19/12/80: Southend United (A)

Thanks Timbo for this 1980/81 Southend programme – one from a season when Southend were Fourth Division champions and we finished 17th. More than likely a nondescript Torquay campaign from a period I can hardly recall and one we rarely seem to discuss on this site. Was it that uninteresting? Graham Jones, Richard Bourne, Keith Bowker, Jimmy Weston may have been decent players but they seem like half-forgotten footnotes thirty years later. However, if you’re now forty, these could have been the players you “cut your teeth on” at Plainmoor.

And, although it’s good to see programmes from that era (with the hope they’ll prompt further discussion of those times), I confess the actual publications don’t quite have the fascination of an earlier period. Inevitably, that’s nostalgia on my behalf but it’s clear that – by 1980 – programmes had progressed from being newsletters to magazines. Who - for Gawd’s sake – coined that dreadful expression matchday magazine? Was it Jimmy Hill at Coventry?

As for the match itself, the date suggests I should have been there because I was doing a course in North Kent at the time. But I didn’t make it, probably because of the complex public transport arrangements needed to get back from Southend to Swanley on a Friday night. I thought it may also have been due to a loss of interest but I managed to make it to St Albans the previous Saturday. Regarding the weekend of the Roots Hall match, I slummed it at Arsenal v Manchester United on the Saturday and probably experienced great difficulty in even getting hold of our result from the Friday evening.