Normanton Lad

6 minutes ago, Shipley Ram said:

Deja vu

 

 

I missed that. In Dave Mackay's autobiography I think he said that Alfie Conn's dad was his hero at Hearts. It's a pity Mackay didn't sign him. He would have been a very stylish partner for Charlie George.

According to wikipedia Alfie Conn was on our books in 1979. I can't remember that. Apparently he didn't play a single game. I don't know why because his competition was players like Colin Chesters and Andy Crawford. Does anyone remember him being on our books?

He was a very talented player. He featured quite a bit in this game :

SPURS BEAT LEEDS UNITED 4-2 1975

9 minutes ago, Crewton said:

I'm not trying to push anything 'down their throats', I'd just like them to stop oppressing one half of the world's population and criminalising other people's sexual preferences. It's the 21st century, not the 7th. Any international tournament should be open to the enjoyment of everyone without fear. FIFA did not fulfill this requirement when choosing Qatar.

As for "rich and decadent old man"? Absolute LOLZ considering the life of the average Gulf Arab.

You're a Troll though, so these posts are unsurprising. I've seen your work before. I can't ban you from this forum, but I'd strongly recommend that someone with the power to do so does.

I only post on this site so I don't know where you think you've seen me before. Why do you call me a troll and why do you want to ban me? All I've said is that the world is a very big place and we in the West are a very small part of that. We should respect other cultures. 

Do you always want to ban people who write things you disagree with ? How does that fit with your comments about oppression? That smacks of hypocrisy. 

13 hours ago, Tombo said:

This is a Hall of Fame sentence. I mean he had some talented players at Bolton but I don't know about handling world class players?

Bolton ffs. Wow

Djorkaeff, Jay-Jay Okocha and Hierro were all world class. They would be stars in any team in the world.
 

1 hour ago, Crewton said:

I can only assume this is an attempt at satire, because if it's serious, it's the biggest pot of arse-gravy I've yet read on this forum. 

I can only assume you have no respect for the cultural beliefs of one quarter of the world's population. What happens in the West is of little concern to them. But when Westerners try to push woke culture down their throats in their countries then that is a different matter.

To them the West is a rich and decedent old man with no heirs. He will soon be gone and only remembered for his eccentricity. In not too many generations the West will just be a strange footnote in the history of the world. 

3 hours ago, David said:

The world is a large place, have you got any source on the numbers that were laughing? 

No one could afford to do a statistically meaningful survey about what all the people in the world think about anything. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about people might think otherwise we’d be silent on most topics. My belief is based on a thought experiment.

LGPT rights is a thing mainly confined to American, other English speaking countries and Western Europe. That population is small compared to the rest of the world. It is probably only about a third of the population of India alone.  In my thought experiment I just imagined a random person in somewhere like India, Nigeria or Indonesia watching the German protest and asking what it was all about. On hearing that the Germans are demanding that people should be able to change sex at will or marry someone of the same sex I would assume that these people would burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.

In terms of the world population we in the West are a small fringe group with offbeat ideas.

2 hours ago, David said:

Yeah I'm not sure the world really did laugh at England and Germany.

If we was to poll the World on the One Love armband, covering of the mouth or that robe they stuck on Messi at the end....my money is on the robe being the most laughable out of the three. 

Messi holding the World Cup should have been one of the most iconic photos of the game, yet it's been tainted now with something you would see in an Ann Summers catalogue.

It was an entertaining World Cup, no doubt about it, just not sure it will ever be able to hold the crown of being the best World Cup with the loss of lives, human rights issues and being played at Christmas.

Part of me is glad England didn't win it. 

Just hope a new trend hasn't been set and we see the winning captain at the US World Cup sprinkled with cheese and armed with an AR 15 as he collects the trophy.

They were laughing.

If diversity is such a good thing why can't we respect the cultural norms of Qatar. If everyone has the same laws and cultural norms then that's not diversity. Religion is very important to people in that part of the world and gay sex is prohibited by their religion. Why should the West try to force their cultural norms on the rest of the world.

Re. the loss of lives, as far as I know only three people died building the stadiums. In the early 1970s I worked on a construction site in the UK where more than three people died on site over about three or four years and that didn't even make the national papers. Many migrant workers have died building other things in Qatar but the death rate for migrant workers in Qatar is lower than that in their own countries. Most people brought up in the Third World have not had access to medical care as children and they are not as healthy as people in First World countries. A lot of migrant deaths in Qatar can be attributed to general ill health. A doctor who had done research in Central Africa told me that the average person there has so many parasites that it is amazing that they have the strength to do any work at all.

