Hiding With The Hooligans by David Radford

Author:David Radford [Radford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Offside Publications
Published: 2012-08-13T22:00:00+00:00

And If The Kids Wanna Fight You’d Better Let ’Em

SEASON 79/80

After just missing out on relegation the previous season Arthur Cox was on the look-out for players to boost his squad and we saw more transfer activity that summer than we had over several decades. Bill Green was signed for £40,000 and Alan Birch came from Walsall for a similar fee. Alan Crawford and John Ridley were each signed for £35,000. Leaving the club was my favourite, Rodney Fern, who went to Rotherham, but we also unloaded Bobby Flavell (to Barnsley), Cottom (Chester), Cammack (Scunthorpe) and, shortly after the season had started, Letheran went to Swansea for around £60,000. It was good business but Cox hadn’t finished spending, not by any means. Early in 1980 he paid £40,000 for John Stirk, a club record fee of £50,000 for goalkeeper John Turner and then smashed that record by signing Phil Bonneyman for £150,000! It wasn’t so much the amount we paid for these players, it was the wages they were on. Some of the players, Turner included, were on more money than some First Division players, so we needed success. Having put all our eggs in one basket, we desperately needed to get promotion – and we didn’t have the best start.

Three Go Mad In Mansfield

August 18th, 1979 Mansfield 3 v 2 Chesterfield

Now, as we all know, Mansfield are scabs! We all know this and we all accept it; but what we called them pre-miners’ strike, well, I just have no idea. I don’t even really recall viewing them then with the disgust and mistrust that we do now. In fact, if anything, they were just ‘this club down the road.’ (To be fair, most of my spleen-venting went towards the two Sheffield clubs.) Given the close proximity of the yellow peril and given the fact that we had both spent our footballing lives in and around the bottom two divisions, you would have thought there might have been numerous tales of massive punch-ups between the two clubs. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending upon how you look at it – this hasn’t always been the case. I’m sure there have been plenty of altercations in back alleys but, for me, Mansfield were always just a team we hated because of local rivalry; a rivalry that escalated and became more significant since the miners’ strike, and I have seen a tremendous amount of pure hatred towards these hapless supporters, particularly at Chesterfield, purely because of this. But this tale happened before all that, so this was just hooliganism. There was nothing political behind it at all.

Getting to Mansfield shouldn’t have caused too much of a problem really since it’s only 15 miles down the road, so if you didn’t want to go on the supporters’ club bus you could walk it. But, with Wynnie’s Tours taking a well-earned rest, the onus on getting us to Mansfield lay with the East Midlands battle wagons.

A fortnight before the game I did a round-up of

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