Relegation means the weekely seven decades quiz becomes. a little harder to compile because, generally speaking, third tier players are hardly household names and, with so many of the teams we’ll be playing next season spending the majority of the last sixty years or so in the lower reaches of the EFL, there won’t be too many Bolton’s and Reading’s around (i.e. teams that have been used to competing in. the top two divisions for so long that theu have a large number of famous players I can use to provide easyish questions about).
However, a set of mostly new grounds for City to visit in the next year or so does give me a chance to do my first grounds quiz in a while. Regular readers will be aware of the format, but for anyone who isn’t, here are photo’s of grounds all twenty four League One sides for the com ing season have played at as their home venue at some time or another in their history. As that implies, the pictures may not be of the club’s current stadium and all you have to do is name the club that has played at the pictured ground – I’ll give additional clues if I think they are required and the answers will be posted on here over the weekend.
1.
Apparently, this photo was taken in the late 40s, just before the ground was opened.
2.
City are the visiting team in this picture taken at a current League One side’s former ground..
3.
A nice, easy one.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
This ground is still in use today.
10.
11.
This photo is more than fifty years old and is of a pre season cup competition game against Manchester United.
12.
13.
14.
This photo was taken in the 80s, so the ground shown had not been hosting league football for long at that time.
15.
Someone in this photo went on to manage England.
16.
17.
These people were not queuing for a football match, it was to watch Elton John.
18..
19.
This station. is adjacent to the ground.
30.
This picture was taken around sixty years ago at the fourth ground this club have had as a home, they still play there.
21.
22.
The team in question would have been playing at this ground when they lost to City in an FA Cup tie in the 70s.
23.
24.
Answers.
- Port Vale.
- Belle Vue, Doncaster. The photo is from a game between Doncaster and City in December 1993.
- Kenilworth Road, Luton.
- Millmoor, Rotherham.
- County Ground, Northampton.
- Edgeley Park, Stockport.
- Ninian Park, Cardiff.
- Valley Parade, Bradford.
- Bloomfield Road, Blackpool.
- Leeds Road, Huddersfield
- Elm Park, Reading – the photo was taken at a Watney Cup game against Manchester United in 1970.
- Broadhall Way, Stevenage.
- London Road, Peterborough.
- Springfield Park, Wigan.
- Graham Taylor talking to schoolchildren at Sincil Bank, Lincoln when he was manager of the club in the seventies.
- Cherry Red Records Stadium, Wimbledon.
- Crowds queue to enter Home Park, Plymouth for an Elton John concert there on 26 May 2007.
- Pirelli Stadium, Burton.
- It’s St James Park station in Exeter.
- Brisbane Road, Leyton Orient.
- The L.S. Lowery painting “Going to the Match” depicted the crowds heading for Burnden Park, Bolton.
- Loakes Park, the former home of Wycombe Wanferers.
- Field Mill, Mansfield
- Oakwell, Barnsley.
Gee Paul…hats off to you for the EFFORT you have put in here. There are very few that I can identify.
And SPOILER ALERT…
anyone who fails to get #13, should be flogged for not studying the pic long enough…!!
TTFN,
Dai
Well, I’ve spent about five minutes looking at it Dai and can’t find anything which gives away the club, but that might well be because I really do need a new pair of glasses!
OMG Paul…
I am having a laughing fit here. I haven’t laughed so much since my LSD trips back in the summer of 1971.
Oh don’t get me wrong… this is a ‘mea culpa’ alright. But even you will realise why I am laughing so uncontrollably at your reply, when you read my explanation for my error. Here goes…
A standard feature of group acid trips was on the surface puerile in the extreme, but undeniably funny. The pseudo ‘hippy commune’ I used to live in… had several Sat night/Sunday morning alfresco ‘trips’, where we would all stare at trees and watch them turn into moving giant animals in the breeze, and fall about laughing at three o’clock in the middle of the night in a deserted New Forest, where we had just the light of the moon to combat the blackness.
Other times we would stare at carpets and watch the patterns change in front of our eyes. Or LP covers like Dylan’s John Wesley Harding… looking for the Fab Four camouflaged in the trees… and laughing triumphantly when being the first to find them… oh happy days…!!
And it was the last mentioned memory that made me laugh at your ‘5 minutes staring’ at pic 13, waiting for it to yield up some magic evidence.
