Rightful Places

Reflecting on the fact that many commentators have found this year's Premiership campaign rather boring, on account, as I mentioned last week, of the relative success of Charlton; Birmingham; Fulham and Bolton, I concluded that it must all be a question of what you grow up with.

A very dear old friend of mine, one of only three university chums I am still in regular touch with, took great delight, at the beginning of the season now ending, in the return of Aldershot and Accrington Stanley to the weekly football results. "Nice to see proper football teams around again", he remarked. He is equally delighted by the return of Chester and Shrewsbury to the league, and a little dismayed that this is at the expense of Carlisle and York, when upstarts such as Cheltenham; Kidderminster or Rushden and Diamonds ought to be on their way. As a good Yorkshireman, he is enjoying the successes this year of Doncaster; Hull and Huddersfield; yet as a good Evertonian, he is perfectly happy about the come-uppance of Leeds United, (but then most people have hated Leeds since the Don Revie days) although he has at times been reduced almost to gibbering horror at the prospect of Everton falling out of the Premiership, as the club has been in the top division uninterruptedly since the mid-fifties, and their being anywhere else is, to him, unthinkable.

Everton, and the way in which their fans regard them, might be the subject of another bout of musing on another day, but my text for today is all this business about clubs being, or not being, as the case may be in their rightful place, or back where they belong, or whatever.

This is by no means a new phenomenon; I have seen the "X are finally back where they belong" line applied to Newcastle United after their long spell outside the top division, as well as Aston Villa and even Sheffield Wednesday. Burnley, a club I also love not a little, had it said about them in 1974, too.

No doubt there are even cruel journalists who will use the idea when traditional members of the lower divisions return there after an excursion into the higher reaches; did anyone find Rushden & Diamonds mentioned in the same paragraph as this trite notion in the past week?

For obviously, trite notion is what it is. A club belongs precisely where its performances have taken it, and nowhere else. The Leeds caretaker manager last week expressed the interesting view that "Leeds will always have a bright future because it is a big, big club and the position and respect it holds in the game means it will come back." But we don't operate our football leagues on that basis. Clubs win promotion by winning matches, not by people measuring how big they are, or by collecting the most votes in a respect poll.

I have been following league football for 40-something years, and now and again the old notion that there should be an end to promotion and relegation, and the top division should consist permanently of the 18 or 20 'biggest' clubs in England, crops up. Needless to say, all the people who write this kind of tosh appear to be of the opinion that their own favourite club would be one of this unelected elite. Equally needless to say, Charlton are never one of the ones earmarked for this, nor indeed Fulham, Birmingham or Bolton, all of whom finished in the top half of the Premiership this season.

So these four being in the top ten is 'boring' for some journos, and they should be allowed to have Leeds and West Ham back, and Man City being further up, and... who knows, maybe Sheffield Wednesday can be raised from wherever they have sunk to now; for no doubt they are well respected, and they are a big club. Well, they have a big ground, at any rate.

But I still think it is a case of what looks right. My first acquaintance with a league table was at the end of the 1956-57 season, and I have to say that I subconsciously feel that those 22 clubs are 'proper' top division sides. And no amount of success by, say, Liverpool (in Div 2 at the time), has ever really convinced me otherwise. But I still say that if you're good enough, then you can be there, which is what gives all the smaller clubs hope. Despite everything.

You can look at all tables from the past, and find a whole lot more, here

The 56-57 table is here,and when you look at it, count how many of the then Division One were in the Prem this season: I make it 14, actually. But none of them is in their 'rightful place'. They deserve to be there on merit