I am kneeling on the carpeted floor, body leaning forward, weight supported by my left arm. My right arm reaches out and around in front of me, elbow pointing away. My fingers are spread – little, ring and middle together with my thumb resting gently on the green cloth. The index finger draws back at the second knuckle and then swings rapidly downwards, striking the curved base on which the small plastic figure stands, sending it forwards before arcing right to strike the over-sized plastic sphere. It rolls perfectly into the miniature penalty area… they’re in with a chance here. The next play requires a change in position and to make that movement I lift my left knee and twist my body sideways. Disaster strikes. A momentary wobble of my left arm, supporter of much of my admittedly meagre bodyweight, causes a temporary dislocation of my foundation, a spasm of movement and the knee comes rapidly down to steady things – in the wrong place. Almost instantly there are two sources of suffering. First, there is the sharp pain as the small plastic figure drills its way into my knee; I cry out, but the sound is short-lived and soon replaced by the sharp snap as the double leg fracture of my star left winger occurs. Then, there is the sorrow of knowing that another body will be entering the treatment room to be patched back together with model adhesive but forever to display the tell-tale signs – the bulges of glue where shin bones have been re-sealed, the slight sideways lean, the almost imperceptible loss of height. That star left winger will always now be known as ‘Stumpy’.
If, like me, you were a football-crazy child in the 1970s then you will almost certainly have experienced something akin to the experience described above. For in the 1970s, before the days when football matches were a form of wall-to-wall, constantly available televisual anaesthetic, we had to make do with the once-a-year spectacle of the FA Cup Final, the sometimes stay-up-late drama of Match of the Day or the post-Sunday lunch treat of The Big Match. And this meant that if we wanted to experience the cut-and-thrust, ebb-and-flow and thrills-and-spills of Liverpool taking on Manchester United we had to create them ourselves, on a piece of green cloth spread on floor or table, with 22 plastic figures, a small plastic ball and a set of goals. This was the world of Subbuteo Table Football.
I must have been about 8-10 years old when I encountered Subbuteo. The details of my first brush with the game can only be described as sketchy at best and for this reason, looking back from my adult vantage point, I suspect that some of them are more imagined than real. My best friend at the time, the wonderfully and uniquely-named (in my experience) Jago, who actually played real football for a real team (something which was almost incomprehensible to me, coming as I did from a completely non-football-interested family) had a Subbuteo set. Or perhaps he was going to get one; or perhaps he wasn’t… perhaps it wasn’t him after all but someone else or several someone elses at school. Yes, the details are somewhat sketchy. Whatever the trigger, and there must have been such a trigger because there is zero chance that I discovered Subbuteo in isolation, Subbuteo found its way into my childhood.
My recollection of my introduction to Subbuteo takes a somewhat strange and rather cruel direction and repeating this story now I can’t help but wonder whether I have things right. I believe that I was given a Subbuteo set by my parents as a birthday present. If I was, it would have been the Club Edition – the standard set containing pitch, two goals, two teams, three small balls and a set of corner and halfway flags. In this set, one team wears a basic blue shirt and white shorts combination and the other sports red shirts and white shorts. Thus an imaginative youngster can, for example, play as Everton or Portsmouth or Rochdale with the blues and Manchester United or Charlton Athletic or Barnsley with the reds. My memory tells me that on opening this set my parents were not sufficiently impressed with the value for money it provided and so a decision was made that the set was going back to the shop and an alternative plan would be put in place to enable this football-mad child to indulge what would surely be a passing phase. I certainly recall being in the upstairs room of a shop and my remembered narrative is that we were returning the set but looking back into the misty past it seems inconceivable that this could really have been the course of events. We might have gone into that shop to look at sets and at that point, prior to purchase, the parental decision not to purchase was made, or we might have been in that shop to purchase some of the separate components that would become part of my own, home-made, set. On reflection, both of these possibilities seems not only possible but actually likely. Both would certainly be less cruel than presenting and then removing a birthday present in the way that I initially recall events. Forty to fifty years on I have no way of finding out the truth.
