The Comeback To End All Comebacks
Europe’s win in the Ryder Cup is being celebrated as one of the great comebacks.
It is a great comeback, but in many ways it pales into insignificance compared to that amazing, cold and wet Saturday afternoon on the 21st December 1957, when Charlton Athletic beat Huddersfield Town seven-six at the Valley after being five-one down, with only ten men. It must be one of the few Second Division matches of the era to have its own Wikipedia page.
Reading that Wikipedia page, you find that Huddersfield were managed by Bill Shankly and he had rested a young Denis Law. Shankly later said about the match.
one of the most amazing games I have ever seen
And he’d seen a few matches!
Another Coloured Police Horse
South Yorkshire Police gave the horses an exercise, whilst Town were in Barnsley.
As you can see, one is a very striking coloured horse, which the officer told me proudly was one of a matched pair. It certainly proves the odd Suffolk phrase.
A bad horse is always a bad colour, but a good horse is always a good one.
Usually, that was said in respect to chesnut mares, but then in Suffolk, chesnuts are always liked because of the Suffolk horse, which only come in that colour.
Andy Murray’s Balls
They’ve just announced that the tennis balls Andy Murray used at the Olympics will be auctioned along with lots more Olympic memorabilia. The Sun has the story here, together with a beach volleyball picture. The reason for the picture is that a rake used in the women’s final sold for £261.
Is This London’s Ugliest Tube Station?
I went to West Ham station today and took a few pictures.
It really is truly awful, unless you like piles of bricks. It isn’t correctly named either, as it’s nowhere near the Boleyn Ground and I suspect on match days, staff are for ever rounding up lost away fans. Crystal Palace station is another badly named one, as that is nowhere near Selhurst Park.
Marshgate Lane Revealed
This is the first time, I’ve been on Pudding Mill Lane station and could get a reasonably clear view of where Marshgate Lane goes under the Greenway and the Northern Outfall Sewer into the Olympic Park.
Marsh Gate Lane Revealed
As I said here, it was a complicated and expensive job. Also,because of European Union rules, it had to be open to all EU companies. It was a fixed price contract and it was won by the Germans. Rumours abound that Marshgate Lane lived up to its name and they didn’t make the profit they expected.
Sporting Trophy Of The Week
The Tour of Britain cycle race started this week in Ipswich. The first stage took them from the county town of Suffolk to Norwich.
Kristian House was listed as the winner of the King of the Mountains for the stage!
When Was It Known Hillsborough Had No Safety Certificate?
It has been said many times in the last day or so, that Hillsborough had no safety certificate, at the time of the disaster on April 15th, 1989.
Perhaps, my memory has gone, but although I can remember the disaster, I can’t associate it with what I was doing at the time. I wouldn’t have been at football at Ipswich, as at that time I didn’t go. I can remember where I was when I heard about Lockerbie a few months earlier.
So for how long has it been known that Hillsborough did not have a valid safety certificate at the time of the disaster?
Surely to knowingly book the stadium without a valid safety certificate, is akin to flying a Boeing 747, without a valid certificate of airworthiness.
Or was that something that always happened in those days?
In trying to get more answers to my question, I came across this page on the web site of the Football Industry Group at Liverpool University. It is something everybody should read. This is one of the page’s conclusions.
The disaster was basically caused by the failure of South Yorkshire Police to control a large
crowd of Liverpool fans outside the Leppings Lane End, and the poor state of the ground,
but it was also clear that football’s total failure to learn from the numerous disasters that had
afflicted it during the twentieth century, and a police force conditioned to view supporters as
potential hooligans and so always expecting violence, contributed significantly to the 96 deaths
and many hundreds of injuries.
I agree very much about learning from the past. In the 1960s, I was in a few crushes at White Hart Lane and Highbury, and how they avoided a Hillsborough-type disaster in some matches, was more down to luck than any planning.
The page also says this about the safety certificate and emergency plans.
Sheffield Wednesday had redeveloped parts of the ground without obtaining
a new safety certificate, or telling the emergency services: the result was that the safety certificate was
outdated and useless, and that plans Sheffield Wednesday had developed with the local emergency
services could not be put into practice, as the layout of the ground had changed.
That to me is inadequate, to say the very least. An emergency plan like that, only works without an emergency.
The Anonymous Widower 