Flanagan's Football Files

SHARING SOME OLD FOOTBALL STORIES.

We now live in a world of what appears like non stop football on tv with 24 hour sky sports news channels live games even on a saturday evening at 8pm, but it hasnt always,been like that,in what seems like a whole lifetime ago,you actually had to wait sometimes a whole 24 hours to get you fix of football news, here is a glimpse of some old media stories.

The first MOTDs were, of course, in black and white. The first colour transmission was on 15th November 1969 at Anfield when Liverpool beat West Ham 2-0. At the time, colour TVs were still rare, so the commentators had to ensure that their commentaries were suitable for viewers with either colour or black and white sets. That caused problems. John Motson once famously said, "For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all-yellow strip.

Yet another TV first for Arsenal came at the Emirates on Sunday, January 31st 2010. Their 3-1 home Premier League defeat against Manchester United was the world's first live sports event to be broadcast in 3D. The experimental Sky broadcast was beamed to 9 pubs to test the technology and public opinion.

The biggest TV audience in British broadcasting history was for a football match. The British Film Institute has estimated that the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany had a TV audience of 32.3 million, 200,000 more than watched the second-placed event, Princess Diana's funeral in 1997. The next most-watched football match was the 1970 FA Cup final replay between Chelsea and Leeds United, played at Old Trafford. An estimated 28.49 million watched that one, which ranks as the 6th most-watched event in British TV viewing history, just ahead of Charles and Diana's wedding in 1981 but just behind the Apollo 13 splashdown in 1970.

It's not unusual to see football-related ads during the commercial breaks, but few can really be called classics. Perhaps one of those few is Ian Rush/who has ever heard of the Accrington Stanley ad run by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1980s. An eight-year-old Carl Rice gave Accrington - who had dropped out of the Football League in 1962 - the sort of publicity they never had when they were in the League. Accrington invited Carl to be the guest of honour at a match in 2006, and later the same year, they won their place back in the Football League. Carl let slip that Accrington weren't the first choice of club names they planned to use - the original plan was to use Tottenham Hotspur, but that idea was dropped when Spurs objected. But Accrington Stanley was perfect. The great new venture was closed-circuit television. The Second Division match between Cardiff City and Coventry City on Wednesday, 6th October 1965, was transmitted to Coventry's Highfield Road ground and watched by the Coventry faithful on four giant screens. At the time, about the only live football was the FA Cup final, and the experiment was well received - 12,639 watched the 'real' match at Ninian Park while another 10,295 watched the televised screening. Because it was a black and white picture, Coventry borrowed the striped kit of Stoke City to help the viewers distinguish them from the Cardiff players. The experiment continued, and three months later, London became involved when Millwall's match at Workington was beamed to The Den, but the technology really took off in March 1967. On Friday, 3rd March 1967, the First Division had its first CCTV match when Arsenal played Manchester United - 63,363 watched the match at Highbury, and another 28,423 at Old Trafford for the screening. Just over a week later, the first FA Cup tie was screened with even more impressive attendances. An FA Cup 5th Round tie between Everton and Liverpool saw 64,318 at Goodison and another 40,619 a few hundred yards away for the screening at Anfield. The late 60s also saw the likes of Chelsea, Leeds and Manchester United beam back pictures of away European matches to their respective home grounds. However, despite giving large numbers of fans the opportunity of watching live away matches, most would not normally have been able to travel, and the idea never really took off. It never went away, but I guess with the advent of all top matches now being shown on live TV, the thought of watching matches from the armchair or at the pub was perhaps always going to be a better option than watching a big tele in the cold!. At the time, Closed Circuit TV was cutting-edge technology. Coventry's programme notes for the first CCTV match at Cardiff in 1965 give an explanation of the science which they presumably expected to baffle everyone, and this I have reproduced below. Just remember that the internet and mobile phones were science fiction in those far-off days!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the most creative of all football headlines, was a take on the name of that song in Mary Poppins. Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious was the headline in the Sun after an amazing result in the Scottish Cup. Part-time minnows Inverness Caledonian Thistle visited Parkhead and easily beat mighty Celtic 3-1 in a Scottish Cup Third Round tie played on Tuesday, February 8th 2000. Celtic manager John Barnes and his assistants Terry McDermott and Eric Black lasted just two more days in their jobs, with Kenny Dalglish becoming manager of the Glasgow giants.

There are some newspaper stories that you just know are written by a fan of the club being reported on. One of those headlines came in February 1961 when Manchester United were slaughtered 2-7 at Old Trafford by Sheffield Wednesday in an FA Cup tie. A Man City fan would have a field day composing a headline after that result, but it was obviously a Reds supporter who got the job. The headline in that evening's Manchester Evening News was United in nine-goal thriller.

Younger football fans would never believe any of time it took to get stories like this. They live in a world where news travels so fast that finding out about something is genuinely like being there, which is fantastic. Just a trip down memory lane also has a nice nostalgic glow about it.