Royce Franklin takes a nostalgic look back at how football has changed in the 67 years since he watched his first live match.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Second World War teams usually played two games per week for the first five weeks.
The midweek games would be in pairs, home and away fixtures against the same opponents. Those two pairs of games would be balanced in the latter part of the season with third and fourth pairs of fixtures with teams playing each other usually on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Fixtures on Good Friday preceded East Monday’s returns games with a Saturday game in between.
Are you listening today’s managers? That’s three games in four days and not all players would be full time professionals.
Such a system no doubt helped the compilation of a team’s fixtures which had to be calculated manually.
Today because of computers it is much easier to request an away game on a particular day because of a rival event in the area or because a ground reconstruction may not be finished for the first Saturday of a season for example.
In bygone years this was less so. I remember games soon after the Second World War when Lincoln (my home city) had to play some home games with a morning kick off because the Lincolnshire Handicap was held on the same day. The horse race was run at Lincoln until its move to Doncaster in 1965. One of those morning games was against Oldham in 1951.
Remember also there were no floodlights for any League game until February 1956 when Portsmouth entertained Newcastle in the old First Division. For the record Newcastle won that game 2-0.
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