March 27 – Garth Crooks Megamix | On This Football Day

March 27 – Garth Crooks Megamix

LIKE Garth Crooks trying to choose a metaphor to use in a post-match interview question, we just couldn’t decide which story from football’s dark and murky past to bring you today, so we thought we’d squeeze them all in.

We’ll start by remembering that bastion of football management heroic failure Bryan Robson. In 1997 Robbo achieved the unlikely feat of guiding Middlesbrough to both the League and FA Cup finals in the same season. They lost both, and were relegated for good measure to compound a season of real misery for Boro’s long-suffering fans.

But had they won one of those finals, would it have been a unique achievement of winning a cup and getting relegated in the same season? Well, no. Norwich lifted the Milk Cup in 1985 and were then relegated at the end of the season. The only other team to win silverware and get relegated is Reading. Today in 1988 61,470 fans saw Division Two Reading beat Division One Luton Town 4-1 at Wembley in the long-forgotten Simod Cup Final. Sadly for the Royals, relegation soon followed and they were not even allowed to defend the Cup, as it was only open to sides in the top two divisions.

Speaking of cups, (another seamless link) until Portsmouth came along last season, the last non-big four club to win the FA Cup was Everton in 1995 when a Paul Rideout goal was enough to see off Manchester United. The man who masterminded Everton’s march to their first trophy since 1987 was Joe Royle, a scouser who had previously served the club with distinction as a player. But on this day in 1997 the dream was over and Royle left the club by mutual consent. He claimed it was because he was prevented from buying additional players (including Tore Andre Flo) but the run of six League defeats in a row (equalling a club record) probably didn’t help.

More managerial madness on this day in 1999 when Kevin Keegan took charge of England for the first time in a Euro 2000 qualifier against Poland at Wembley. KK had got the job on a temporary basis after Glenn Hoddle’s infamous comments about disabled people came out and he was forced to resign. A Paul Scholes hat-trick ensured Keegan was off to a winning start and he soon took the job on permanently.

Another international boss also presided over his first match in charge of his new team on this day in 2002. When Craig Brown finally stepped down as Scotland boss in 2002 after nearly a decade in the job, the Scottish FA decided to follow England’s lead and ‘go foreign’ for the first time in their history. Perhaps just to upset the English, they plumped for a German and signed up Berti Vogts. The Scottish team he inherited was not in a good way and in his first match Vogt’s team was humbled 5-0 away to France. After the match Vogts resorted to Keegan-esque mindless optimism. “I am very optimistic,” he said. “In the defending part, we did well and now we have a lot of alternatives for the squad list.” Hmmm.

The whole world is now in, well, a whole world of financial strife as people up and down the land start re-using tea bags and piling on yet more jumpers rather than turn the heating up. But in 2002 everything was still rosy: the value of your house was going up by several million pounds each day, and everyone thought those boys in the city were really top stuff. Except in the Football League, where just about every club was in financial difficulty because today in 2002 ITV Digital went into administration. The ill-fated digital broadcaster had shelled out £315 million in 2000 to buy the rights to all Football League matches. It soon became clear that they had vastly overpaid. For example, a First Division match between Nottingham Forest and Bradford City in 2001, the rights for which cost £1.2m, attracted just 1,000 viewers. It would have been cheaper for ITV Digital to have driven each viewer to the ground by taxi, put them up in a five-star hotel and given them £500 spending money. That and a catalogue of other errors meant the end for the service.

And finally… the shirt worn by Pele in the 1970 World Cup Final went on sale at Christie’s auction house in London today in 2002. It sold for an eye-watering £157,000, beating the £91,750 record which Geoff Hurst’s shirt from the 1966 final had fetched in 2000. “I was absolutely stunned,’ auctioneer David Convery said afterwards. “We had an indication the evening before that it might beat the world record. But we were still thinking about £80,000.”

We’ll leave you with some footage of Pele scoring in the 4-1 win over Italy, but if you really want more, have a look here to see what else happened on this football day.