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Spot on Nick, not long after the tragic event Everton played Liverpool at Goodson Park. Red & Blue stood side by side,as you rightly say, just sympathy, no rivalry.
At the time I was managing a programme dealership that had the Wembley contract, we used to distribute League & FA Cup Final programmes all over the world by mail order plus programmes for England games. We also used to distribute Div 1 match day programmes to ex-pats and collectors worldwide.
Obviously we had a pre-order of the Hillsborough programme that was in transit from the printer, JW Northend. The programmes arrived mid-morning on the Monday. Nobody wanted to touch them. I got into the office at 8.30 and both the main and back up answer machines were full - so that’s one hour in total of taped messages from collectors desperate to know if we were getting the programmes and if so how much were we going to charge and how many could they have! From 9.00am onwards we were literally bombarded with calls, I found that quite hard to stomach. We left the phones off the hook all day Monday from about 10.00am onwards.
We had an arrangement prior to the event with Sheffield Wednesday to take any surplus programmes afterwards. One call I did take on our back office line for the trade was from Graham Mackrell who was the club secretary at SW at the time. He was in bits as you could well imagine. If I thought we had it bad over the programmes, he had it ten times worse. He said we have about 3,000 left over, I know we have an arrangement, but these people, have they no respect? He said his gut reaction was to destroy them, I didn’t protest, so they went in a skip and had a fire hose added and were turned to pulp.
We never put our pre-order up for sale, however, the owner of the business did open one box to look at a copy of the programme months later. All I heard from his office a few moments later was OH MY GOD! - NO WAY. I went in to the office to see if he was OK , he was sat at his desk as if he’d seen a ghost. You could say he’d seen 96. For cup semi finals when they were hosted by neutral clubs it was custom & practise for the host club to write a welcome to both clubs which is on the inside of the front cover and the adjacent page as you open the programme. As you opened the programme for that game the inside cover was a full page picture of the Leppings Lane end terrace. It literally made your blood run cold. We must have both sat there in total silence for 5 minutes or more, there just weren’t words.
That’s my somewhat unique memory of that weekend. Those so desperate to obtain a programme were I am sure a minority of people and I doubt many, if any, of them were true football fans who as you say Nick behaved with respect and sympathy.
Think that’s a bit harsh Sir, I certainly don’t hate the club but I am beginning to hate what SR are doing to it on the pitch. They are making key error after key error. Take managerial appointments & dismissals for example, we keep saying that they need to get the next one right when appointing them and they should have acted sooner when dismissing them but the majority of their decisions have been pants. Then there’s recruitment - don’t get me started…
I think a lot of us are ground down not just by this season but by what has been done to our club by owners that keep making major mistake after major mistake. Personally, that does not mean I hate the club and I don’t feel that comes across from what I have posted so far on this thread. When you have a neighbour who supports Brentford say have you got the owners to apply to go on Pointless yet? it is embarrassing. I think the thing is we can all see what is happening to our beloved club and can also see that with better management it would not need to be the way it is and we would not be in the position that we now find ourselves in.
TBH, I have very little faith in SR getting next season right, I try to stay positive but my confidence in our current owners is shot to pieces and I can’t see much light at the end of the tunnel. I sincerely hope and pray that I am wrong and that we have a great season under the right manager with some superb summer signings.
You were not the only one, I remember my Uncle was convinced we were safe even though he’d seen an article in the paper a month before the end of the season about the change to 3 up / 3 down. The season finished on April 27th but unfortunately the article he saw in the paper was published on April 1st and he wrongly assumed it was an April Fool joke on the part of the newspaper. On the last day of the season, Man U had lost 1-0 to City (the famous Law back heel) which left them on 32 pts from 41 games and us on 36 pts from 42. With only 2 pts for a win and United still to play Stoke away on the Monday he thought we were safe. He’s no longer with us, but he said he never forgot the feeling of utter devastation when he realised that article on April 1st wasn’t a prank and we were relegated.
Without checking this out properly I seem to remember that Northampton Town went all the way from D4 > D1 > D4 between seasons 1960/61 & 1969/70. That was the equivalent of the PL > L2 in five seasons but they didn’t drop out into the National League. So, top flight to basement in 5 seasons is the fastest decline I know of but there might be a better example that I am not aware of…
Here’s another unwanted record to add to the list - when Carlisle United replaced us in the top flight for the 1974/75 season we became the first team in top flight history to be relegated after finishing 3rd from bottom because the rule had been changed for the 1973/74 season from 2 Up / 2 Down to 3 Up / 3 Down.
