Summerdeep

Maybe?!!

Unsworth Out. One of the posters said these performances were making him ill, and I feel like that just following the games on the internet. I think I'd feel suicidal (or murderous) if I was actually in the stadium. I watched the end of the Jack Rowley regime in the first half of the 1969-70 season, but I doubt that it was worse than this.

Glad I don't go to matches these days. It's purgatory just following these games on the forum... Unsworth Out, by the way.

This one's now on YouTube, though it was previously available on a compendium of Colin Garwood goals.

I've always regarded the formation used by Frizzell's promotion sides in 1971 and 1974 as 4-2-4. The wingers (Heath/Bebbington and McVitie/Groves) were definitely part of the forward line in my view, but it's true they could play deeper when required and could thus also be regarded as part of the midfield. I've never heard anyone use the term 4-2-4 for a few decades now, but it was definitely a thing in the 60s and 70s. Brazil's famous World Cup winning side in 1970 lined up in 4-2-4 formation, with Gerson and Clodoaldo running the midfield and Jairzinho and Rivelino on the wings. Rivelino did play frequently as a deepish midfielder for his club sides Corinthians and Fluminense though.

No-one ever mentions 4-2-4 these days. Maybe it's a prehistoric relic from a bygone age, but it can't possibly be worse than the current formation, if half of what I'm reading is true. I've no idea what 3-5-2 is, and still don't know what a 'wing-back' is, despite the term being at least three decades old. The two sides that gained promotion in the 70s both lined up in a 4-2-4 formation. All you need is a couple of good midfielders and two effective wingers, the rest should sort itself out. It's really good to watch, when it works as well....

We lost the first game of the 1970-71 season 4-1 at Grimsby, but were promoted. Mind you, we had a proper manager back then.

^ Thanks!

So what was the final score, guys?

Hince was a player for Man City, Charlton, Bury and Crewe, where he was a teammate of Stan Bowles. He scored Bury's goal against us when we beat them 4-1 in the Manchester Senior Cup final at Boundary Park in 1970. He retired early from the game and became a journalist at the Manchester Evening News.

Jim Williams in his match report reckoned that Huddersfield played really well that day, just that nothing went right for them. I can recall Gowling missing a penalty for them in front of the Chaddy End - it came back off the inside of the post. Jim Williams, by the way, also thought that the Latics played well in their 8-1 defeat at Peterborough in 1969-70 : he felt that 9-6 would have been a better reflection of the play!

When longtime Latics fans think of the 1973-74 season, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that incredible run of ten straight wins from the New Year onwards that set us up for the promotion challenge. However, the run-in over the last five weeks of the season was pretty amazing as well. From 30 March, we went on a seven match unbeaten run, dropping just one point, culminating in four straight wins over the Easter period (sixteen goals for, one against). After the 6-0 home win against Huddersfield on 20 April, promotion was assured and everyone expected that clinching the divisional title would be a formality. As it turned out, just one win from the final four fixtures would have done the trick, but in fact we didn't even come close to winning any of them. Maybe the pressure and effort of the previous few months had caught up with the team and they began to run out of petrol, or maybe there was some easing off, who knows? Anyway, the side was comprehensively outplayed at Grimsby on 24 April, only a late consolation goal from Garwood making the game look to have been a lot closer than it was. At promotion rivals York on the following Saturday, we competed really well in a tight encounter, but didn't create one decent goalscoring chance from open play, as I recall, but there was that amazing Whittle free kick equalizer of course. Then there was the home game against Charlton three days later, when we should have clinched the title (a draw would have done it). There was a crowd of almost 19,000 and a carnival atmosphere, and the Latics piled on the pressure attacking the Chaddy end in the opening quarter of an hour, but thereafter we seemed to run out of ideas and momentum, as Charlton cruised to a 2-0 victory. They were our bogey side in this division from 1972 to 74, and won all four fixtures during this period. A guy called Arthur Horsfield always seemed to score against us! That left us needing one point from the final game at Plymouth on a Friday night to take the title on the eve of the FA Cup final. Most hardcore fans probably listened to the frequent reports by Jim Williams live on Piccadilly Radio, and my recollection from those is that it was a grim backs-to-the-wall affair for the most part, but of course we survived for a 0-0 draw. The Latics finished that season with the best ever away record by a Third Division side under the old 2 points for a win system (won 12, drew 6, lost 5), but the following season in Div 2 we couldn't notch a single away win....

