having a fruitless journey arriving just as the game was called off, and thereby meeting-up earlier than planned with friends later that evening, who  inquired “Good Game was it ?” before chortling into their beers. I’ve never been to Ipswich, mainly thanks to the train breaking down three times, yes, three times, from Liverpool Street. By the time it got to Colchester the match was well into the second half, so time to turn around and head home. At least British Rail refunded the train fare.

The non-football programmes also bring back some stories, like going to watch a very young Andy Murray play local hero Xavier Malisse in a Challenger Tournament in Mons, Belgium ( we lived 30 minutes away at the time ) and with my wife and I being the only spectators cheering for the Scot, a young guy in front of us turned as asked if we were his parents !

Whilst I could recall some of the rugby players who had played at Chinnor early in their careers before going onto play for England, Wales and even Ireland, I discovered some, such as Jack Nowell, who made no impression on me. Adding these to others who have recently played in the lower leagues of English Rugby and are now on some of the rugby expert’s “ones to watch” list, I am well positioned to bore some friends when Rugby resumes. 

Some of the friends I have been to matches with never bother buying a programme, so will be unable to evoke the kind of memories I have now recovered. Also worryingly, current financial pressures and technology permit some non-league clubs to stop printing and instead only publish on-line programmes. Whilst I have a handful of these downloaded to the hard drive of my laptop, I will have to remember to save or copy them every time I change my computer.

 
Nearly all of the programmes have little or no financial value but I shall continue to store them so I can engage in periodic bouts of nostalgia and to re-jog my memory. However, I did perform a few searches on the internet and discovered that some of my Champions League Finals Programmes from the 1990s are selling for between £50 to £100 each. I have now put these into plastic folders and stored safely in a drawer in the spare bedroom so that these will remain in good condition and not get lost. It now gives me my next project, er….. how does this E-Bay thingy work then ?