As a football mad
kid, one of the highlights of my week was collecting our comics from Hamer's,
the newsagent at the top of our street. Reserved and kept behind the counter
would be Look-In! for my sister and Shoot! for me. When a new football title, Match, was published in 1979 I had that too
but Shoot! was the main event. So much
so that when we moved to Spain for a year my Nana would post it out to me along with jokes she'd copy down from Tony Blackburn's radio show. It
was about two weeks out of date - the magazine, not Blackburn's jokes , they were waaaaay out of the date already -by the time it arrived, but that was how I kept
in touch with the scores and what was happening back in England. News traveled
slowly in the late 70s.
One thing that made Shoot! stand out was their famous League
Ladders. At the start of each season they'd giveaway a piece of folded card
with a slot for each position of all the English and Scottish divisions and
fiddly little cut-out tabs for every club. With the Sunday Mirror in front of me I'd lie on the floor and
painstakingly arrange all clubs in their current league position so, at a
glance, I could tell you throughout the week - should anyone care to ask, and
they never did - that Sunderland were sixth in the second division and Torquay were 15th in the fourth. I didn't support one specific team for many years; I just loved football, full stop.
Last week I
bought a few old copies - three for a quid - down the market. From 1975 and
1976 they are a few years earlier than when I started getting it but they're exactly as
recall them and the features the same. There are big-name columnists like
Liverpool's Kevin Keegan and QPR's Gerry Francis who weren't scared to offer an
opinion. Francis expresses his pride in being named England captain aged 23,
"the youngest international skipper in Europe" and then takes a
journalist to task for inaccurate reporting, "I am afraid Mr James has
unjustly wronged me and devalued the Daily Mail
in my eyes". Like Mr Francis's mullet, some things never change.
You Are The Ref was
another popular feature. "Before a match you see a player inserting contact
lenses into his eyes. Do you (a) take no action or (b) refuse to allow him to
play?" Then there was the Focus On... questionnaire in which players
revealed with predictable regularity their favourite food as steak and chips
and their favourite singer Olivia Newton-John.
One player who
stands out in the issues I bought is Laurie Cunningham. I loved Laurie
when he played alongside Cyrille Regis for West Bromwich Albion; such exciting players. Black players
weren't a common sight so always seemed that little bit cooler to me, especially with flair like Cunningham. WBA had
three in 1978: Cunningham, Regis and Brendon Batson, which allowed manager Ron Atkinson
to name them the Three Degrees without anyone batting an eye. Cunningham would
go on to play, with great acclaim, for Real Madrid - including a European
Cup Final but in 1976 he was still plying his trade in the second division for
Leyton Orient. In his Focus feature from the 9th October 1976 issue Laurie
doesn't come across as the archetypal mid-70s footballer. His favourite singers
are Isaac Hayes and Bob Marley and I get the impression his heart was somewhere
else. If he wasn't a footballer he thought he'd be a professional dancer and the story goes he would pay his fines for being late for training by winning dance competitions.
He was certainly his
own man. Look at these answers. Favourite Player: Nobody. Favourite Other Team:
None. Most Difficult Opponent: Nobody. Personal Ambition: None. In fairness
Laurie did have an ambition of playing for England, something no black man had done, which he would achieve six times.
Tragically Laurie Cunningham died in a car crash, aged 33, in 1989.
