just LOL if you wasted time on football scores on teletext, when the rest of us were playing bamboozle and booking £100 all inclusive holidays to ibiza.
That game in 2010 was truly remarkable. Inexplicably live on BBC Two for reasons I will never understand, so I was able to watch it with my uni friends who were curious as to my fascination in a mediocre football team. They were top and unbeaten and yet we utterly annihilated them, with 3-1 massively flattering the Rs. I've rarely seen us batter a team like that, it should have been at least 6-1 (I hate the overuse of that phrase but in this case it's genuinely true). Even their consolation goal was scored by a Watford legend who hated himself for scoring it. Nothing about that match made sense, but it was highly enjoyable. We will lose this one though. Prediction QPR 1-0 Watford Someone I've never heard of (23); Deeney (sent off 87, missed pen 90+1)
In Manchester in the seventies you could buy a 'Sporting Pink' edition of the Manc Evening News, barely an hour after the end of the match. It had all the scores!. In the sixties at Vicarage Road a couple of ball-boys would troop round the greyhound track and hang numbers up against letters of the alphabet. You had to buy a program to know which letter stood for which match. The numbers were the half-time scores. Presumably they got the scores off the BBC radio. Until video became available for public use virtually all our matches were not recorded on anything at all. If you weren't there to see it then you were never going to see it - ever. I remember a QPR visit to Vic Rd in the sixties where they took the lead and then we beat them 6 - 1. Johnny Fairbrother starred, I think. But you'll have to take my word for it or read it in a book.
Was it as late as 1970? I think the best 3rd division (as was) team I ever saw was QPR's. We were second, I think, and they were top. We visited them just after Christmas. Welbourne got our consolation goal 90 seconds from the end, by which time they were cruising at 4 - 0. I don't think we really recovered from that and didn't get promoted.
Nothing wrong with Teletext Holidays. Bamboozled was a pain to get to work, especially since the colourful teletext buttons on a remote were some of the most unresponsive of all of them. Loved the daily quiz aspect of it though.
I was at Salford University in the mid-90s and I used to pick up one of these on the way home in Manchester after various northern away days. It was the only way of getting the other scores apart from asking people, until the Sunday papers came out the next day. What was annoying was that when a game had a lot of injury time, it would miss the cut off (which must have been about 5pm) and the score would have the caveat that the game hadn't actually finished when they went to press.
That was a great day and it was packed in our end. It was particularly nice to win as the Newsagents I used to go in on the way to work was in Woodford Road and was run by Tony Sherriff who was a QPR season ticket holder so was able to give him a bit of stick.
I got frog marched out of the ground in 1982 for singing "Cheat" at the ref who had just disallowed a perfectly good goal that would have sent us up. The copper was about 60 and still a PC so clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer...I managed to stop him on the concourse and explain I was shouting cheat and had no idea what swear word he thought I was saying...You could see the cogs whirring in his head and eventually he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He then frog marched me all the way back to my mates on the terrace.
I loved ceefax. Would sit in my shellsuit and just watch the scores update for 90 mins. Seems strange behaviour thinking back I’d agree.
I was at Man Uni 88-91 and Howard Kendall was manager of Citeh. He complained that the Manc Evening News had a vendetta against him and actively got him the sack. The response from the newspaper was " Well Howard we have to print the results "
And an 80% small pitch. Spectators up close and personal to players. Made for a great atmosphere Just like the one West Ham are trying to emulate at the London Stadium
It was a real drag at times looking up scores on Ceefax/Teletext. If there was a full programme of matches and there were lots of goals, it could take you up to two minutes to find out the score, and these were the days before smartphones when you could look it up instantly. Other than that there was the Internet (if you had a computer with one - I didn't have Internet at home until early 2002) and my computer wasn't turned on all the time, text alerts which were expensive, or the radio on which it could take many minutes to find out the score if we weren't in the big league. Ceefax also had this annoying tendency to spoil results before you had a chance to key in the page and find them - example being, when we were two goals up against Charlton in 2006/07 in a game which was really last chance saloon and then later on, I turn on Ceefax to see one of the headlines being about Alan Pardew praising Charlton's fightback (pretty much impossible to miss unless you covered your eyes while keying in the page and waiting thirty seconds for it to open!). Ironically the final result, a 2-2 draw, put us above our relegation rivals West Ham, but we knew we were doomed while West Ham started their incredible escape.
Provider of my favourite ever football headline: "Happy Hornets Whack Wombles". We'd beaten Wimbledon 4 - 2.
It's good but it's not 'Super Caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious' Our very own Mr. Barnes was Celtic manager at the time, back in 2000.
Yes although they were certainly a cut above us in the 70’s when they finished runners up in the top league, we have also had our fair share of wins over them with both teams taking it in turns and being “ much better “ and more successful many times we have played them, let’s hope Saturday is a case in point!
Less known is the original version of this from the 60s, which referred to Liverpool and England player Ian Callaghan: 'Super Calli Scores a Hat Trick, QPR Atrocious.'
Interesting. I’ve just done a bit of research on this and you’re right: Callaghan’s only ever hat-trick was against Hull in a League Cup replay on the afternoon of Tuesday 4th December 1973. QPR didn’t play that day so couldn’t have been linked in the same headline, which is attributed to the Liverpool Echo anyway. The headline is sometimes referred to as “Super Calli goes ballistic...” (no hat-trick) so it could refer to any Liverpool v QPR game. There was only one season in the 60s when they were in the same division but several in the 70s and Callaghan played in most of, if not all, the games. However he didn’t score in them and none of them were hammerings for QPR, the biggest score being 3-1. So maybe he put in a brilliant performance without scoring and QPR were only labelled “atrocious” to fit the headline. Or maybe the whole thing is an urban myth which has spread around the internet and the writer of the ICT/Celtic headline should get more credit.
I was just interested as an urban myth too - but Google is very handy for this kind of stuff ! Am having to self-isolate so have a bit of time on my hands !
I hope no-one gets into a footrace with our centre backs; they're going to be even slower than usual after all the jet-setting
............Foster Ngakia TE Kabasele Kiko .......Capoue Garner Sarr ......Pedro .....Sema .............Deeney Subs to bring on: Gray for Deeney, Chalobah for Garner, Quino for Pedro, Sierralta for TE, Perica for Foster. 8-0 to the hornets.
There is not much difference for sitting with Your computer and looking for a possible goal from shoutbox, is there? Actually, over here in Finland, local Teletext did a wonderful cultural thing the other weekend. They showed every result and goalscorer of the Fa cup games. During a times when everything is Premiersip and internet related, it was quite remarkable really!
I used to deliver the Echo around Warners End in Hemel in the early 70's after school, very happy days mate.
This is their biggest game of the season, at home to a team they’ve been in the shadow of for a long time now, and receiving a pat on the head during a cup tie a few years ago. Some of their players will never play against bigger names. Hope the players know how much of a cup final this is for their players and fans.
Yes it'll be a massive day for their players alright. I expect there'll be a few of them chasing after our lads at the end, trying to beg for their shirts etc.
That was also the game when they came up with this little montage for half time: Edit - this version reissued when GT died,
Likewise in Leavesden. Some of the stuff I saw on the Haines Way development was a real shock for a privileged WBGS lad.
I think I remember him. Didn't he have things dangling off his sombrero as well? Might have been the game where they filmed a Weetabix advert at half time...
