Yeovil friendly 5/2/21

That's amazing really in that just six years later, we were in the league and they continued along their 108 year odessy as a non league club before getting there in 2003. We managed to maintain our superiority for another year with promotion under Leroy in their maiden league season but relegation for us a year later while they finished as champion reversed eighty years of ascendancy although there was that FA cup blip!

Funny enough, Horfield is just down the Gloucester road from Bristol Rovers ground and you would have driven through it if coming from the city centre. Had many a quiet pint there in my student days!

From Mr Sayer Poll's season ticket?

The Western League dream turned a little sour. Sixteen decent sides (listed below) in it in 1920/21 and Plymouth Argyle Reserves intending to move up from the P&DL made it look a very attractive proposition for our professional debut in 1921/22.

Abertillery Town
Barry Reserves
Bath City
Bristol City Reserves
Bristol Rovers Reserves
Cardiff City Reserves
Cardiff Corinthians
Douglas
Exeter City Reserves
Mid Rhondda
Pontypridd
Swansea Town Reserves
Swindon Town Reserves
Ton Pentre
Welton Rovers
Yeovil and Petters United

In the end Argyle and many of the WL sides made a very late decision to switch to the Southern League instead. Torquay made a last gasp attempt to enter the Southern League but were turned down, along with Weymouth.

Only nine clubs when the fixture list was drawn up became only eight when the season started with Douglas (a Bristol works team) going pop.

I see you've spotted that Yeovil was their first team and found out where Horfield is. According to Adge Cutler all the girls there are quite respectable really.

Weymouth's history records that 3,000 spectators gathered at Plainmoor for Weymouth's visit, whilst the Terras only attracted a crowd of 12 hardy souls to Horfield - the smallest ever crowd for a Weymouth first team fixture.

Note many Magpies fans would have made the trip to Horfield on March 11, because there was alternative entertainment at Plainmoor. We fielded a weak team in a 2-2 Western League draw whilst many of the first team stayed at home to play Torrington in a Devon Senior Cup quarter final which we won 6-0.

The strange 1921/22 fixture list, due to the decimated Western League, blurred the edges between first and second team matches on several occasions. You could write a whole article on that.

Yes, it's interesting how Torquay and Yeovil went their separate ways between 1927 and 2003. Maybe there were strong reasons for that back in the 1920s: were Torquay United a far more attractive, viable and ambitious proposition all along? Or could it have gone the other way if some of the respective boardroom personalities been different?

Either way, Yeovil took its football seriously (and possibly more so than we may have done had we stayed in the Southern League) and by the 1930s had established a local footballing culture that would stand it in good stead all these years later. I suspect that, even in those days, the demarcation in Somerset was Taunton for cricket, Bridgwater for rugby and Yeovil for football.



We've talked before about the number of Welsh teams in English football between ninety and hundred years ago. That's in stark contrast to Scotland where league football developed entirely separately to England.

That has a knock-on effect right to this day and it's now intriguing to think that Cardiff and Swansea are exactly where Celtic and Rangers would desire to be. It's also amusing just how many Cardiff players have appeared for Scotland in recent years. And you could also argue that Wrexham and Newport would be borderline Premier League/First Division if they were Scottish.

Occasionally, of course, there are voices - both Welsh and English - who argue the case for all Welsh clubs to play in Welsh football. Ah as if a semi-pro Cardiff City, playing Prestatyn in front of 1,500 people, would be good for anybody (xenophobes and strident nationalists of either persuasion aside) when even Colwyn Bay and Merthyr Town avoid Welsh football like the plague.

This, of course, leaves the Welsh Premier League in the curious place of being minus the country's six biggest clubs with, who knows, the likes of Bangor and Rhyl secretly fancying a tilt at the English leagues again. It also means, charmingly so perhaps, that Airbus UK and Bala Town will be representing Wales in next season's Europa League.

That's the lie of the land but you wonder what if history had been different. The bigger Welsh clubs - representing whole places such as Cardiff, Swansea and Newport - were set up to take on English clubs in English competitions. In a purely Welsh structure you may have seen two or three separate clubs from each of those communities playing in a national league; a league that may have taken on the characteristics of Irish football with its multiple clubs from Dublin and Belfast. Equally, without Welsh clubs in the Football League and Southern League, you may have seen other clubs emerge from the Sourh West of England.

As for the present, semi-professional football is struggling in Wales. Since James wrote the quoted words the successor clubs in Llanelli and Barry - two of Wales' larger towns - have been refused entry to the top four tiers of Welsh football. It's the local leagues for them now. Rules are rules - and Welsh committees are particularly strong - but that looks like a wasted opportunity.

Appropriate that we kick off our centenary year against Yeovil, as 100 years ago they were the club we were aspiring to be.

Mind you, unity amongst football fans in the town must have been stretched to breaking point at the time after Charles Dear's disgraceful shenanigans over the Devon Senior Cup.

Still, we managed to bridge the divide and now approach 100 years of everyone pulling together to preserve professional football in Torquay. Long may it continue. United we stand ...