Revisit Football's golden age...

Nostalgic football fans in the UK - can we have your attention please!

Some People Are On The Pitch are proud to announce that a new series of The Big Match Revisited is returning to ITV4 on January 1st 2009. Covering the final 20 weeks of the 1978/79 season, the first programme has an absolute gem of a game in the shape of West Bromwich Albion's 5-3 victory over Manchester United.

So if you want to hear plenty of this...



...see some of this...



…and wallow in the masterly presentation of this man...



…make sure you tune into ITV4 in the new year on Thursdays or Sundays for a huge helping of football 1970's-style.

The previous series (looking back at the 1982/83 season) was broadcast at the start of this year and was hugely successful - so much so that many people wrote about it at the time from national newspapers to… well, us, frankly.

And rightly so, in our opinion. There's little enough vintage football on our screens as it is these days and ITV4 have realised this by giving fans of a certain age plenty of what they're looking for.

Throughout the course of the second series of The Big Match Revisited, you can expect to hear lots about the league title race between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, the dwindling fortunes of Chelsea, QPR and Derby and the race for promotion to Division 1 involving Crystal Palace, West Ham and Brighton.

And of course you can remind yourself of all the great players of the day that were doing the rounds. Names like Liam Brady, Steve Coppell, Mick Channon, Cyrille Regis and the recent arrivals at Spurs, Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa are all there on show for your televisual entertainment.

So go on - immerse yourself in nostalgia. Make a note in your diary for New Year's Day on ITV4 - The Big Match Revisited is back on your screens again.



With thanks to our friends Laura Wootton and Gary Andrews at ITV for providing us with the above information.

My First Match

Before we get on with the following article, a quick apology for the lack of new stuff going on this week. My excuse is that I've been on a hastily-organised holiday of sorts in the west of England in a place called Mere. It has few distinguishing features except for the fact that it's probably the last place in Britain to acknowledge the existence of the Internet.

I was staying in a cottage that has no connection to the World Wide Web, the nearest open wi-fi network was about five miles away and the only access I had to my blogsite was via a PC situated in a small local library 100 yards away from our holiday home. They allowed casual web surfers like me one hour to find out whatever you could from the outside world before cutting off my access (painful if you're not ready for it) and that was about it.

So here I am, just back from my holiday, uploading my first article for almost a week, and I hope you enjoy it accordingly. Now I'm back from The Land The Internet Forgot, you should find I'm a lot more prolific than I have been in the days to come.

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One memory that many of us seem to share with great affection is that of the first football match we ever went to. I'd like those of you visiting SPAOTP to tell myself and the rest of the audience about your memories if you'd care to, but in the meantime let me tell you mine.

The first football match I ever went to was between my favourite team, West Ham United, and Orient (often, as now, known as Leyton Orient) on Saturday, December 26th 1980. I was nine years old and West Ham were playing in the old Second Division. The former was something I'd experience only once in my life, the latter would happen all too regularly for my own personal liking.

The opportunity to go and watch The Hammers for the first time came about when my aunt Sylv suggested it'd be a good idea for her son (my cousin and fellow West Ham supporter) Keith to take me along to see a game at Upton Park as that was where he chose to spend many of his Saturday afternoons anyway.

There was also the added exciting bonus of sleeping over at Sylv's house that same night before returning to my family home the following morning. As you may agree, the prospect of spending the night in someone else's house when you're only nine is about as exhilarating as it gets, so I didn't need to be asked twice on this one.

And then came the big day. I didn't live very far away from Sylv and Keith so I arrived at their house in next to no time that Saturday lunchtime. After a quick hello and goodbye, Keith and I jumped on a bus (I think it was the number 5 but it's both difficult to remember and largely irrelevant) and before long we were walking along Green Street near the Boleyn Ground.

I seem to recall we arrived a little early - probably just before 2 o'clock, but Keith suggested we get our tickets, go through the turnstiles and find our place on the near-empty terraces. And yes, it was terraces in those days. None of this new-fangled all-seater business. You stood on the concrete steps like the 30,000-odd other fans and that was about all the luxury you were afforded.

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was a bit of a blur. The fans started to arrive the nearer we got to kick-off (a tradition that continues to this day, I can confirm) but the wait seemed to be endless. One welcome distraction, however, came when I looked up at the commentary box behind me and spotted Brian Moore.

Moore was the number 1 commentator on ITV back then and remained in that key position until his death in 2003. Renowned for his balding pate and his friendly, reverential commentary, Moore could often be seen up in his crow's nest at Upton Park surveying the action down below. The ITV cameras often visited West Ham's ground - more, I suspect because it wasn't far away from their studios on the South Bank of the Thames than because West Ham were anything approaching a top side of that era.

Anyway, the thought that West Ham v Orient would be featuring on 'The Big Match' that evening added an extra frisson of excitement to the proceedings, and when West Ham went on to win 3-1, you could be certain that I'd be staying up until 10.30 that night to watch the highlights of the self same match.

And therein lies another difference to the football of today. Back then, us Brits weren't spoon-fed wall-to-wall coverage of every goal from every game on TV. You had one 'highlights' show on a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon and nothing else. They'd show the goals and best bits from three games and not all of those were from the top flight, so if your team wasn't featured, you were out of luck. But anyway, that's another story for another time...

Back to the plot. Keith and I got home from the match, me with my programme rolled up under my arm and a broad smile all over my face. We had our evening meal, talked all night about the game and before you knew it, it was 10.30 and ITV were showing my first ever match in highlight form all over again. It was a strange experience, seeing a game on TV I'd attend only hours earlier, but it nicely rounded off an exciting day that still lives with me as I approach my 37th birthday.

