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