Tony Bailey came to us on loan from Derby early in 1974 before signing fulltime. He replaced Dick Mulvaney in the centre of the defence, and made a big difference. He had excellent anticipation and positional awareness, and was a sort of minor Bobby Moore type. For some reason he didn't manage to establish himself in the 1974-75 season, and was offloaded to Bury after a few months, if memory serves. One interesting side-effect of Bailey's displacing Mulvaney was that Andy Lochhead became acting club captain and played a key role in geeing up the players on the pitch and generally boosting morale. I remember quite a lot of fans commenting on this at the time - take a look at the footage of the away game at York City (available on YouTube) and look at his reaction after York took the lead. Didn't realize until I read the posts here that Andy had died, by the way. Tony Hateley can also be added to the list of departed ex-Latics as well.

It's clearly a lot more difficult these days, that's for sure. When automatic relegation from the old 4th Division replaced the re-election system in the late 1980s, it was initially quite common for relegated teams to go straight back up in one season. I'm fairly sure that Lincoln City, Colchester United and Darlington did so in that era, and maybe one or two others as well?

I've read all the posts here and still don't know what the final score was. 1-0 Latics?

I was watching a YouTube video about a reunion of former Southport players in 2011, and wondered whether the guy at the bottom left of the picture might be Reg Blore. Certainly could be, IMO.

^ Reminds me of this Chaddy End song from the late 1960s, which brings us back to Alan Lawson, with a Jim Fryatt tie-in as a bonus! "There was a soldier, A Scottish soldier, And Lawson was his name, and clogging was his game. He came to Oldham, When Celtic sold him, He was victorious in battles glorious, And Barry Stobart, and Jimmy Fryatt, He sent them far away, To the infirmary!" LOL. Great days in the Chaddy End, late 60s!

The Latics strip did change to tangerine and blue in the 1966-67 season when McIlroy was the manager, and you're right that Sievwright had long since departed by then. I always thought that the change of colours was a Ken Bates inspired thing, and as far as I know he didn't have any Orange Order ideological connections. There were a significant number of Irish players at the club at this time though, most of them from the North and therefore possibly with Protestant affiliations. I'm thinking of Magee, Blair, Hunter, Smith and Johnston. I once read an anecdote about Allan Hunter when he was at Ipswich that would suggest he had very strident Paisleyite convictions. So yes, there is a possibility that McIlroy might have suggested to Bates a change to an orange strip, and that it may have had some kind of sentimental religious-cultural inspiration, but I think it's a long way from being provable at this distance in time.

That's if Sid The Manager selected him for the team, of course. Yes Suh, Mr Wright!

In my time as an active football supporter, the 'close season' was around three months (early May to early August). Now it seems to be barely two months.

According to Sievwright's Wikipedia entry, he scored 326 goals in 174 appearances for Macclesfield Town in the period 1966-72. Maybe Latics should never have released him....

I think that may have been the report on the defeat at home to Workington on Boxing Day 1969. That was probably the result which sealed Jack Rowley's fate, though he hung on until the defeat at Scunthorpe five days later. The Chaddy End was singing 'We're a load of rubbish' at regular intervals in the second half, and Keith Bebbington fired a penalty kick miles over the crossbar. Jim Williams said something in his match report about the ball coming down with snow on it....

If you listen to the interview with Les Chapman below (from the 18:45 mark), you'll hear a reference to the incident I had in mind. LOL, very entertaining! I can also vaguely remember that Williams was badly beaten up and hospitalized after being attacked somewhere in the town centre, probably in the earlier part of 1971. The Chronicle report on the incident was very sketchy and brief, and didn't make it clear whether there was any connection to his role as Latics correspondent, or whether he was just the unlucky victim of a random assault. I think he may have suffered a broken jaw or similar.

Was that the incident which led to Lawson physically attacking Williams on the team bus some time in the 1960s?

Many of the opinions here echo my own recollections. I couldn't believe it when, even before the first top-flight season had started, Royle sold Warhurst, a young, versatile, mobile player with International potential, and replaced him with an old clogger like Kilcline. I'm sure the latter gave his utmost to the club, but what sort of declaration of 'faith in the future' was that, seriously? I also seem to remember that Kilcline was purchased for the ludicrous price of around £400,000+ and sold just a few months later for not much more than half of that. I had the impression that Royle had lost the financial acumen he had possessed a few years earlier, when he routinely purchased players for bargain prices who were later sold at a huge profit, though admittedly this sort of thing was becoming increasingly difficult to pull off, especially at the top level. £750,000 for Ian Olney, folks? I suppose there are two basic takes on the Royle Premiership era. On the one hand, maybe he did as well as he could have done with a club of our resources, especially when you consider the experiences of other clubs of similar size which were promoted to the top flight in this era, eg Barnsley and Bradford City. And if Mark Hughes's volley at Wembley in 1994 had gone 18 inches higher, then who knows....? On the other hand, teams like Burnley, Ipswich and even Wimbledon were able to sustain much longer periods in the top flight in the later 20th Century.