A cautionary tale about not checking with experts

In my book of the month post about the autobiography of Billy Meredith, I included this picture of a Wales team for a fixture that my great uncle, Tommy Matthias, played in.

However, when I sent the link to blog post to Anthony, who I've recently met through a vintage soccer memorabilia group, he almost immediately told me that the player I thought was my great uncle was someone else.

Anthony also said the photo was mislabelled in the book, as it was taken at the Racecourse in Wrexham. The pub in the background is The Turf, which is still present right next to the stadium. 

In hindsight, I should have known something was off because Fred Keenor should have been in the line up and he had a very recognisable face. 

I'm not sure who the guy I circled was. Anthony said he hadn't seen that photo before (so at least it was something new for him!) but it most definitely isn't the line up for the game in the caption. 

All this is a cautionary tale - I could have checked with an expert before posting. Next time I will!

Book of the Month: Football Wizard - The Billy Meredith Story

This autobiography had been sat on my footie books bookshelf for a while so I have a sense of satisfaction to have finally read it. There's a personal family connection with Billy Meredith because he played for Wales alongside my Great Uncle Tommy Matthias either side of the First World War.

I knew that Billy and Tommy were both in the Wales team that beat England for the very first time, in a British Home Championship game at Highbury in 1920. What I didn't know, until this past week in fact, was that Billy played in Tommy's benefit game for a "Wrexham and Welsh XI" in 1922. (I found this out from Anthony, a new contact via a vintage sports collecting group, who specialises in Wrexham's history.)

Billy was a fascinating character at a time when football was emerging as the sport of the masses. There is a great scene-setting chapter explaining how coal miners in the Black Park Colliery in Chirk, where Billy worked as a young man, would leave the pits at the end of the shift and go straight to watch - or play - football without even washing the coal dust off. Billy lived in Chirk and commuted to Manchester to play and train until he was offered a contract as a professional footballer. 

His upbringing wasn't conducive to playing football for a living. His religious parents thought it was a silly pursuit. His dad apparently only ever attended one game where Billy was playing, and reportedly was unimpressed. Despite this, Billy soon made a name for himself at Chirk - they won the Welsh Cup in 1894. The next year he was playing for Manchester City, and soon helped them win promotion to the First Division and then their first FA Cup win.

He was then involved in a scandal, when he was accused of trying to bribe the captain of Aston Villa to throw a match. His punishment was a lengthy ban from football. When he returned to playing, he was in the colours of Manchester United where he was part of the team that were League Champions for the first time in 1907 and then won the title again with them in 1911. In between those league titles was another FA Cup win. He also played in the first Charity Shield match, and was on the winning side.

Billy felt doubly hard done by with regards to the match-fixing scandal. Firstly, he felt he was unfairly treated due to being Welsh and that an English player wouldn't have been censured so severely. Secondly, he felt his club let him down badly and didn't have his back. Throughout his career he got into arguments with his clubs, often revolving around money. He was a big champion of the 'Player's Union' but this wasn't motivated by solidarity as much as feeling players weren't being paid enough when they were the reason people came to football matches. 

The author, John Harding, is pretty even-handed in how he writes about this. One can sense that Billy was a spiky fellow, with a focus on money that probably stemmed from his relatively poor upbringing. But there are several times when it seems like Billy let his pride guide him into rows that he could have avoided if he'd had a bit more nous.

But Billy was a superstar - as it evidenced by how he drew a crowd whenever he played in a testimonial, benefit or charity game. His was usually the name on the adverts for the game.  He tried his hand at endorsing products, set up a sporting goods store, and even appeared in a film playing a version of himself as a trainer and mentor to an aspiring footballer. Sadly, that film doesn't survive. He was regularly depicted in newspaper cartoons, which always included his trademark toothpick. 

Billy's professional career stretched over 30 years, although with a chunk of it lost to the First World War, when he played in several wartime league games. After the war he was back playing for Wales and for Manchester City and continued playing into the 1920s. 

If I was going to be critical of this book, it does rely a bit too much on reports in newspapers and magazines, particularly the Athletic News. This is a common problem faced by a lot of football writers; the story can just become a string of results and match summaries. The book could have done with a list of the honours that Billy won. It's also a bit annoying that some team photos have the players identified and some don't. I'm certain that one of the team photos includes my Great Uncle, but it's not confirmed in the book.