Bradford 2-0 up and down to 10 men in the first 15 mins Swindon back in the game at 3-3 just after the hour mark Bradford go 4-3 up then Swindon make it 4-4 in the 90th minute but it’s not finished yet - in the 95th minute Swindon are gifted the win with Bradford’s second OG of the game! Tranmere definately take the gold medals for the crowd scenes but the way a few of the Swindon players thank Bradford’s 2nd OG scorer made me smile
Would not be surprised Rohl is looking elsewhere, especially if RB Leipzig are interested - added to the fact SR are running the club and I would think Rohl has had his fill of basket case owners for the time being!
Curbishley? Out for too long and nah anyway…
Cooper? Yep, I’d be happy with that - or…
If Chelsea fail to gain that 5th CL space then I suspect Uncle Todd ‘moneybags’ Boehly will find it unacceptable. If so, we could do a lot worse than get Maresca in, proven ability to get a team promoted and able to work at PL level. The expectation level here would be far less and if Spors turns out to be half decent we would surely be in a far better position to at least give it a proper go if we did get back up despite SR still running the club.
I think one of the bigger problems is almost zero accountability. This comes right from the top, if you get a pr1ck like the one yesterday and you call him a pr1ck in a post match interview then the FA fine YOU instead of doing anything about the problem. Referees are assessed by ex-Refs - a strange breed at the best of times, and it smacks of the old boys network as they rarely throw ‘one of their own’ under the bus no matter how much they deserve to be. Nothing will change and nothing will improve whilst the current status quo is upheld and maintained. It needs a root and branch overhaul of the current system for anything to improve as there is no real accountability under the current system so refs like the prat we had yesterday can keep putting in sh1t performances and keep getting away with it without sanction.
And also a hotel they already owned that they sold to themselves for a similar sum of money. Just taking the p1ss out of the financial regulations, the PL and the rest of us.
The loan to Maxim Demin, Bournemouth's former chairman, was allowed to be written off as debt in the 2022-23 season. The remaining liability of £71.4 million was fully discharged after Turquoise Bidco bought the club, which then provided a £89.8 million shareholder loan to repay A. FC. B. Enterprises, according to The New York Times. This write-off was recorded as an exceptional gain in Bournemouth's accounts.
Agreed, just for once, can SR / Spors just stop trying to re-invent the wheel and just find a wheel that fits the promotion bandwagon. Wish list thinking has got us nowhere since SR arrived and never will.
Agreed, when Beattie got his second of the game not long before HT it really started - sacked in the morning, you're getting sacked in the morning just echoed around an otherwise silent WHL and when Kevin Phillips made it 3-0 on the hour it got even louder. Dubious goals panel had Kev's effort off him afterwards and said OG but at the time it didn't matter it was just the sweetest feeling. From memory, the win put us 4th and Spurs either 17th or just in the bottom 3 - how times have changed for us...
That’s got to be another record surely? Perhaps Spurs getting revenge for Saints getting Hoddle the sack as their manager after a 3-1 win at White Hart Lane back in the day. Considering the way Hoddle & Levy behaved when Hoddle was poached from us by Spurs there seemed to be some kind of poetic justice about Saints relieving him of the job he went behind our backs to obtain. But yes, I agree, that has to be some kind of strange record regarding Martin & Jurić.
With half a dozen others worth more than a dishonourable mention.
Although Branfoot didn’t get us relegated, despite his best efforts, he was the moron who actually dropped Matt Le Tiss for several games. The quality of MLT’s two goals v Newcastle upon his reinstatement into the team showed just what an utter prat Branfoot really was.
As for Redkrapp, never wanted to be here, referred to the team in post match interviews as ‘they’ not ‘we’ - so, they had a slow start, not we had a slow start. Only took the job to p1ss off the Caravan Utilising Nomadic Traveller (great acronym!) East European owner of the Sk8’s after they’d had a ‘toys out of the pram’ spat about something or the other…
Today should be Groundhog Day Ground Zero for SFC, the default day of the year it always resets back to for our poor club under its current ownership because the SR Directors are not just fools on April 1st but are still fools for the other 364 days of the year!
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