What is certain is that I never did have the Subbuteo Club Edition as a child and so I never owned the thin green, slightly shiny, pitch cloth with white printed markings, the regulation goals, the two teams with the basic blue/red shirt and white shorts kit combos. This stung me at the time and, unreasonably, I have been smarting from that sting ever since. Instead, what I had was a mother-made pitch with line markings zig-zag stitched in white cotton into a heavier, deeper green-coloured piece of cloth, cut and measured and marked to exactly the same size as the official one. Every child knows that there is no substitute version for the specific branded item that they want as a Christmas or birthday present and any parent who has tried to buck that rule will probably know it too, but now, many years later, it is time for me to confess that my unique pitch was in many ways better than the ‘proper’ one. The additional heaviness of the cloth meant that the playing surface smoothed out much better and the darker colour was smarter and simply much more grass-like. True, the stitched lines did sit ever so slightly proud of the surface, especially in those places where corners were turned or joins were made causing the weight of stitches to increase, but this was just something that had to be taken into account occasionally during play. To accompany my home-made pitch I needed goals and because these were bought separately I ended up with a set of ‘World Cup’ goals, presumably modelled on those used in the 1974 World Cup in Germany. Again, with sheepish hindsight, I confess that these were better, more solid, more exotic than the basic goals of the Club Edition. So far so good.
It was the teams that disappointed; more precisely one of the teams. I suspect that my first teams were whatever the shop had going and probably were cheapest on offer. I don’t have a clear memory of one of my first two teams – there is a vague recollection that it might have been Barnsley – but the other team? Well that was the mighty Bangor, with apologies of any fans of ‘The Seasiders’, Northern Ireland’s not so finest. Who, in 1974, at the age of say 9 years old, had heard of Bangor? And what sort of team plays in a kit that consists of yellow shirts with blue sleeves and black shorts anyway? I suggest the answers to those questions are ‘pretty much no-one’ and ‘none of any significance’; and to the first question again: ‘certainly not me’.
Subbuteo proved to be more than a passing phase for me. Over the next several years I gradually built my supplies. There were more teams – Liverpool appeared one Christmas morning and a successful raid on a jumble sale afforded the possibility of imaginary trips to Scotland for the Edinburgh derby with the deep purple-maroon shirts of Hearts of Midlothian and, one of my all-time favourites, the white-sleeved green shirts of Hibernian. At my ‘peak-Subbuteo’ I perhaps had as many as eight teams but they were always changing, as armed with enamel model paints and fine tipped brushes, I set to work. Over time, players put on weight as layers of colour were added, flesh and hair was re-tinted and black boots ‘polished’ (yes, always black boots).
Then there were the accessories – corner and line flags (who didn’t snap these?), a referee and linesman set (completely pointless and just got in the way of play), stick on shirt numbers, the TV camera tower, the green, picket-fence style pitch surround, a set of six ball boys resplendent in yellow tracksuits with red stripes down their arms (completely useless for actually retrieving the ball) and best of all, the scoreboard, with rotating dials to show the goals scored and two slots for insertion of whichever of the multitude of small printed card slips displaying team names were in play. There were many other accessories and as a child who would spend hours poring over catalogues I certainly knew about and wanted all of them – the FA Cup, throw-in taking figures, corner taking figures, working floodlights and eventually, in a move that presaged the stadium building phase of modern football, the grandstand.
Eventually, by sometime in my early teens, my pitch was pinned permanently to a perfectly-sized low table that had once been home to my brother’s model railway. I pinned on a cardboard edge to form a pitch surround complete with advertising hoardings leaving a two or three inch strip of surface on either flank. At each end there was space for the goal and at one end enough extra room for my piece-de-resistance, a terraced stand lovingly crafted and painted from an old cardboard box. This set-up sat in the corner of my bedroom and was the battle-ground for huge knock-out tournaments with me playing both teams, one predominantly right-handed, the other left-handed in what must have given games some approximation to home advantage. For whilst Subbuteo is designed to be a game for two players, pitting their wits and their skills against each other in friendly rivalry, almost all of my matches were played out as me versus me.
