So here it is, Merry Christmas...

  

Notts County 0 Forest 1

Division Two, Meadow Lane, Saturday 26^th December 1973, 32,310

 

Three divisions had separated Forest and County at the start of the decade, but by the time the oldest league derby in football was played for the first time since 1957 the clubs, quite literally, could not have been closer. Our relegation in 1972 had coincided with the first of their two promotions in three seasons. They were now 5^th in the table, with us 6^th after beating Bolton the previous Saturday, our first win - at the fourth attempt - under new manager Allan Brown.

 

Back in 1957, more than 32,000 had turned up at the City Ground for the final game of the Division Two season, four days after we had clinched promotion with a 4-0 win at Sheffield United. We had clearly taken our foot off the accelerator, as we somehow contrived to lose 4-2 to a County team that finished 20^th. Fifteen years on and a similar number (double County’s previous highest crowd of the season to date) were attracted by Boxing Day football and the resumption of the battle for local bragging rights. We were among them; Dad would have been to Meadow Lane many a time, but for Robin and me it was our first ever away game, though it was actually a shorter trip than a home game.

 

With the closest professional grounds in England separated by not much more than the width of the Trent and most of the city lying north of the river, Meadow Lane was the nearer of the grounds for us and many other Reds fans. With a large crowd expected we no doubt allowed a bit more time than usual for Dad to get one of his usual parking spots either side of the station on Queen’s Road or Station Street, but it was only once we parked that things felt any different from a home game. Instead of the usual walk to Trent Bridge and the City Ground, we had the shortest of strolls onto London Road and across the canal to the ground. And instead of queuing to buy a programme from our usual seller at the Forest end of the bridge, we had to find one of his counterparts outside Meadow Lane, the official programme being an essential part of the matchday experience for far more supporters than it is in the digital age.

 

Robin and I would have been eager to compare our familiar “Forest Review” with the hitherto unknown “The Magpies” (the name of County’s programme not yet having dropped the ”s”). Doing so now reveals that County fans got 24 pages for their 7p, while we only got 16 for our 6p. However, their pages were smaller, had much more advertising and a lot more white space. Apart from the pen pictures of our players and two pages looking back to that 1956-57 season and reviewing the post-war meetings of the teams, there was very little to detain the reader.  In contrast, our sixteen pages for the return game at the start of March crammed in, amongst other things, four pages on County, a feature on a meeting of the teams in 1919, a full-page reproduction of the line-ups in the programme for a derby in 1923, and a page each devoted to recent match action and the reminiscences of manager Brown. By then, though, Forest had made the unpopular decision to raise the price of the “Forest Review” (unusually in the course of a season) to match County’s 7p. 1973-74 was the season of the energy crisis and three-day week and the resultant inflation had increased the cost of producing the programme. During the winter months some games kicked off early to avoid the need for floodlights and thus save valuable electricity, but over the holiday period clubs were allowed to use them and so the Boxing Day match kept the usual 3pm start.

 

We took our places on the terrace in front of the Main Stand, modest and somewhat outdated compared to its namesake across the Trent. Opposite us, behind an uncovered terrace, was the County Road stand, its gable proudly proclaiming the year (1862) of foundation of what was until 2019 the world’s oldest professional league club. To our right was the small Meadow Lane stand, which had been moved across the river from Trent Bridge cricket ground. Finally, to our left - packed with Reds fans - was the Spion Kop, again smaller than its Forest equivalent, the Bridgford End, but with a similar scoreboard at the back waiting for the half-time scores to appear against the letters allocated to the day’s fixtures in the programme.

 

As first away matches go, it was not exactly an intimidating experience, as Forest fans probably made up at least half of the crowd. There was no obvious segregation on the terraces, there being no reason to expect any crowd trouble. As with any other city rivalry, most fans would have had family members, friends and school or work colleagues in the opposite camp. Indeed, the days were not so long gone since many fans of either of the city’s teams would happily watch whichever was at home (and, moreover, could afford to do so). County were probably still Forest’s main local rivals in those days, as the nascent East Midlands rivalry with Derby County had faded somewhat in 1972 with our relegation.

 

Although the atmosphere was lively and expectant, it was different from what I was used to at Forest. Over the river the singing in the Trent End would be almost non-stop and feature a wide variety of chants. I wasn’t always able to distinguish the words, but perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing, given my age and the Trent End’s reputation for boisterousness and worse. But there didn’t appear to be an obvious singing area at Meadow Lane, nor did the Magpies’ fans seem to have any chants of their own. All I can recall is a repeated “Cahnteh! Cahnteh! Cahnteh!”, which didn’t seem to start in any particular part of the ground. This could be quite loud if enough people joined in, but was likely to be met with an equally voluble “Forest! Forest! Forest!” each time it was aired. A few short years later such chanting of a team’s name would be drowned out by repeated chants of “Shit! Shit! Shit!” from the rival fans, but these were simpler times.