Tommy Matthias circled

Those are really quite minor quibbles. An updated version of this book has been published and some of those issues might have been dealt with. Overall this was a fascinating and enjoyable glimpse into the early days of soccer and I learned a lot from it. 

Football recap of the month - January 2024

Into the new year with a bang! 

My game numbering continues from December.

Game 33: Haughmond 1-0 Wem Town 

Reason for going: I was in Shrewsbury for the weekend and went with my nephew to watch this Shropshire County Premier League game.

Point of interest: The Shrewsbury Sports Village was my first new ground of the year. It's where the Shrewsbury Town Academy team play.

Game 34: Shrewsbury Town 0-1 Wrexham

Reason for going: Thanks to the FA Cup draw this was the first time Salop and Wrexham had locked horns in 15 years. Plus there's the whole Hollywood thing. 

Point of interest: This was the first sell out at the Meadow since the season they narrowly missed out on promotion and ended up losing the play off final at Wembley. Also - this was my 200th Shrewsbury game in my records.

Seven photographers! Usually there are two max.

Game 35: Cardiff Corinthians 1-1 Cardiff Draconians 

Reason for going: I fancied a local game instead of trogging to Aberystwyth to watch Barry.  (Although if I had gone on the bus to Aberystwyth I would have seen Barry win.)

Point of interest: The Corries play on a pitch that is half a cricket pitch. It's right next to the railway line so there's a good view of trains trundling past. They also have a clubhouse with a wall of old photos and news clippings. I love a good clubhouse wall full of archive stuff. 

Clubhouse full of history

Game 36: Cardiff Metropolitan WFC 0-1 Barry Town Ladies

Reason for going: This seemed a good way to fulfil my football fix for the weekend. One of my aims for the season was to see a women's game so this ticked this box too.

Point of interest: This was the 10th game I've seen at Cardiff Met's home ground in Cyncoed. It's the first time I've seen a Barry Town team win there!

Bonus football watching

I'm not counting it in my list of games, but this month I was able to watch my nephew, Zac, play for his Juniors team. He scored a screamer and set up two other goals in a 4-3 win.

Outsourcing memories

Various apps are annotating my life. I've blogged about the Futbology app previously. Recently it has started pinging me reminders of football matches I attended, and have logged on the app. These are similar to 'Facebook memories' that often come up related to stuff I posted dating back to 2007 when I joined the site.

My Futbology reminder on 5 September is for Newport v Wrexham in 2010. 

That's not a photo from the game in question - it's their generic photo for Newport Stadium where Newport were playing at the time.

What Futbology doesn't know is that the game was moved from the Saturday to the Sunday but I didn't know so I ended up at the empty stadium on the Saturday wondering what was going on. This was long before I carried a portable computer connected to the Internet in my pocket.

I had totally forgotten that aspect of the game, except that I got an aforementioned Facebook memory on 4 September that cryptically mentioned driving to Newport on a fruitless trip, and then the reminder today revealed why!

Facebook then handily provided me with these reminders of the action from the game, including a missed penalty.

There were more updates about the game, with details I didn't remember. It made me think about how so many of our memories are now preserved online -  we are effectively outsourcing them. These are the memories of my "cloudgangers", as Douglas Coupland termed them. These digital versions of my life, stored on servers around the world, retain knowledge of the events that shape who I am long after I have forgotten them. 

This does make me wonder if there is a statute of limitations on our cloudganger memories. We change as humans, but our preserved content does not change. Can it truly be seen as representative of us, when we are new people?

This question might seem trivial, but this week a professional footballer was disciplined by the Football Association for the content of a social media post made in 2012, when the player in question was 14 (and long before they became a professional footballer). 

This made me feel slightly uneasy. Firstly, should we judge anyone as adults based on what they said or did as 14 year-olds. Most of us were dickheads when we were 14. Secondly, should we really hold people to account for opinions they held 9 years ago without checking in with them now? This blog has been running since 2006 - I have changed my mind about a number of things since I started.  