I've seen every World Cup since 1966 and this was easily the best. I've not enjoyed watching football so much since the 1970s. Qatar did a great job and all the complainers are left with egg on their faces.  England and Germany tried to spoil it with political stunts but they just showed themselves up as fools. All the world laughed at them. Keep politics out of sport. What a disgrace for the BBC to ignore some of the closing ceremonies just so that we could listen to boring nonsense from so-called pundits who have nothing original to say.

2 hours ago, AndyinLiverpool said:

Speaking as someone on the spectrum, I find it hard to tell if someone is joking or serious.

Can anyone please confirm that this cannot possibly be serious?

Completely serious. Southgate is just a functionary. He is not a leader. Like all those of his type he has no vision or independence of thought. He just goes along with the current trend. His players like him because he does what they tell him. It should be the other way around. Would you follow Southgate into battle? I wouldn't.

Big Sam proved that he could handle world class players at Bolton. I've just finished reading his autobiography and as far as I can see his only fault was that he was too generous to lesser mortals.

Get Rid. Southgate is not a winner. You can tell is a weak man. When you compare him with people like Brian Clough, Dave Mckay and Alex Ferguson you can see he is not a leader. I'd bring back Big Sam.

“I just want to say one word to you : plastics.”

Just joking. That was a good film and it astonished me to think that I since that film came out I’ve had a long working life and I’ve been retired nearly 20 years. You are living in a totally different world to the one I worked in. When I started firms would almost be begging for you to work for them. Anyone from my school who wanted an apprenticeship could easily get one. Those boys usually ended up as self-employed plumbers, electricians, gas engineers, etc. The ones who got office jobs often ended up as some kind of manager and they retired at 50 on a nice pension. Now job loyalty and security are long gone. It is every man for himself.

Not long ago I decided to spy on some of the young people I used to work with. These were people around your age. The more successful of them had reinvented themselves as “Project Managers”. Before they had been junior managers or IT workers but they got the Prince 2 qualification and a bit of experience running small projects and then they all seemed to find work as consultant project managers in big organisations like local government and the NHS. I could see from the Linkedin site that they usually moved on to another contract after a couple of years. I don’t know if this is normal practice or whether they didn’t want to stay long enough to be "found out".

That’s one option for you. Just say that you’ve been doing project management in education for about 10 years. I’m sure you could dress up whatever you’ve been doing as various projects.

It seems so anachronistic for Jimmy Hagan to have been at the Baseball Ground in charge of Benfica. He had been at Derby County so long ago that he would have chatted to Steve Bloomer when Bloomer was the groundsman. I doubt if he had any fondness for the Rams. He had been allowed to go to Sheffield United even though Derby must have realised how good he was. He went on to have a great 20 year career for the Blades. It was a bit like when Man United let Giles go to Leeds.  Sometimes managers get rid of players against the long-term interest of their clubs. It is often a case of a personality clash.

I don’t think Brian Clough put many people on a pedestal but I’m sure he would have respected Hagan. He performed wonders at Peterborough. His time at West Brom wasn’t as successful. In fact, his players went on strike in January of 1964 because he wouldn’t let his players wear tracksuit bottoms during training. Those of us of pension age will remember how cold it was that winter. When Hagan drove his car into a canal some of these players jumped in to rescue him. The others probably thought "Let him drown".

Below in the Youtube link at 5:57 you can see the canal he drove his car into. It was next to West Brom’s old training ground. The clip is from a documentary from about 1962 called “The Saturday Men”. It was supposed to be about the life of an average footballer but many of those players were far from average – e.g. Bobby Robson, Don Howe, Jock Wallace, etc.

It’s fascinating to see how much industry there was at that time. The background in the clip seems to be full of factory chimneys. This has got nothing to do with Jimmy Hagan but I find it hard to understand how we were so poor then when we were manufacturing so much. Today when we make nothing the situation seems reversed.