 

With a large crowd packed into a smaller ground than Forest’s, we found ourselves unable to see much of the play, so either at dad’s suggestion or our own initiative, Robin and I picked our way down to the very front of the terrace. On the other side of the wall in front of us was an elderly County fan in a wheelchair. He was well wrapped up against the December chill and, hunched in his chair, his squat figure reminded us of one of the characters in Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, a popular children’s TV programme in the early 70s. Just as the Potty characters’ faces were usually hidden behind a shock of hair, elaborate hats or glasses, all we could see looking down on our new companion’s head was a flat cap, which pivoted from side to side as the action flowed from end to end.

 

Now we at least had a reasonable view when the action was in front of us, though we still couldn’t see much of our side of the pitch at the Spion Kop end. On several occasions it was only the roar of encouragement from the Reds’ fans that told us Forest were breaking down the right, usually through Duncan McKenzie, our main goal threat and my second childhood  Forest hero (after Ian Storey-Moore), who was enjoying the best season of his career,  which he would finish with 26 League goals to his name.

 

As is often the way with such eagerly-anticipated matches, the game was less memorable than the occasion. On 37 minutes, one of those Forest breaks led to us being awarded a penalty, which George Lyall put away for what turned out to be the only goal of the match. As I recall, in a game of few clear chances we seldom looked much like adding to it, but we were able to keep out everything the more physical County side threw at us, despite (or perhaps because of?) playing veteran right-back Peter Hindley in the middle of defence.

 

I wasn’t too young to understand that the result is everything on these occasions. It didn’t need to have been a sparkling performance or an enthralling match. The main thing was that we had won, a belated Christmas present which meant I could look the County fans in the eye when we went back to school after the holiday period. We would go on to finish 7^th, never seriously threatening the promotion places, while County would end up three places behind us. Thus we just about retained our status as the city’s top team, but County would finish above us in both the next two seasons – the only occasions this has happened in my lifetime to date.

 

Forest: Barron, O’Kane, Winfield, Hindley, Cottam, Richardson, McKenzie, Lyall, Martin, O’Neill, Bowyer

 

County: Brown, Brindley, Worthington, Masson, Needham, McVay, Nixon (Collier), Randall, Bradd, Probert, Mann

A lucky point?

 

 

 

Forest 2 Swindon Town 2

Division Two, City Ground, Saturday 21^st October 1972, 8,683

 

It would be fair to say that neither Forest nor the Nottingham public had responded well to the return of Division Two football to the city for the first time in fifteen years. We started the season with two goalless draws and three narrow victories, but this was something of a false dawn and we had only won once since then. Disappointingly, crowds for League games had already dipped below 10,000 on four occasions, with the club pouring oil on the flames of the sale of Ian Storey-Moore and relegation by taking the unusual step of increasing the price of ground admission (to 40p) for a lower grade of football.

 

These days it would also be unusual for a club to retain the services of a manager after an ignominious relegation, but the turnover in the hot seat was less frantic in the 1970s and, despite the fans’ increasingly hostile criticism of Matt Gillies and the committee who were persevering with him, it was only in the week leading up to this game that Gillies finally offered his resignation. He was never to work in football again.

 

Swindon were managed by former Hearts, Tottenham and Derby hard man Dave Mackay, who had joined as player-manager the previous year, but had since hung up his boots. The Robins had their own equivalent of Storey-Moore in Don Rogers, another goalscoring left-winger with a fearsome shot, though he was currently the subject of strong interest from Crystal Palace, which would soon lead to his moving to Selhurst Park.

 

Our own attacking options reflected our inconsistency and perhaps betrayed a certain lack of confidence. In the days when shirt numbers still meant something, the wingers’ shirts (7 and 11) were worn by midfielder George Lyall and young striker Alan Buckley. Meanwhile, a certain John Robertson wore the number eight shirt, in those days associated with the inside-right position, his conversion into a world-class left-winger being some way off at this stage. With centre-forward Neil Martin banished to the reserves for the entire season to date, ‘Sammy’ Chapman had recently been re-deployed in the striking role in which he had broken into the first team almost a decade earlier. And, it has to be said, from which he had been converted to a centre-back once it was decided he might prove more adept at stopping goals than scoring them.

 

With us breaking even in mid-table but struggling for goals and Swindon several places below us with only three wins from fourteen games, this didn’t have the makings of a memorable encounter, but in its way that is just what it would become, for me at least. As with the Wolves game that had all but sealed our relegation five months earlier, I can remember almost nothing of the match itself, so I am indebted to the excellent Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk and, in particular, their reproduction of the match report from the Football Pink, for much of what follows.

