A question on Saturday’s opponents from each of the last seven decades. I’ll post the answers on matchday morning.
60s. Born in a place which sounds like a parent in good health, this crowd pleaser signed for Birmingham at the age of eighteen, but found it hard to break into the first team there and it was only after he moved south two years later that his career flourished. Much more of a regular choice in his new surroundings, he acquired a reputation as something of a big match player, scoring the opening goal in a famous win which ranked as one of the best in club history at the time and making the difference for his team in a goal laden winner takes all game. His departure to unsteady whites resulted in an alliterative nickname and after three years with them, he left for foreign, and distant, shores where I believe he lives to this day – who is he?
70s. Very much a west Midlands man, this full back, who was “adept at back peddling” according to Wikipedia, won promotions with each of his first three clubs. He stayed with his first club for eight years apart from an unusual occurrence when it crossed the Atlantic Ocean only to return again a few months later. Birmingham was his second club and when he left after three years early in this decade, he had played over sixty times for them. He next turned up at a club which underwent a kit change from the plain to the exotic while he was there. Leaving them in 1976, the final few years of his playing careersaw him zigzagging the ocean again to play for a variety of clubs of which only a left sided valley played in the Football League. His managerial career, which ended with Stafford Rangers, didn’t amount to much, but there aren’t many who could say their first international cap came in an 8-3 win, can you name him?
80s. Pander to BBC soap opera initially and you get Birmingham midfielder (4,4).
90s. Danger, so iron returns to Cardiff (3,9).
00s. Flinty outhouse?
10s. Who is this member of a Birmingham squad beaten here during this decade?
20s. It’s not happened in six hours and fifty nine minutes, and counting, but could do at St. Andrews on Saturday, what am I talking about?
Answers.
60s. Motherwell born winger Greg Farrell signed for Birmingham in 1962, but only played four times for them in his two years at St. Andrews. Signed by Cardiff City for a modest fee, Farrell turned into a mercurial performer who was absolutely brilliant on his day and, sometimes, pretty awful when it wasn’t. He was at Cardiff for three years and is now referred to by some City fans as “Fingers”! His finest moment in a Cardiff shirt was when he ripped Middlesbrough to shreds in an end of season game that would see the loser relegated as he scored one and made four in City’s 5-3 win – Farrell also scored the first goal when City went to holders Sporting Lisbon in the 64/65 Cup Winners’ Cup and won 2-1, before completing the job with a goalless draw in the second leg. Farrell ended his career in the UK playing for Bury before emigrating to South Africa.
70s. Bobby Thompson played nearly three hundred times for Wolves between 1961 and 1969. Two years before he left them, he played twelve times for the Los Angeles Wolves who had a novel approach to recruitment in that they imported whole teams from Europe and South America to represent them! Thompson was part of the Birmingham squad which was promoted to the First Division in 1972 and when he achieved the same feat with Luton Town (who changed kits from white and black to orange and black in 1973) it meant he had achieved an unusual career hat trick following Wolves’ promotion in 1967. Port Vale were the final league club for a player who won the first of eight England caps in an 8-3 beating of Northern Ireland in 1963.
80s. Dean Peer.
90s. Ian Rodgerson.
00s. Stern John.
10s. Cohen Brammal was an unused sub for Birmingham in their 3-2 defeat here in March 2018, now playing for Colchester, he has been linked to City during this transfer window.
20s. Joe Mason’s forty first minute goal to secure a 1-0 win on New Years Day 2013 was the last one scored by a Cardiff player at St. Andrews – we have played four times there since then without finding the net.