My knock-out tournaments were huge affairs and for these the card tabs of the match scoreboard really came into their own. I would shuffle them all up and then draw them out one-by-one, building a complete set of fixtures as I did so. The cards were laid out on the floor in pairs and then the matches started, winners of fixture one playing winners of fixture two, each round progressing with ever decreasing numbers until eventually, there it was, the grand final pairing. I don’t remember any strong favouritism coming in to play but I am sure that the referee’s decisions on matters such as penalties or offside were not always without bias and stoppage time at the end of matches would certainly have been ‘fluid’. A tournament of this kind with, say, 64 teams at the outset would have comprised 63 separate matches and so must have lasted several days – clearly long enough to burn into my memory – just me in my own little world of football, right hand, left hand, back and forth, shoulders aching and knees numbing.
Rarely, I would play against someone other than myself, but this was never satisfactory. My main opponent of the time was a family friend who had no real interest in football and so I would always win. There was also a brief spell when for some reason we were not allowed to remain in secondary school at lunchtimes during which I would go to the house of a classmate. His Subbuteo set up was in the attic of their house (so exotic to someone who had never been in the roof space of a house before) and we’d flick players around for a few minutes before heading back to school for afternoon lessons. But really, for me, Subbuteo was a realm for individual, personal immersion – a chance to escape to victory and defeat away from prying eyes.
At some point, all of my Subbuteo teams and accessories went the same way as my Action Man, my model cars and sundry other items, sold on as I entered my mid/late teens to provide funds for my burgeoning interest in home computers. But clearly the attachment remained strong, so strong in fact that at some point in the late 1990s, presumably after me making much mention of it, my wife bought me a brand-new set as a wedding anniversary present. Finally, at the age of 30-something, I owned the Club Edition complete with its basic goals, its oh-so-breakable corner flags, its boring team kits and its horrible, sub-standard, thin and shiny pitch. That set now resides in the loft along with the extra Plymouth Argyle team (sporting the classic 1993/94 Peter Shilton’s ‘Nearly Men’ kit with green and white striped shirts and black shorts) that was received later as another present. I must confess that it has been little played. As an adult, I noticed much more my team bias in play and I simply didn’t possess the patience to let a game unfold or the ability to put up with the strain of reaching and leaning and shuffling around from a kneeling position on the floor. Despite this lack of action, I must confess that many, many times in recent years I have found myself scrolling through the online marketplace just a finger’s flick away from re-uniting myself with the pitch surround, the TV tower or the scoreboard and once I gazed in horror at a particular Completed Item – the Bangor team, in box, sold for £165…
The big hand in the sky has reached down and lifted the star winger from the field. He must wait until the final whistle has blown before taking his turn on the operating board. Despite horrific injuries he will return to play again as ‘Stumpy’, with the slight lean and lower centre of gravity that will give him the ability to turn in ways that none of his teammates can. But back to the action on the pitch…
…the ball lies just inside the penalty area… my right hand reaches across and lines up behind the number 10 while my left arm extends further, twisting round to allow my hand to grasp the small green plastic handle that emerges behind the goal. Both arms tense. This is the moment. Flick. Jerk. The rod swings across and clatters the goalkeeper, arms ever stretching upwards, against the near post – that collision would certainly have hurt in real life. But the ball has gone the other way, and there it is, nestled neatly in the far corner of the goal. With stoppage time complete the referee blows his silent whistle and the unthinkable has happened… The small dial on the scoreboard is turned, the number appears, the shock of the century has happened: Manchester United – 0 Southport 1. The Sandgrounders have had their day.
(c) Tim O’Hare, January 2024 (originally written in 2021)
and a writer 