Boys From The Black Country

Gold Mark

Description

Mark Gold thought he had got writing about Wolves out of his system when he wrote Under A Wanderers Star-Forty Pain-filled Years of following the Wolves (Offwell Press, 2003). But no. Mark, who first saw Wolves on TV as a seven-year-old in 1960 when they won the FA Cup - their last trophy - has returned to the club to pen a history. But this is history with a difference. Mark chronicles the club's many triumphs, their players, managers and fans but he also muses on what sort of terrace chant Edward Elgar, one of their most famous supporters, might have composed for them today.

Sujets

• Midlands (Inglaterra)
• Midlands

Informations

• Publié par: Sportsbooks
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907524134
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title page

Part one – Have I got Old News for You

Chapter 1
Banging the leather for goal
Chapter 2
Hell might not be in West Bromwich, after all
Chapter 3
The Major years
Chapter 4
What did you do in the war, daddy?
Chapter 5
You’ve never had it so good

Part Two – Talking about my generations

Chapter 6
If you lived through the sixties, you won’t remember
Chapter 7
The swinging sixties
Chapter 8
Quite good but not a patch on the old days
Chapter 9
One day you’re up – the next day you’re down
Chapter 10
Wolverhampton Wanderers can seriously damage your health
Chapter 11
Stevie Bull’s a tatter
Chapter 12
Golden tit time
Chapter 13
Millennium man
Chapter 14
Twaddle from Hoddle
Chapter 15
Merlin the magician

Appendix
A serious bit about life, death and stuff
Acknowledgements
About the author
Copyright
Part One
Have I got old news for you
Chapter One
Banging the leather for goal
Perhaps the most significant figure among the founders of Wolves was only eleven or twelve years old at the time. Born in 1865, Jack Addenbrooke was part of the original committee who set up St Luke’s school team in Blakenhall and two years later in 1879, merged with Wanderers cricket club to form Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Despite his tender age, young Addenbrooke became the first secretary of the club at St Luke’s, though it is not recorded how he managed to land the role. Was he some pushy little kid who was given a position to stop him pestering the bigger boys and to give them an excuse for not always selecting him to play in their team? Or did some wise contemporary come to the conclusion that ‘the boy’s got fantastic administrative talent. He could even be a future manager of the club. Let’s give him the secretary role and see how he develops?’ Either way, Jack was to become a central figure in the development of the club for more-or-less half a century.
During the 1880s, Wolves were involved in various local competitions that don’t exactly send the pulse rate racing. OK, so they lifted the Handsworth Grove Cricket and Football Club Six-a-Side competition – their first silverware – in 1883. Big deal! A year later came the first ‘major’ trophy, when Wanderers beat Hadley in the final of the Wrekin Cup. In a closely fought match they emerged victorious by 15-0.
Trying to give some significance to these long-gone and frankly no longer very interesting events, football historians have argued that they indicate the emerging spirit and ambition that in time would make Wolves such a great club. But it seems more likely that they simply show that Hadley were pretty hopeless. Although winning any old cup must have been great for the players and supporters at the time, it’s hard to feel a great sense of pride about it now. Nonetheless, the following Saturday’s Football Focus did its best to give the Wrekin Cup result great import:

Ray Stubbs : So what do we make of this, Mark? A pretty emphatic win for Wolves, but was it just down to the poor quality of the opposition?
Mark Lawrenson : I don’t know about that, Ray. Bob Paisley always used to say that you can only beat the team that’s put in front of you. It’s important to instil that winning mentality and it seems to me like Wolves have got what it takes. If they maintain this kind of form, I can see them developing into one of the top teams in Europe in about seventy years time.
Ray Stubbs : That good eh, Mark? And what about Hadley, Alan?
Alan Hansen : Shocking defending.
Lee Dixon : It was shocking defending, I agree, Alan, and I’m sure Hadley will be disappointed with that. But they’ll also be looking to take positives out of the game. Next year I predict that Arbroath will defeat Bon Accord 36-0 in the Scottish Cup and that’ll remain the world record score until at least 2010. So I think Hadley will be able to take heart from this result and find something to build on.
Garth Crooks : Football’s football. If that weren’t the case, it wouldn’t be the game that it is.

Garth did actually utter those precise words, though not about Wolves in the 1880s. It is probably one of his more sensible comments!

In 1888 the Football League was formed. Wolves – along with Villa, Stoke and ‘that lot down the road’ were among the twelve original members. The rest were all from the North West or East Midlands. Sunderland – apparently quite a crack outfit – was excluded on the grounds that it would take the other teams too long to get there. Had Roy Keane been around as manager, he might well have blamed the decision on ‘the bread and dripping sandwich brigade at the FA’.

