Shoot! 28 October 1978

The qualifying competition for the 1980 European Championships had just begun when this issue hit the shops. Shoot! covered the upcoming round of fixtures involving the home countries and devoted much of its content to it accordingly.

England v Republic of Ireland

Having already won 4-3 in Denmark, England were about to make their first trip to Dublin for 14 years. Ron Greenwood's men hadn't reached the finals of a major competition since 1970 and this appeared to be their best chance of doing so given the talent available.

The former West Ham boss had put the emphasis on attack against the Danes, a tactic that suited players like Kevin Keegan, Trevor Francis and Tony Woodcock, but the Ireland squad was widely regarded as the best one ever and were seen as worthy opponents. Player-manager Johnny Giles was able to choose from a wealth of new and established Football League stars such as Liam Brady, Steve Heighway and David O'Leary, yet England 'keeper Ray Clemence didn't see them as much of a threat when he wrote about them in his weekly column.

Clemence was quick to focus on Johnny Giles' playing role specifically. The former Leeds United star was 37 years old going into this match and the Liverpool number 1 noted how some Irish fans were asking Giles to step aside to allow someone younger to take his place. As it is, the Republic of Ireland stalwart brought much experience and a steadying influence to the squad and this bore fruit as Ireland went on to draw 1-1 with England in Dublin.

Scotland v Norway

Scotland, meanwhile, were adjusting to life under new manager Jock Stein. Following a disastrous World Cup campaign only a few months earlier, Ally McLeod had miraculously been given a vote of confidence by the Scottish FA and was allowed to start the Euro '80 qualifying competition. When his side then lost their first match 3-2 away to Austria, however, McLeod was relieved of his duties, allowing Stein to take his place.

Jock Stein was already perceived as something of a legend having guided Celtic to European Cup glory in 1967 – the first time a British club had won the competition – yet his reputation was called into question by writer Chris Davies.

Only 45 days earlier, Stein had taken on the manager's job at Leeds United but surprised the football world by performing a dramatic U-turn to lead the Scottish national team instead. Davies noted how Stein had often preached loyalty to his players in the past yet had now turned his back on the Elland Road club. Stein claimed his wife hadn't taken to their new life in Leeds, but this only prompted Davies to wonder how she could have developed such a dislike of the place in such a short space of time.

Stein had also said he felt unable to turn down the Scotland job on account of being so patriotic, yet he'd declined such an offer while acting as caretaker manager in 1965. All this was casting Stein in a less than favourable light, Davies concluded, to say nothing of the precarious nature Leeds were left in with no manager.

Stein went on to lead Scotland to a 3-2 win over Norway that week, but ultimately failed to maintain their form during the entire European qualifying campaign. Scotland finished next to bottom in their qualifying group below Belgium, Portugal and Austria when the competition ended 17 months later.

Tough times at Stamford Bridge

Domestically, the spotlight fell on Chelsea in more ways than one. Lumbering through a financial crisis, they'd seen gate receipts plummet after a couple of seasons spent in Division Two. Despite returning to the top flight in the 1977-78 season, their position looked vulnerable and an air of uncertainty had enveloped the club.

This was reflected in Ray Wilkins' regular column where he confided his inability to pinpoint the reasons behind Chelsea's poor run of form at the time. Though they were playing capably enough on their travels, Chelsea's performances at home were particularly poor. "We use the same formation but the ball is like a hot potato… no-one wants it" Wilkins remarked. The players were undoubtedly lacking in confidence and there was a need to be more professional, he went on to say.

A welcome distraction (to say nothing of a financial fillip) came in the form of a friendly match against New York Cosmos at Stamford Bridge a month earlier. The NASL outfit were on a European tour and had stopped off in West London to help The Blues generate some much-needed revenue.

A crowd of 40,000 turned up to see the match in which Johan Cruyff primarily caught the eye. Cruyff was invited to take part in the tour and was thought to be joining the New York club on a permanent basis having left Barcelona in the summer of 1978. Chelsea had also mounted a 'dramatic bid' for him according to Shoot! but his next move would be to Los Angeles Aztecs the following year. Meantime, Cruyff's show of skill and flair in the exhibition match against Chelsea earned him a place at the start of the opening title sequence of ITV's The Big Match as you can see here.