I could not have made a better choice of photo to make a mistake over, could I now? Because #13 undoubtedly could have been of the Sahara Desert… and it would have offered up the same possibilities of linking it to the club concerned…!!
And so Paul, your witty suggestion that you need go to Specsavers, really tickled me.
But the fact is that at the bottom of ‘my’ picture, I spotted the number ‘13’… and made the mistake of thinking it referred to what I was seeing above… whereas of course to any logical soul like you, it referred to the photo BELOW it.
Apols for sending you and other MAYAns on a wild goose chase.
Thus I should have referred to photo 12, not 13.
Still… I am glad I have made the error, as it has been a long time since I have laughed like I have this morning.
TTFN,
Dai.
Someone read your latest message before me Dai and so was a bit baffled to have it pointed out to me on a messageboard that you had meant picture 12. I was pretty sure I’d read all of your earlier message, but assumed that I couldn’t have done so and now, when I click on here and look for messages that have been sent in the past twenty four hours, I find an explanation to the situation as I read your latest message for the first time! I see what you mean about picture 12, but the identity of the club takes a bit of finding and so I don’t think what I have done falls into the major howler category – as I mentioned on the messageboard, it was hard to find many pictures of that ground which did not make it fairly obvious who played there, but I hope I’m making a joke here rather than telling a truth when I say I’ll have to be extra vigilant when.doing one for League 2 grounds in a year’s time!
Paul,
I decided to have a real go at this quiz after making my comments and you responding.
Now, given that I am still blushing from my numbering error above, I am going to make doubly sure that I don’t repeat such errors in this answer of mine here.
Initially I just had 5 ‘certs’… numbers 3, 7, 12, 15 and 21.
So what I did was looked at the Div 1 table for next season , and crossed out the names of the clubs I had guessed. Then started looking for clues.
I got Plymouth from the bottle green paneling on the stand’s exterior. I got Stockport from the initials on the bobble hats. I got Barnsley from the Barnsley Football Club sign painted on the side of the stand (seen through the trees). I got Northampton from the sight-screen… and knowing that they used to play county cricket there at the County Ground. I got Wimbledon from the recent sinkhole publicity. I got Wigan from your clue re their entry to the Football League, and my knowledge that they used to play at Springfield Bank. I got Bradford from the strip, and Huddersfield’s Leeds Road from the topography… and memories of King John giving me and my mate Graham Pritchard from Trebanog two tickets in the Leeds Road grandstand which he asked young Gareth Williams to give us, as Charlo had used up his own allocation on his Leeds based family and friends.
Both boyhood idols of mine have now left us alas… but Gareth sadly got sent off in our narrow defeat.
Some answers did surprise me when you presented them.
I would never have guessed Rotherham’s Millmoor, as I have watched City play there and had no memory of entering an area of industrial dereliction with its whiff of gangland executions…!! Gosh the photo makes it look menacing.
Port Vale was fascinating… your answer surprised me, as the pic had not the smoke from the kilns of the Burslem potteries I would have expected… and it reminded me that Vale Park was genuinely conceived – if not built – as a ‘Wembley of the North’. Alas the money did not back up the fine words… however its playing surface was for many years the best for many miles around.
Peterborough I should have guessed from the blue paint… instead of which I thought the Posh was #23… not spotting the touches of yellow in that stand… which should have told me it was Mansfield, not The Posh.
As for Exeter, Blackpool, Wycombe, Reading they surely would be guesswork for 99% of us?
What did stun me was Burton. Who knew their stadium was built in a modern housing estate? A rhetorical question… I jest of course.
TTFN,
Dai
Thanks to Mike and Dai for their responses Mike, although he’s 30, my guess is that Millwall will still want Jake Cooper for a season or two more yet – I weas going to say that he’d still be the first name on the team sheet when it comes to defenders, but they’ve got that ex Spurs lad (Tandanda?) now haven’t they and he’s a fine player at Championship level.
Regarding kits, the name of this blog tells you that kits do matter to me, but I suppose what grates with me is that we have this annual ritual where some people get terribly excited about something which, when all’s said and done is a slight variant on what we normally wear. We switch from white to blue shorts every now and then, but, as for the shirts, I never remember them past the one season when we wore them and had no idea of the sponsor’s name until we started using the inane “Visit Malaysia’.