This is the story about the strike :
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/incoming/gallery/baggies-refused-wear-shorts-343350

This is about Hagan’s crash :
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/black-country-bugle/20180815/281861529341413
 

On 06/09/2022 at 13:41, Bob The Badger said:

 

1st - Scunthorpe - The overwhelming champion.  Literally no redeeming feature whatsoever, other than you can get out of it quickly onto the M180 and back to civilisation. Possibly the whitest large town I have ever stayed in.

I find it hard to believe that Scunthorpe is the worst place in the UK. I worked there in the early 1970s and I thought it was much nicer than Derby. It seemed like a model town to me. As you walked out of the railway station towards the centre of the town you passed the sorting office, the fire station, the police station, the hospital and a cinema all close together on the same road. This is going back 50 years so my memory of this might be wrong. Between these buildings you had public gardens and nice detached houses with big gardens. This was all a short distance from the High Street. At the bottom of the High Street they had a new library with a cinema in the basement. I was working away from home so I spent quite a bit of time wandering around Scunthorpe. They had some very nice parks.

The library cinema often showed foreign films and old black and white classics. The latter were far more impressive when you saw them on a big screen. You were given notes about the film when you went in and there was a discussion afterwards. Intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, like myself, were well catered for in Scunthorpe.

On the other hand, the Scunthorpe pubs seemed a bit rougher than the Derby ones. This was because the proportion of men in Scunthorpe who were doing heavy manual work was greater than in Derby. Most of them seemed to work in construction or at the steel works. Despite the hard work they were doing more than a few of them had enough energy left to start pub punch ups. I soon learned which pubs to avoid.

I’ve always thought Birmingham was fairly dire but that’s only based on a few walks around the City centre and Sparkhill. If your only impression of Derby was walking up Normanton Road then you’d get a false impression of Derby.

I spend a lot of time on all the dna sites on behalf of several people. I find it interesting but it is not for everyone. If you are happy with who you think your parents and your relatives are then maybe it is best not to open Pandora's Box.

If you are just interested in the health side of your dna then once you've got your raw data from the genealogy/dna site then you can upload it to other sites to get a report about possible problems with your dna for free or for very little money. I think it is important to know if you a carrier of a bad gene. One of my relatives was a carrier of a very rare bad gene and by bad luck his partner was also a carrier. The outcome for their child was not good.

Although Ancestry Dna has the biggest database it is not as useful as 23andme or Myheritage because Ancestry Dna does not have a chromosome browser. If you are interested in genealogy you often need to know which chromosomes have the dna segments you share with your relatives in order to find common ancestors.

It's not "free speech" on this site if the site owner is paying for it.

I like the meme showing a man on his deathbed saying "I wish I'd spent more time online arguing with strangers".

You are never going to change the political views of others on football sites. If you need to get something off your chest you should go on Twitter if you are left wing or Telegram if you are right wing and bend the ears of people who agree with you. If you are middle of the road then you probably don't feel strongly about politics and you won't feel the need to say anything.

Derby 3 Chelsea 1 1968 
Derby 3 Leeds 2 1975 
Derby 4 Real Madrid 1 1975

There are some people who really do remember things as they happened. For example, Ben Pridmore, who lives in Derby, had to prove that his memories were accurate to become world memory champion. I have very clear memories of what I was doing on 9/11 and when I first heard that Kennedy had been assassinated. I'm good at remembering conversations and I also seem to be good at remembering quotes and poetry. Most of this is due to me thinking a lot about the past and having inner monologues when I go for my walks. Thinking is just talking to yourself and if you don't think about something you will forget it.

There are some remarkable people who claim to be able to remember nearly everything about their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeEQ85m79I

However, I do think Bob the Badger is right when he says a lot of people are just making up stuff. 

Those Cavaliers TV matches were a godsend – there wasn't much else you could do on a Sunday afternoon. It is hard for today's youngsters to imagine how quiet things were then on a Sunday. The only shops open were newsagents in the morning and the off-licence in the evening. There was hardly any traffic on the roads because there was nowhere to go. 

Nowadays Sunday is just another day, but then it felt different from any other day. On Saturday you looked forward to Sunday because it was another day off work, but on Sunday itself the prospect of going to work on Monday seemed to hang over you and spoil the day. You had a feeling of dread lurking in the back of your mind. I liked to go to the cinema on Sunday evenings to take my mind off work. Before the adverts and the film they would usually play some light string music. Often it was a particular record with cascading violins. It was very famous then but I can't remember the name of it now. I just know that as soon as I heard it I could relax in my seat and all my troubles would be forgotten for a couple of hours.

