When I think back to my Saturday afternoons at his age, I recall with fondness that same fresh air...wafting in through the window of my tiny bedroom, where I sat listening intently to Mercia FM, following the fortunes of my beloved Coventry City. Now if the image of a teenage lad sitting alone in his bedroom listening to his team play out another goalless draw isn't depressing enough, imagine then that as well as listening, he's also making careful notes about the match...actually let me back up slightly there...it's not like I was just making notes for my own amusement like a nerd or something! I had an actual reason to be noting down the team that day, subs, goal times etc...My life had some purpose!
So why was I painstakingly recording match details? Was it because, in pre-internet days, access to such info was regarded as a precious commodity? Was living in some eastern bloc with tightly controlled media access? Or was I just a nerd? Obviously not the last one...
The real reason was because I was truly obsessed with football and Match magazine had provided me with an official (it was given away with a magazine, so it had to be completed!) means to record such info.
The Match Facts Football Yearbook 87/88, to give its full, rather grandiose, title, was an A5 sized booklet, which allowed, nay encouraged, you to fill out your team's match details for the entire season. Being 12 and with nothing better to do, I took to this task with an intense amount of gusto.On opening the booklet, you were presented with a space to fill in details of your team, their nickname, ground, manager etc, beneath which was an example of how to fill in the match facts. This was split into two parts, the top dealing with the basics - Opponents, Date, Score, Attendance etc and the bottom part reserved for the team list. This was before squad numbers of course, so it was easy to fill in positions 1-11. You were encouraged to write the player names diagonally, not only because the spaces were quite small (note the names in the example are all pretty short...no Pickering or Ogrizovic for them to contend with!), but also to allow room for the Match Facts rating (the score given to each player in the following week's copy of Match). As you can see, that was something I never bothered with...mine was a more 'of the moment' sort of nerdiness...
The Yearbook had enough spaces for a full season (even accounting for the higher number of games in a lower league club's season), as well as special pages for the FA / Scottish Cup and the League (Littlewoods Challenge or Skol) cup. What they didn't provide, however was space for any European competitions...but this was of course 1987, so no English clubs were playing in Europe. If you were a fan from North of the border (maybe, Dundee Utd) then that was just tough...this was dealing with domestic matters only! Even then, something was missing...with English clubs banned from European competitions, the Full Members Cup had been created, meaning teams in the top 2 divisions were now playing 3 domestic cup competitions in one season!
As it turns out, Coventry did very well in the FMC (sponsored that year by Simod, an Italian sportswear manufacturer) and nearly reached the final, only losing to eventual winners Reading on penalties...which you can see was lovingly recorded by myself in the space left by getting knocked out of the Littlewoods Cup early.
As if filling in stats wasn't exciting enough on its own, to prolong your interest (and keep you buying the mag no doubt), the Yearbook also had spaces for stickers. Similar in size to the Daily Mirror ones, these brightened up what else would have been rather dull pages, rendered as they were in a pale green with darker green lines. Bizarrely, it would appear I grew tired of putting in the stickers much quicker than I did filling out details of 42 matches (plus those 3 cup comps!), perhaps lending the nerd theory extra weight.
Match produced another Yearbook for the 88-89 season, following exactly the same layout, but in shades of red. I clearly had outgrown my nerd status (I so hadn't!) by then as I seem to have given up halfway through the season...I think what finally killed it was having to write the following in the one and only entry for that year's FA Cup...
"Sutton Utd 2 - 1 Coventry City"
25 years on and the pain is still fresh...
-- Rich Johnson