The choice seems to be whether we delete the record and lose the richness of who a person is, their faults and failings in their history. Maybe we should seek to expunge everything that does not represent who we are in this moment, recognising that everything we commit to the servers now might be deemed expungeable in a few years' time. 

But if we radically revisit our past selves and seek to remake them into versions we can accept, then we lose the sense of development that enabled us to reach the point we are at. We learn more from owning our past mistakes and explaining why we would do things differently now, than from pretending it never happened at all. 

Otherwise our cloudgangers may be highly accurate replicas of us, but have no memories. 

25 years of football - the random games, some of which will never be repeated

After reviewing my 25 years of going to football matches I went through my boxes of old programmes to scan a few for a post about memorable matches. And I found a lot of other games that I remembered, and some that I didn't. Here's a selection of programmes from some very random games, featuring a number of clubs that I will never get to see again.

Some Shrewsbury ones to kick us off

Shrewsbury v Scarborough, Div 3, 15 September 1992

Scarborough went bust a while back. A new club has formed, Scarborough Athletic, but they are a long way off returning to the league. This programme was from the era of Shrewsbury's "scrambled egg" shirt designs, which is now being sold in the club shop as a retro item. At the time we mocked it as horrible. Even in the 90s, which was a decade of horrible shirts. Wait 25 years and it's cool again. I blame hipsterism for this.

I'm mainly including this to show how I used to deface football programmes with my own notations.

I gave Mark Barham my man of the match award. I vaguely remember him having blonde floppy 90s hair and being a winger. I could well be wrong.

Shrewsbury v Carlisle - 3 April 1993

I'm only including this because the cover star is flame-haired full-back Tommy Lynch!

I adored Tommy Lynch.

Shrewsbury v Hereford - Div 3, 2 April 1994 - birthday football!

Got to love going to a game on your birthday. Not as memorable as the Newcastle game I went to 11 years later (see here for more). Also, typical Shrewsbury photo choice with more of a gurning Hereford player than the Shrewsbury player who is being out-jumped for the ball. I think that's Gary Patterson, who I thought was crap but lots of other Shrewsbury fans loved.

Oswestry Town v Shrewsbury, pre-season friendly, 8 August 2004

Another disappeared club. This fixture will never happen again as Oswestry Town were absorbed by the TNS monster, who moved in and became The New Saints.

Telford United v Macclesfield Town, GM Vauxhall Conference, 26 February 1994
This is why I always think of the league below the football league as the GM Vauxhall Conference, even though it's been rebranded multiple times. The power of imprinting! Telford were founder members of the national league below the football league.

The programme cover shows the main stand of the Buck's Head. Rebuilding the ground in the 2004-05 season bankrupted the club owner and the club. They relaunched further down the leagues as AFC Telford United. Their new ground is quite nice, but they have never sustained the heights they were at in the 80s and 90s.

Next up, a Wales B international - do they still do these? This was in 1994.

We went mainly because Carl Griffiths, ex-Shrewsbury striker, was selected for the Wales squad, and it was played at Wrexham's Racecourse ground which was less than an hour away. There are some random players in this line up. I still defaced programmes back then, so we can see that Carl came on as a sub.

In 1994 I moved to Cardiff. I went to a few City games, but it didn't stick. So I drifted to other games. Here's another team that has disappeared - Inter Cable-tel. Technically their opponents, Barry Town, are a phoenix club now as well. This was the era when Barry bossed the League of Wales, although this was a league cup game.

The League of Wales is now the smaller Welsh Premier League. So both these clubs and the league they were competing in have either disappeared or been considerably revamped. The ground it was at, Leckwith Athletic Stadium, was bulldozed when Cardiff City relocated over the road from Ninian Park and built their big new CCFC Stadium. There is nothing about this game that could be repeated.

The next season, Inter Cable-tel had reverted to their original name of Inter Cardiff.  That's a cleverly cropped photo of them, saying Inter without the suffix,  with the Welsh Cup on the cover of this programme from a UEFA Cup qualifier in 1999. A note inside the programme reminded me that the half time entertainment was provided by the Tongwynlais Temperance Brass Band.

Thinking about it, that's a cup competition that's gone as well, replaced by the Europa League. Everything changes.