There's a link to a Cavaliers game below that captures the spirit of the time and the church bells give it the Sunday feeling. You can see great players enjoying themselves. It's a pity that we only get a short bat from Sobers. Roy Marshall seemed to score a hundred before lunch every Saturday. I don't know why he didn't play more for the West Indies. Fred Rumsey was a familiar face at Derbyshire games. I don't think I ever talked to him but I can remember looking at him in a beer tent around 1975 and thinking that he looked old and far from the cricketer I remembered on TV in the 1960s. I've just looked him up on wikipedia to find out when he died. I would have guessed the 1990s but he is still going strong and he even had a book published last year. He's still only in his 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N77TIGZqzc&t=1072s

Old age in those days started at about 50. At that age most men were knackered by many years of hard physical work. I can't remember seeing anyone over 50 running. Most of my old relatives had died or they lived far away so I didn't have much to do with old people. I used to regard them as being miserable and secretive. My street was full of them but they rarely seemed to come out of their houses. I couldn't work out what they did all day. 

The old couple next to us didn't like children. We only had a tiny patch of grass at the back but my brothers and I played an under arm cricket game there. Unfortunately, our neighbour didn't like our shouts of “out” or “lbw” and she sometimes came out the back to tell us off. We just listened to her politely, but that wasn't enough and she reported us to our mother. When I asked my mother what the old lady had accused us of she replied “dumb insolence”. My mother laughed but she and my father had great respect for the elderly and she said she would tell us off. Many years ago I looked up the occupiers of the houses in our street and I think that old couple were living in the house before the First World War. On Sundays she would sometimes go to the off licence with a jug to be filled with beer. They must have died at least 50 years ago. I can't imagine how they would have coped with some of the people in that street today.

On 12/08/2022 at 15:12, Turk Thrust said:

Remember your Road well. I lived in Valley Road from age 15. I left school (Joseph Wright Art School now sadly gone) and went to Derby Art College in Green Lane but left and became a librarian in the Wardwick. Went to Aston Uni to qualify but left to become a cocktail barman in Estartit in Spain at the Custard Beast Bar (you can tell the era from the name). For a short time worked for a shadowy unit in MoD in London. Back to Derby after 18 months, signed on and was taken on by the dole office in Normanton Road. In 1976 I moved in the Department of Employment to Birmingham where I worked in Sutton Coldfield. Then onto London to work first in the Careers Service and then the Wages Inspectorate and then became a records and information manager. Best move ever. I worked on British and World Bank funded aid projects (mainly civil service reform and economic strategy). Went to over 50 trips to the Caribbean, India and Malaysia but mainly to Africa (got arrested and imprisoned as a spy in Sierra Leone, and had a bad experience with goats in The Gambia). In the final few years before retirement I worked on the UK Freedom of Information Act but still keep my hand in and work with computerising the Nigerian Court of Appeal and sorting out records management for Nigerian prisoners. Since my name is Crooks, this is very apt.

Your career has been very varied and eventful but to me it all seems hellish. I don't like travelling. Wouldn’t you have been more fulfilled as an artist? With your education at Joseph Wright Art School and the Art College you could have been an illustrator or something equally artistically creative. I like the work of Harry Wingfield, a Derby man, and Martin Aitchison. While they were drawing or painting they were probably also watching the birds in the garden. They both lived into their 90s and I doubt if they had more than half an hour’s stress in their careers as illustrators. As a kid I liked to draw and I would have loved to have gone to Joseph Wright School. I ended up working on building sites and latterly doing pointless things in offices. Fortunately, I’ve been retired nearly 20 years and I have been able to do things I should have done when I was younger.

It is a great shame that the art schools have gone. I suppose the conceptual artists and other wasters spoiled it for those who could draw and paint things people like to look at.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Wardwick Library was excellent. I always finished my trip there with a quick visit to the museum to look at the Joseph Wright paintings. I think they also had a stuffed fox there which I found very interesting. 
 

16 hours ago, B4ev6is said:

He was telling me how sad he was when I had to pack up my tetsudo and how special I could have been I knew that as well but I am feeling a bit fed up use to able to do stuff i came pretty close winning stuff in national tetsudo champership but my condation and put a stop to that.

But i do miss it so much but he is such a good man I was please to see him but he said I put some weight on but sorry excuses we used to do were extremely physical demanding.