News Desk

In other news, Tottenham's Gerry Armstrong was expressing his dissatisfaction at the varying number of roles he found himself undertaking for the North London club. 'Play me up front - or let me go' ran the headline as the article reminded readers of Armstrong's many recent substitute appearances. Shoot! reported that Birmingham, Arsenal, Ipswich, Aston Villa, Luton and Fulham were all interested in the Northern Ireland international, but in fact he stayed at White Hart Lane until a move to Watford nearly two years later.

Manchester United, meanwhile, had posted a loss for the previous season of £290,349. This had been largely down to Dave Sexton splashing out £1 million on Leeds United pair Gordon McQueen and Joe Jordan, so we were led to believe, but United fans could sleep easy in their beds. The Manchester club had made sufficient enough profits over the previous three years to leave them with an overall profit of £624,468 – "just enough to buy Trevor Francis, if he should become available when he recovers from injury."

Regular features and colour pics

Finally, this issue of Shoot! contained many of its most well-known features including You Are The Ref ('Compiled by Clive Thomas'), Ask The Expert (a chance for readers to pit ridiculously dull trivia questions to the magazine's researchers in the hope of winning £1 for having their letter published) and Football Funnies (five cartoons that regularly challenged the Trades Descriptions Act and all selected by an invited football player of the day, in this case Manchester City's Peter Barnes).

Yet as everyone surely knows, Shoot! could always be relied upon to provide its readers with a liberal sprinkling of glossy colour photographs, and this edition was no exception. The middle pages contained part of a week-by-week pull-out booklet featuring top players from the home countries, this one including profiles of Scotland's Willie Donachie and Northern Ireland's Pat Rice. There was also a double-page spread showing snapshots from the last round of Euro '80 qualifying matches, but the back page was reserved for the obligatory team picture which this week took Stoke City as its subject.

The Potters were riding high in the Second Division at the time and would go on to gain promotion to the First Division at the end of the season, doing so with the barely believable combination of Garth Crooks and Howard Kendall among its roster list.

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Flicking in a Winterthur Wonderland

The Picturesque City of Winterthur

Firstly I apologise for a such a poorly punned title. I did consider alternatives, but the play on Hot Chocolate’s ‘It started With a Kiss’ just wouldn’t work. ‘It started with an offer of a free Subbuteo team in a football magazine’ just doesn’t quite cut it.

So what am I going on about? Subbuteo! Despite being aware of Subbuteo from a very early age, being more into cricket than football meant I was more obsessed with obtaining Test Match than any flick-to-kick related products (and for £7.99 from Goldies toy shop, Test Match would be mine – replete with signed photo of the then England team... Botham, Gower et al. Now all that was required was some friends to play with... oh well, back in the box!)

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I had seen lots of Subbuteoitems in the windows of the toy shop in town, but even when I first became beholden to football, it still never appealed. It just seemed way too nerdy and serious. Yes they had lovely shiny trophies, but one didn’t need to love Subbuteo to desire those. I'd already dipped my toe into the world of table football a few months earlier when I purchased an all white team from the bargain bin at that same toy shop, but other than drawing my own kits on the blank plastic kit canvas, I still wasn't really getting it.

Two factors combined to change my stance:

1. There were pretty much no other football toys out there at the time (Striker had disappeared a few years earlier and wouldn’t be available again until the '90s)
2. An offer of a free Subbuteo team in Shoot! Magazine.

Yes, a FREE Subbuteo team! Which one would I get? As the advert clearly stated, ‘You could even get your favourite team!’ The excitement!!! 

The form was filled in, the requisite Stamped Addressed Envelope (how I miss that phrase) included and the standard 28 days for delivery was waited. Finally, one day after school, a package had arrived. A package that had seen better days by the look of it; my SAE a shadow of its former self. Whether it had suffered some rain damage followed by a letterbox-induced shredding or had just been used as a football for the posties at the local sorting office I shall never know. Nor indeed did I care for I was possibly about to embark on my full-on Subbuteo journey. I tore open the parcel, excitement building... who could it be, who could it be???

Well... you know the answer to that. Kinda gave it away in the title, really.

So...Winterthur... Who???

According to Wikipedia, Winterthur (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪntərtuːr], English: /ˈvɪntərtʊər/) is a city in the canton of Zurichin northern Switzerland. It has the country's sixth largest population estimated at more than 100,000 people.

So there you have it. Furthermore, FC Winterthur play in the Swiss Challenge League, the second highest tier of Swiss football. They play at the Schützenwiese Stadium.

