When I was a boy in the 1970’s growing up in the Hampshire countryside, me and mate Dean Warwick were the only Pompey fans at our school.
However we were quite evangelistically minded and soon we had converted a little posse. This led to some great big light-hearted bundles with the Scummers at the school.
At this time in Pompey’s history we had a moron like chairman called John Deacon, and we were so.. so.. so skint that the Scummers used to throw penny’s to us across the street. Sadly our only retort of any worth was “We`ve got a better ground than the Dell” or “Our support is bigger than yours” even the two seasons we had together in the old second division prior to this they beat us in every game.
When we bought one of their players it was usually a crappy old cast off rather than an up and coming talent – Macca excepted, and yes I know that was much, much later – what young talent we did have soon got sold off, funnily enough one got sold to Spurs – Graham Roberts.
We were bottom of our league and going further and further down to eventually being bottom of the old fourth division, whilst those lot up the road went form strength to strength an odd Wembley trip or two. All with a wiley older manager who used a fantastic combination of youth and older experienced top notch pro’s at the end of their careers, who had been there, done it and swapped the proverbial shirt. That Manager then enthused these old Pro’s and brought out some great performances at the twilight of their careers. This led to second place in the top Division, European football and a league cup final – and a crappy feature film a bit like “Goal” starring the guy who played Lovejoy. (Love me more like.)
Its funny how history imitates itself and things that go around often come around.
It was sad to hear that Scumpton nearly went into administration recently – any one got any penny’s!
Written by plymouth graham.
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