Upton Park was a different place then. It had a certain bleakness about it, but there was some good football played at the time and the players who ran out onto the pitch in their claret-and-blue shirts were, for someone of my age, legends in their own small way. Though I've seen many games at Upton Park since then, I'll never forget the first time I walked through the turnstiles and saw football 'in the flesh'. It was December 26th 1980, West Ham were playing Orient and it was a day to be frozen in my consciousness until the day I die.

British Football in the 1980's - Revisited

You'll have to excuse me for a moment. I'm going to get rather nostalgic.

A number of other blog sites have recently been talking about a programme currently being shown on the ITV4 channel here in the UK called 'The Big Match Revisited'. Ours is about to join them, if a little belatedly.

The reason why so many people have brought up the subject of 'The Big Match Revisited' is because it pulls the curtain back on a period in British football history that people like me remember fondly but very rarely see these days.

That period is the early-1980's, a time when football was a very different animal from what we know today, yet for all its foibles, people of a certain age like myself (i.e. 30 years or older) have largely forgotten all the good and bad things that made it what it was. Until now, that is.

What ITV4 are doing is showing a series of programmes which were originally broadcast exactly 25 years ago. In London, that programme would have been 'The Big Match', a Saturday night show featuring highlights of two or three football matches that had taken place earlier that day. There were, however, equivalent programmes shown in different regions of the UK, but they all did the same thing - give viewers their first and probably only chance to watch the best bits from a small selection of the latest football games 'de la jour'.

It's proven to be real appointment-to-view TV for us thirty-somethings. Only yesterday I sat down to watch this week's show - a re-run of the North of England version of 'The Big Match' called 'Match Time' presented by former ITV anchorman Elton Welsby and co-host Denis Law.

Now herein lies the first point of curiosity. I never knew the former Manchester United legend had ever been employed by someone as a TV front-man, and to be fair, he didn't make a bad job of reading out the football news headlines on the show. What was more difficult to understand was what in god's name possessed him to settle on that hairstyle. It looked like he was balancing a stuffed cat on his head. Never mind... more of Denis later.

It was then time for highlights of the first featured game between Liverpool and Stoke City. The Reds, of course were rampant at the time, winning the First Divison title year in, year out, and the 1982-83 season was no different. Here, however, is Curiosity number 2: Stoke City playing in the First Division. Not a regular occurrence in the early-80's or at any time since, but luckily the ITV cameras were there to capture this rare event on film.

Sadly for them, they were beaten 5-1 by one of the all-time great Liverpool line-ups who, in my opinion, played rather poorly. All the stars were there to see - Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush, Alan Hansen, Mark Lawrenson (not just with a moustache but with a beard, too) and Bruce Grobelaar (sporting a beautifully cut mullet) - yet the passing was at times lacking in accuracy and overall the interplay between them left a lot to be desired. Stoke must have wondered what the score would have been if Liverpool had played better.

Really though, for me a programme like this isn't so much about judging football performances - it's in the fine detail that one gains the greatest enjoyment. Neither team's kit featured any shirt advertising - it was banned on TV back then. Ironic in a way, considering Liverpool weren't allowed to have 'Crown Paints' on their uniform, yet it loomed large on the three 20-foot advertising boards that were regularly in full view of the cameras (see left).

And that kit - the one with the white pinstripes. What a classic. I absolutely adored any kit with pinstripes back then. It seemed like the ultimate in football design... an interesting reflection on what goes through the mind of a 12-year-old boy, I suppose.

Even the pitchside advertising hoardings provide a rich harvest for the ardent nostalgist. These days they're all about electronic moving imagery promoting worldwide brands such as Nike or Mastercard. What did Liverpool have back in 1983? Wooden advertising boards promoting KP Nuts, John West tinned salmon and Slalom Lager (Slalom LAGER?!?!?)

Anfield still had its crash barriers in place on the terraces back then, a reminder that crowd trouble was far more of a sinister threat than it has been in recent memory. And the crowd - just over 30,000, we were told. It sounds quite low by today's standards and perhaps it is, but for a game against Stoke (no offence) at a time when Liverpool were 14 points clear at the top of Division One, it was a fair effort on the part of the crowd in attendance that day.

Still, it was all good to see a quarter of a century on, as were the highlights of the Everton v Sunderland match and the Notts County v Spurs match, too (Notts County AND Stoke City in the top flight at the same time?!? We must have been dreaming...)

All that was left to complete a perfect 45 minutes of escapism was a round-up of the day's news from the aforementioned 'Law Man'. Were all used to seeing the goals and action from any match that ever takes place in this modern era, but back then TV cameras weren't so omnipresent, so programmes like 'The Big Match' had to make do with black and white stills photographs taken by the Daily Mirror or some other tabloid newspaper to illustrate any exciting events. Cheap, but effective, you might say.

And finally, a look at the league tables... well the top and bottom bits, anyway. Just looking at the names of the teams and the levels they were playing at is enough to make your mind boggle. There was Nottingham Forest and Coventry City near the top of Division One, Arsenal in 15th and Swansea and Brighton propping them up at the bottom. Derby and Middlesbrough were stuck at the bottom of Division Two and in Division Three the leaders were Portsmouth. How things have changed.

How they've changed indeed, but that's why we like our football history so much. It's wonderful to step back from the here-and-now that sometimes lacks so much in the way of imagination to gaze through the looking glass into the Never-Never-Land of our youth. We probably thought it was all a bit humdrum back then in all fairness, but we should thank ITV4 for giving us a chance to see it all again. It's what helps keep us young, after all.