For me, that kit from the mid 70s was a departure, hence people remember it – it’s no coincidence either that one shirt I can remember from the last forty years or so was the one with white sleeves that we wore for a season oe two in the late nineties – while it was the usual blue and white, it was distinctive in a way the shirts we usually wear are not.
Going on to the Admiral mkits of the 70s, while the piping gave them that distinctiveness (I particularly remember Coventry’s brown away kit) I wasn’t a fan. Maybe it was because I thought they were too cluttered and commercial. I can remember a lot of criticism when England started wearing Admiral kits because it was believed that the country’s kit was sacrosanct, but that wasn’t why I never liked, or bought, the Wales Admiral kit – I just thought there was too much “going on’ with it.
A few responses to your comments about the quiz Dai. Try as I might, I can’t see a Barnsley FC or anything like that on photo 24. As for some of the others, I never saw a game at Millmoor, but I can remember going past it at very close range on a train one Sunday on my way back from the Scotland v Wales 5 Nations game in 1987 and what struck me then was that it looked exactly the sort of place where gangland executions might take place! Maybe it all depended on something like what side of the ground you were looking from? I take your point about some of the grounds being down to guesswork, but I think it’s fairly well known that Exeter’s ground has a station close by and Blackpool’s ground has always struck me as having dingy stands (or it did at least before the recent improvements to the ground)
Paul, compadre…
This is like a replay from Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW UP… a film easily making my TOP TEN MOVIES OF THE 1960s.
The unforgettable scene where David Hemmings blows up the picture of the trees looking for evidence of the gun…
Oh what a scene that is… and a hallmark of Antonioni’s genius is the way he so atmospherically uses the sound of the wind blowing the branches as his only soundtrack in this quite compelling scene.
https://tinyurl.com/3c635hyn
[So, Dai… your point is…? How does this relate to Paul’s comment re pic 24?]
Paul… do a David Hemmings and look through the tree at the bottom of the hill and you can clearly see the truncated words BARNSL FOOTBA.
You will remember your delicious response to my daft numbering error, viz… ‘Well, I’ve spent about five minutes looking at it Dai and can’t find anything which gives away the club, but that might well be because I really do need a new pair of glasses!’
Hope that wasn’t a self-fulfilling prophesy…!!
Before closing… a couple of more mundane points.
1. My visit to watch City at Millmoor was 1975-6… half a century ago. Between my visit and you going past 12 years later… my hunch is that the de-industrialisation of Britain – so famously a hallmark of the decade of the Miners’ Strike – was moving at a particularly savage pace in Rotherham. (Glad you liked my image of gangland executions…!!)
2. As for it ‘being fairly well known’ that Exeter have a railway station nearby the ground… you will have to make allowances for my ignorance. I had no idea… though I have spent quite a bit of time visiting Exeter down the years and could find my way to Exeter St Davids station blindfolded. But crucially I have never seen a game at their stadium, which judging from the telly down the years, seem to have a lot of private houses close by… seemingly with good views of at least a large section of the pitch.
TTFN,
Dai.
Paul,
Have you ‘done your David Hemmings’ yet on pic 24…?
Hope so. I am worried you won’t confirm the validity of my interpretation… and will thus convince me it was an optical illusion on my part…
… and that I was suffering from an acid flashback from 1971…!!
DW
Just had another look Dai and I can make out the letters “SLE”, but, to a casual glance, the faded white lettering looks more like a window to me. The previous picture quiz I did included a shot of the old Ayresome Park which had the words Middlesbrough prominently placed in it. That was a howler on my part, but I’m much more relaxed about pictures 12 and 24 in this quiz, because the club name takes a fair bit of finding in both photos (especially no. 24).
I’ve now seen the magnified version of picture 24 which confirms the name of the club concerned did appear in it. However, I stick to my view which is that if it requires magnification tools for someone to clearly see the name of the club in one of my picture quizzes, then so be it. Although I try to avoid mistakes like the one regarding Middlesbrough I made in the previous quiz I set, I’m not going to start scouring any photos I use with a magnifying tool to see if i’m giving people the answer somewhere in the photo.
Paul compadre,
Here is a David Hemmings ‘blow up’ I have made of the sign.
https://tinyurl.com/5d6u8nhv
I rest my case, m’Lud…
TTFN,
Dai.