Their home colours are all red. Only, they weren’t back then. Their home colours were white shorts and socks and white shirts with, if the Subbuteo figure painters are to be believed, three vertical gashes to the upper body. I’m assuming they were supposed to be uniform stripes, but the ones on my figures definitely looked like the result of some coordinated machete attack. Guess that would explain the blank stares on their plastic faces. The pic below is from an eBay listing (not mine - I’m holding on to my beloved Winterthur!) Mine came in more modern Subbuteo packaging (landscape layout, not vertical), but the figures are identical.

The Walking(?) Wounded

I now had two complete teams and, along with some cheap balls from the same bargain bin as before, could fully immerse myself in the murky waters of Subbuteo. Now all I needed was a pitch...and maybe some corner flags...and obviously a ref and linesman. A scoreboard would be quite useful too. Oh dear. In one fell swoop my interest had gone from passing to 'collector'. 0 to Geek in under 5 seconds...

And so yet another expensive pastime came into existence. One I shall delve into in greater detail in future, but for now, Merry Christmas people of Winterthur... and please, get to a hospital – those wounds need serious attention!

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Steve Earl's Football Programmes

Since I first bought a copy of Shoot! for 42p (a price rise of 2 pence on the previous week’s issue I found out later...scandalous!), I have always been drawn to the adverts section near the back of football magazines. The promise of football-related goodies, often in full colour, tempting me all these years. 

Looking back on 25 years' worth of ads, it’s funny how some things have changed and others not. The ads aimed at kids have changed dramatically, moving with the times, as one would expect. Pastel shaded drawings of rosy faced children in England pyjamas (the ad was for football pyjamas, I'd like to point out) replaced with the headache inducing ‘LOOK AT MY AWESOME STUFF IT’S SO AWESOME AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!’ style adverts prevalent in today’s brain mush kids’ football rags.

Adverts aimed at the older end of the age spectrum have changed little; their sober, informative format giving the consumer just what they want – information about what the product is, what it does, how you can obtain it and, in the ‘olden’ days, the standard line about allowing 28 days for delivery.

One specific advert that never seems to have changed is the one that always caught my eye as a lad and still does now.  That of Steve Earl’s Football Programmes.

Advert from Shoot!, July 1986

 

When Saturday Comes, January 2012

The same goofy, child-bearing-hipped football fan – arm still raised aloft, still giving that curious thumbs up, possibly referring to the FREE programmes (NB: in these hard economic times, this is now just a free programme catalogue) the ad’s strapline has always carried and still clutching a handful of programmes. This figure has been invading my conscious mind for over 21 years and yet, despite this apparently excellent marketing device, the crucial piece of info missing from my memory when I came to research this was... who the hell is this advert for? For as much as I could remember the cartoon, that it was for football programmes and that it offered FREE programmes, I had no idea who was selling / giving them away.

In truth this is probably down to me not really being into football programmes, so I never felt the need to read past the first few lines. I did consider sending off for some free ones back in the day, the offer of free things by post having a very strong allure to a child whose only real post up until that point had been the limited edition Star Wars figures (send 3 names / proof of purchases from the backing cards).

Upon further research (reading my old copies of Shoot! after a trip to the garage), I discovered it was for the aforementioned Steve Earl.  I also discovered, to my disappointment and mild horror as it almost torpedoed the whole angle of this post, that in the copies of Shoot! from 1990, the advert had shrunk to only a few lines and more importantly, Mr GoofyProgrammeMan wasn’t there!!!  Rising costs and an imminent recession obviously took their toll and poor old GPM was laid off. It also now cost a whopping 50p, albeit in unused stamps, to obtain the desired free, sorry, FREE programmes. 

 

1990 - FREE Football Programmes still available, but no Goofy Programme Man?

Thankfully, despite worldwide economic meltdown, Steve seems to have fully embraced the value of solid branding and restored good ol' Goofy to his rightful place...just to the left of the title.

One more thing I love about this advert is that, through all the years, the font may have changed, GPM may have taken a sabbatical, colour may have arrived, but one thing that has remained constant is the address.  Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk NR35 1AH.  I can just picture it now...actually, with Google Maps and street view I can do just that...so here it is...

The Promised Land!

Steve Earl's Football Programmes, I may never have sent off for your enticing offer, but you have been a steady rock in my turbulent life for two and a half decades and for that, I salute you!

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