Wolves’ opening game in the League was a home match against the Villa on September 8 1888, and it saw them make history by scoring the first goal in the competition after roughly 30 minutes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of their players who scored it! Villa’s full-back Gershom Cox gets the credit for an own goal, after an attempted clearance ended up crossing the goal-line to give the home side the lead. The game ended 1-1.
The following year somebody had the bright idea of moving the Wolves home ground from opposite the Fighting Cocks pub on the Dudley Road (it was hardly a road at all by modern standards and the football ground had only one shed for shelter). The switch to Molineux was realised on the grounds that by combining the football stadium with the Asda superstore, supporters could enjoy the full supermarket shopping experience before going on to the game. The first official home match was a friendly against Aston Villa on 2 September 1889, in front of almost 3,900 spectators. The following Saturday, Wolves hosted their first league match at the new stadium against Notts County, with the crowd reaching 4,000. Wolves wore their original league kit of red and white striped shirts, ‘fading almost to pink’. (In their earliest years they had worn a blue and white striped outfit, very similar to you-know-who from The Hawthorns). Perhaps this explains why they seem to have bought more players from Sunderland than from any other club – certainly in the modern era. (Goodman, Craddock, Butler, Rae, Collins and Halford for a start).
When Sunderland were actually allowed into the Football League, their game against Wolves is recorded as the first instance of a shirt colour clash in the competition.
The First Cup Final – not quite cricket
Wolves made the FA Cup Final in the first year of the league. Although Villa was the most Southern team in the new competition, the final against Preston North End was played in London. Such bias towards putting on major events in the capital couldn’t happen nowadays, of course!
Preston were the Manchester United of the day, packed with foreign players on ridiculously high wages. Well, comparatively speaking anyway. Their boss, Major William Sudell, was also the manager of a local factory and found the players well-paid work in the town, as well as giving them a wage for playing. The foreign imports arrived from Scotland. Such wealth and bonuses ensured that Preston didn’t lose a game in winning the league and they conceded only one goal in reaching the final of the cup competition.
The Cup Final was not played at Wembley that year for the good reason that the stadium wasn’t built until the 1920s. So, in front of a crowd of 22,000, underdogs Wolves faced ‘the Invincibles’ – as Preston were known – at one of the centres of cricket, The Oval. You could buy a match programme for £21,850. Well, that isn’t what it cost then, but that’s what was paid at auction in 2006 for the only known surviving edition. It’s a world record fee for a football programme.

Surprisingly, radio commentary of The Oval Finalhas survived, featuring Henry Blofeld and expert summariser, Geoffrey Boycott. Boycott was unimpressed with Wolves’ highly rated defence, even though it included an international half-back line of Alfred Fletcher, Arthur Lowder and Harry Allen.

Henry Blofeld : How splendid! And here come Newcastle on the attack again.
Boycott : It’s Preston, Henry.
Blofeld : Oh dear, what did I say? Terribly sorry, old chap. Quite right, it’s Preston coming forward. Oh look over there, there’s the first tram of the day going down the Old Kent Road. It’s rather a lovely red tram, too. How exciting!
Boycott: Goal for Preston
Blofeld: Oh my word, did I miss something?
Boycott : My mother could have defended better than some of those Wolves players. When I scored all of my runs against some of the best bowlers in the world, I had to defend a lot better than that, I can tell you. It’s all very well scoring goals against Old Carthusians and Walsall Town Swifts (Wolves’ opponents in the first two rounds of the Cup competition that year), but it’s how you do against the best players in the world on a difficult pitch that counts. That was sloppy defending.
Blofeld: Oh my dear old thing, what a splendid fellow you are. Oh I say, there’s rather a marvellous pigeon over there on the far side of the pitch. Or is it a duck?
Boycott : Never mind pigeon or duck! I say it as I see it, Henry. When I scored my 22 Test centuries against top bowlers like Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee, I had to concentrate a lot harder than some of these modern players nowadays. I wouldn’t mind a game or two against some of these so-called Wolves internationals, I can tell you. They can’t get the ball into that corridor of uncertainty for toffee, Henry.
Blofeld: (interrupting): Oh goodness me, there goes a shot by one of the Wolves players. Is it Fletcher? Oh no, I think it’s Allen. I must say it absolutely flashed over the boundary, wide of the goal. He hit that one like a kicking horse, he really did. This really is the most tremendous fun.
Boycott : It may be fun for you, Henry. But it wasn’t much fun opening the batting against Malcolm Marshall when I made all my runs for England, I can tell you.
Blofeld: Oh my word, her