I've never heard of Tetsudo but after a quick check I could see it was the same thing I came across in the 1970s when it was called Goyararu.  Not many people in the martial arts had ever heard of it. I had a bit of contact with someone who trained and I went to watch a few sessions. It looked like a good way to get fit but it also looked a bit like a cult. I doubt if it would be of much use for self-defence. The advent of MMA showed that the most useful martial arts in a real fight were  boxing, wrestling, judo and Jiu-Jitsu. There were top fighters with a karate background but they would have been easily beaten unless they were also experts in the other aforementioned martial arts. Some martial arts such as aikido have been shown to be a complete waste of time. 

If you go via Cambridge and Leicester it is £21.50 each way. The other week I went to Honiton in Devon for £8 each way.

Kevin Hector looks great for 77 especially when you compare him with much younger retired players.  In the pictures above you can see from his waist size that he is looking after himself. I've known a few postmen and I think all that walking has tremendous benefits. One of them told me he was being paid to keep fit.

I was behind the goal at the Normanton End when Kevin made his wonderful home debut against Huddersfield and I can remember one of his last games at the Baseball Ground many years later when it looked as if he was going to race through the defence and score but alas his speed had gone. In fact, I was surprised he lasted so long because when I watched him in a charity game at the Osmaston Sports Ground in the mid or late 1970s he looked completely knackered. There was a tiny attendance and standing on the touchline I had very close view of the players. He looked as weak as a kitten. Perhaps this is just my imagination but in my mind I can see Archie Gemmill laughing as Kevin struggled to reach an easy pass. It could be that he was ill or just recovering from illness.

He might have ended up with a nice house but he deserved to have made as much money from football as any of them are getting today. We know that the TV companies got away with paying peanuts but where did all the gate money go? They didn't spend much on ground improvements. Someone was making money but it wasn't the players. 

2 hours ago, Crewton said:

Moseley was in the first team by season 75/76. Normanton was referring to the period after that, I think, and Langan was the only apprentice I could think of who established himself in the 1st team while we were still in the top flight in the late 70s. I think his point was perhaps that the club was in decline at all levels after that fateful season. 

I think "decline" is the keyword. When Dave Mackay left I rarely went to away games but I still wanted to see a game on Saturdays so I watched the reserves. I never felt as if I was watching current stars or stars of the future. It all seemed a bit depressing and I think a first team squad member playing in one of those games would have felt a bit depressed himself. But I think it must have been different at Liverpool where they were winning the Central League every year. They seemed able to keep a large first team squad happy. Leeds did the same in the 1960s when they had a reserve team containing Greenhoff, Yorath, Bates, Belfit and Johanneson. I think Liverpool are showing now that the key to success is to have a large first team squad and to rotate your stars. 

4 hours ago, Crewton said:

David Langan probably the only one from the late 70s to play in the top flight.

I think Dave Langan and Phil Boyer were the best players who came out of Derby reserves when I used to watch them.

Don O'Riordon wasn't bad and he went on to have a very long career albeit in the lower divisions.

Micky Quinn was on the books at Derby at that time but I can't remember him in the reserves.

On 03/05/2022 at 08:50, Crewton said:

I went to allot of the Central League fixtures at the BBG between 1968 and 1972. You got to see some top players, either on their way up or returning from injury and they were well attended. I think the Liverpool home match attracted an attendance of over 10,000, for example. 

Terrific work again @Brailsford Ram

Top teams always have strength in depth. Dave Mackay's big mistake was selling Roger Davies and not replacing Franny Lee with a top forward. He ended up using reserve players who later found their natural level in the old third division.  Liverpool used to win the Central League most seasons because they made sure they had "like for like" replacements for their injured or tired players. I've just looked at a 1978 Liverpool reserve teamsheet which included Alan Hansen, Kevin Sheedy, Sammy Lee and David Johnson.

When Man City were starting to get really good in the 1960s they had a strong reserve team. I can remember watching big name players like Johnny Crossan and Ralph Brand when their reserve team played Derby in 1966.

One of the few Derby reserve games that stuck in my mind was in 1975 when we played Bury and we had Leighton James, Alan Hinton and Roger Davies up front. I think we beat them 8-0. That was a fun game to watch. But after that our reserve team became very weak. Apart from Alan Cork I can't remember many of them going on to play in the top division.