 

The Pink’s coverage of the game is a prime example of the football editions of local newspapers that have gradually become extinct this century, such as our own much-missed Football Post. It ticks all the boxes:

•  an attitude that straddles the border between local perspective and local bias;
•  a lack of awareness about the opposition players and their positions;
• descriptions of goals picked out in bold…
• …and goalscorers’ NAMES in capitals;
• enthusiastic sub-editing leading to inconsistencies and non-sequiturs;
• a diminishing level of detail as the match nears its end and the print deadline approaches.

 

Taking all that into account, it seems as though it was a fairly even game, but in the journalist’s eyes Forest lacked urgency up front and composure at the back. Jim Barron was forced into a number of saves, most of them coming in brief flurries of goalmouth activity in each half, with the highlight apparently a full-length dive to turn Peter Noble’s shot past the post. Our best effort of the early exchanges seems to have been a shot that went just wide from midfielder Paul Richardson, described for no readily apparent reason other than the number ten on his back as a “forward”. Elsewhere the same inflexible scrutiny of the Forest line-up in the programme sees Lyall and Buckley unquestioningly described as “wingers”.

 

The only goal of the first half came on 33 minutes, when right winger Steve Peplow (who would play three games for us on loan within a year) punished our defensive slackness to blast the ball past Barron. Within a minute, full-back-turned-midfielder Doug Fraser saw his shot from 15 yards hit the bar and go behind.

 

Predictably, the pattern of the second half was for Forest to push forward more in search of the equaliser, which left us vulnerable to Swindon’s counters. Martin O’Neill came on in place of Richardson with 25 minutes left – time enough, as it turned out, for him to have a decisive impact on the game. Swindon resisted the increasing pressure, though they were helped by our wayward finishing, one of the better efforts again coming from Fraser, who fired just wide, as Lyall had done early in the half. When Downsborough was finally properly tested he dived full-length to save Robertson’s shot from just inside the box.

 

It’s clear that the game had become stretched and for all Forest’s pressure the action was moving quickly from one end to the other. Indeed, the anonymous writer notes that “both teams were playing attacking football”, but almost immediately states that Swindon were “well on top”. But if that wasn’t necessarily the case they certainly were after 83 minutes, when centre-forward Ray Treacy beat two defenders to double the visitors’ lead.

 

Finally we get to the one minute of the match that made it stick in my memory long after the other 89 had faded, where I can add a detail which was either missed by the visiting reporter or culled by his sub-editor. Unsurprisingly, a sizeable minority of the crowd had headed for the exits after the second goal, but four minutes later Robertson scored his first senior goal for the Reds, netting from close range after a goalmouth scramble. Those who had left the ground would have heard the cheer, albeit a relatively muted one at what most people would have seen as nothing more than a late consolation goal. Maybe the odd one or two would have glanced back to see if the final moments would be worth returning for.

 

But within thirty seconds we were level, courtesy of what is reported merely as “a goal from O’Neill”, thanks to the exigencies of the Wiltshire press. At this second and more raucous cheer, dozens of Reds fans hurried back into the ground from the corner between the Main Stand and the Trent End, where a wide gate was always opened a few minutes before the end to allow fans safe egress onto Trentside. They congregated a respectful distance back from the corner flag in the hope that our momentum would see us grab a highly unlikely winner. That proved too much to hope for, but what had clearly been a stuttering, frustrating performance would now be remembered as a spirited comeback.

 

Football fans have a habit of judging whole games on the second half alone. An attacking display in the first half is soon forgotten if the momentum is lost in the second, especially if the result is a defeat or a disappointing draw. But if a lacklustre first half performance is followed by a distinct improvement after the break, the whole game is recalled as a much better spectacle and/or performance than an objective assessment of the ninety minutes might suggest. Here was a prime example, in this case of a single minute altering the verdict on everything that had gone before.

 

The Football Pink’s first paragraph referred to our snatching “a lucky point”, though the subsequent report cannot be read other than as a description of an even game, one in which it would be hard to begrudge either team their share of the spoils. So perhaps we were lucky only in the manner of our claiming the point, though a goal in the 88^th minute is, of course, worth exactly the same as one scored at any other point in the game. It only takes a second to score a goal, as a certain Reds manager of the future was wont to say.

 

A game of which I can only recall thirty seconds is an unlikely pointer to that future. But in the short term, Mackay would be back at the City Ground within a fortnight as Gillies’ replacement. And, with the other end of the decade in mind, it’s notable that our scorers were Robertson and O’Neill, here still finding their feet in our first year back in the Second Division, but showing a never-say-die attitude that would serve them well as they went on to play prominent roles in our promotion four seasons later and the conquest of Europe that was to follow.

 

Forest: Barron, Hindley, Gemmell, Serella, Cottam, Fraser, Lyall, Robertson, Chapman, Richardson (O’Neill), Buckley

 

Swindon: Downsborough, Thomas, Trollope, Smart, Burrows, Potter, Peplow, Howell, Treacy, Noble, Rogers