A Game in Hand is Worth...?

In the summer of 1965, there was a polio outbreak in Blackburn. I was living in a village about 15 miles away, and I remember everyone being very reluctant to go anywhere near the place, including a rather voluble young lady called Olive, one of our neighbours, who was a bus conductress based at Chorley depot, and who was a leading light in a campaign to get the bus company to stop running buses to Blackburn, or at any rate buses with Chorley crews on them. I don't think, in the end, she was successful in this, and I think I also remember there being a simple oral vaccine on a couple of lumps of sugar, which made it safe to go to Blackburn again, if one wished to do so.

One side effect of all this, however, was that when the football season started round about the third week in August, Blackburn Rovers were not allowed to play any matches at home, and this prohibition was then extended to all games, just in case. I cannot remember when their season eventually got going, but it was some weeks after everyone else. This meant that they were always a lot of points behind the others, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they ended the season with 20 points and went down, not returning to the top division for some years. As I have stated before, I do not like the club, so I was quite pleased that they went down, but I did see that they almost had no chance from the very beginning. If you start your season when even the next-to-bottom club (you, obviously, being the bottom one) have 10, or maybe 15 points, then there is going to be a psychological effect on players, and people are always going to feel that a few games in hand may not necessarily translate to points, and then there is the fact that a glance at the league table shows you are bottom, even though you may have done nothing to deserve it, or, as in Blackburn's case, nothing at all.

I am thinking of Blackburn's non-start to the 1965-66 season because of a stupid headline on this evening's Soccernet page. The title of the story is 'The deadly dozen' which makes you wonder momentarily if you haven't strayed on to a website dealing with ghastly American popular films. However, reading on reveals that the headline refers to the fact that Chelsea's win today puts them 12 points ahead of Manchester United. But this is just nonsense. Using 'deadly' rather implies that now Chelsea cannot be caught, and this may well be the case; however, Manchester United play their game at Manchester City tomorrow, and Chelsea of course won't be playing, so by tomorrow night the difference may well be back to 9 points again, so why bother making an issue out of an artificial situation where one club has played and another will play the next day? And yet points in the hand are better than games in, er... hand. Chelsea have got their three points, and Man U. have to play for theirs knowing that even if they win, they will only be back where they were, in terms of the relative positions of the two clubs.

It is also for this reason that I find it most irritating that three Premiership games were summarily rearranged to clear the decks for 4th Round Cup replays today. The Tottenham - West Brom replay meant that the Charlton - Tottenham Premiership game was postponed, to a date as yet unannounced, and Newcastle and Southampton were similarly affected. When these league games do take place, it will be in midweek, possibly after a hard weekend, with players who are not as fresh as they would have been after a week without a game. There is also the dread possibility that ground might be lost, and dropping down the table is every bit as annoying when it happens through postponements; as I say, games in hand are not always a consolation. Fortunately, the lie of the current Premiership table means that Spurs were the only team who could have overtaken Charlton today anyway, and Liverpool losing at Birmingham and Bolton's 0-0 draw with Middlesbrough, and of course Everton's defeat at home to Chelsea, are all quite welcome results from Charlton's point of view.

Returning to the subject of silly newspaper headlines, I recall many years ago being in the south of Spain with friends, on the first Sunday of the football season, which in Spain is in early September. We bought a Sunday paper, and I discovered that there had in fact been one game the night before, involving local club Sevilla, and which Sevilla had won 1-0. There was a full league table, complete with columns of noughts, showing Sevilla at the top with 2 points, and everyone else below them, with 0 points, and with the exception of their defeated opponents (can't remember who they were), no games played either. And there was a huge banner headline proclaiming Sevilla's leadership of the Spanish League.

The quiz doesn't operate on a league basis, but if it did, I suspect we would be top of it, after a fairly resounding win last Monday. And I didn't even resort to the book of spells, either. The next quiz in two days' time is to be given by two of our team, and I have been sounding out possible reserve players. We shall see.