Here's another game unlikely to be repeated: League of Wales v League of Ireland, 4 March 1997.

My main point of interest on the night was the appearance of ex-Shrewsbury winger Mark Rutherford in the League of Ireland team. But this LoW squad list is a who's who of late 90s Welsh domestic footballing talent. Several players in the squad played for Inter, so this was like a home match for them, as it was played at Leckwith.

Moving on to Scotland - have you ever seen an Inverness Cup game? I have.

I've already said how my football match tally is influenced by my Dad's love for going to football matches. (Something I've caught.) We were on a family holiday to the Moray coast and Dad found this game was on. Forres Mechanics are known as the Can-Cans and play in the Highland League. Clachnacuddin are from Inverness.

A few years later and I was in Glasgow for a work conference. Celtic were playing at home so I sloped off one night to watch them.

It had been a boyhood ambition to go and see Celtic play because one of my best friends, Ed, was Scottish and supported them. The game was pretty dire and finished 0-0. But I had a great time anyway.

Another unlikely to be repeated opportunity - seeing a Great Britain international team. I went to the 2012 Olympics match played at the Millennium Stadium against Uruguay and Team GB won. I can't remember if Craig Bellamy played, but he looked alright on the programme cover, despite that honest-to-goodness disaster of a kit. The game was a double header with Mexico v Switzerland beforehand. Football should do more double-headers.

I also went to the third place play-off game in the Olympics because the brochure said it would include the bronze medal ceremony, which I thought would be a unique add-on to a football match. But then they announced just before kick off that the medal ceremony would be the following day after the final and the third place winners would receive their medals alongside the gold and silver medalists. I felt cheated by that and, frankly, the Olympics can do one for me now.

I've been to several football matches at the Millennium Stadium. In 2005, while Wembley was being rebuilt, they played a lot of cup finals there. Including the LDV Vans final between Wrexham and Southend United.

My Dad came with me, reliving his youth as a Wrexham fan, and also a couple of guys from work who supported Wrexham. When the game went into extra time I remarked to one of them, Pete, that I always felt extra time gave you more for your money. He wasn't happy about that - he wanted the stress to be over! He was happy at the end of extra time though because Wrexham had won.

And finally, to another cup final in Cardiff that went to extra time. It was my first women's football game, which also featured two goalkeepers taking the decisive penalties in the shoot out. I've blogged about it in more depth here.

Looking through my programmes was a mixed bag of memories. Some good, some bitter-sweet. It's a real reminder of how much the game has changed, and yet, it's still at it's heart the same game.

I'm going to do a post with some Shrewsbury-specific highlights next. And then a fun one to finish this short series.

Newport County v Wrexham

I had an article published on When Saturday Comes' website previewing the Newport v Wrexham game I went to yesterday. (Read it here)

I didn't realise that the game had been switched to a Sunday (for TV broadcasting purposes, no less) so had an abortive round trip to Newport on the Saturday. Doh! At least it meant I knew where the stadium was the next time around.

I really enjoyed the game. Two goals, a comical missed penalty when the taker slipped and spooned his spot-kick onto the bar, some decent passing football in patches, standing on an old-style terrace where people could smoke, the vulgar witticisms of the crowd.

Trivia notes... Both teams had goalkeepers who used to play for Shrewsbury - Glyn Thompson who was sold as a youngster but didn't make it in the big time was playing for Newport and Scott Shearer was in goal for Wrexham. Newport's reserve goalie was also ex-Shrewsbury and also called Glyn.

Neil Ashton, another ex-Town man, gave away the penalty and got sent off early in the second half. Despite the miss, having the extra man meant Newport were the better side in the closing stages. (Yet another ex-Town player was on the bench for Shrewsbury, one-time Wales under-21 international Jamie Tolley.)

Both the managers were called Dean, both had been strikers and played in the Premier League.

Former Chelsea defender Frank Sinclair, now 38, was playing for Wrexham. They say that pace is temporary, but class is permanent. You don't get to be a top-level defender for most of your career without having some nous. He read the game well and it seemed every time a Newport player turned around in possession, big Frank was there to boot the ball away.

All in all, a good day