08/08/88: Chelsea: Friendly at Dawlish

As a matter of interest on this topic, can anybody drag up the line up of the young Chelsea lads that played pre-season at Plainmoor at the start of this season?

It would be interesting to see who, if any of that squad managed to break into First team football........................if not at Stamford Bridge then on loan somewhere else.

Merse the scorer of the free kick Miroslav Stoch has made a couple of late sub appearences this season. He looked very classy that day and gave our defence a torrid time (think a world class danny stevens!)
I also think the lad Mancienne played at centre back he went on loan to Wolves for most of the season got a senior England call up went back to the bridge and has made a few first team starts, and is now a target of Real Madrid. If he did play in the game at Plainmoor I bet he never dreamed of having rollercoster season like this, and it ain't over yet!

Mancienne did not play in the friendly, I think he was away in the Chelsea tour party in Asia.

Funnily enough I was talking about this game with a man I met on my wasted trip to Elmore - I didn't catch his name but he is a friend of Rivieralou's from Starcross. He had been heavily involved with Dawlish on the commercial side in the mid to late 80s and told me about how important the Langstone Cliff was to their finances at the time. The owner used to let the big clubs stay there and Dawlish would make enough money out of a few big pre-season friendlies to keep them going for the whole season. They also had Aberdeen there in 1987.

One of the reasons we played Chelsea at Dawlish was that Plainmoor was in such a terrible state in those days that it needed the summer to recover.

The programme doesn't name the physios which is a shame - because this was the momentous day that Torquay United hit the headlines by signing a current England international! Our physio Alan Morris had just quit, leaving us with a hole to fill. Chelsea of course had England's no 1 Norman Medhurst. After the game, Cyril Knowles went up to Norman and jokingly offered him the job. Norman accepted, but had trouble convincing Cyril that he was actually serious. He was desperate to move out of London and really fancied moving to Devon. I hate to think what percentage pay-cut he took, but amazingly the deal was done and little Torquay United had the best physio in the country. An amazing story, but true!

A year before the Chelsea game, we played Dawlish in a friendly and their goalkeeper had such a brilliant game that Cyril signed him up. Twenty-two years later, we still haven't managed to get rid of him despite several attempts. Yes, it was the one and only Kenny Veysey.

Dawlish was certainly a very happy hunting ground for Torquay United in the late 80s.

Cheers, Capital, checking out the progress of that Chelsea XI - I really enjoyed that game, you know - was a little task I set myself but never got round to....(partly because I discovered this ruddy site in the meantime).

Yeah. Sign of a misspent middle age.

Might even have a shave for the Histon match....