TRIMMED SQUADS, POSTPONED GAMES, THE DUKE AND COVID

Covid is taking its toll and matches are being postponed all over, but some teams are turning out with trimmed squads and drawing on youngsters from their youth teams. One wonders how this will reflect eventually on the final league tables, promotions etc.

Football On This Day 21st December 1996, Middlesbrough were due visit Blackburn Rovers on this day in 1996, for a Premier League match but the fixture was called off by Boro, as they had 23 players unavailable because of illness, injury and suspension. No permission was given for the postponement by the Premier League though and Middlesbrough were fined £50,000 and docked three points. They were relegated at the seasons' end - just two points short of safety!

There isn't always universal agreement as to whether a match should be postponed. In March 1974, Halifax Town and Exeter City asked the Football League to postpone matches because their respective playing squads had been decimated by injury and illness. In Exeter's case they had medical certificates for 9 unfit players which left them with just 9 fit players, two of them goalkeepers. Halifax were given permission to postpone their Division 3 match at Bournemouth on Saturday March 30th 1974. Exeter, however, were refused permission to call off their matches against Peterborough the same day and Scunthorpe 3 days later. So, they played and lost, their home match against Peterborough but refused to travel to Scunthorpe to fulfil their Division 4 fixture at the Old Showground scheduled for Tuesday April 2nd. 

There was speculation that Exeter's punishment might be expulsion from the Football League, but later in April it was announced that the Devon side had been fined £5000 for not fulfilling the fixture and in addition were ordered to compensate Scunthorpe £1094 for the lost gate receipts and expenses. In those days it was a massive sum for a Division 4 side to pay. Uniquely the two points were awarded to Scunthorpe and the match was not ordered to be played. At the time it was the only fixture in Football League history that was never played, a record that was the last for 45 years, that match being the Bolton v Brentford League 1 fixture in 2018/19.

Back in the 1946/47 season West Ham United were due to make the long trip to Newcastle for a Division 2 fixture on March 8th 1947. However the match was called off because of a frozen pitch - but Newcastle forgot to tell the Londoners. West Ham spent £77 (bear in mind the date) travelling to St James Park, in the Nofrth-east, but when they arrived at the ground the place was deserted!

Thankfully many serious infectious diseases spread by person to person contact are a thing of the past in this country. But there was a time when football matches were postponed to prevent large crowds gathering and spreading disease. Past examples of this were at Blackburn in 1965/66 due to a polio outbreak  and Middlesbrough in 1897/98 because of smallpox.

A significant part of the financial losses of a postponement can be the cost of the wasted programmes. If the date of re-arranged fixture is close to the postponed match, often the same programme is used with a supplement added to update the club news and squad details. If a new programme is printed the original one will have a value to collectors. 

One particularly rare single-sheet programme was auctioned in 2005 and sold for £320. The match was due to have been played in occupied Guernsey on June 8th 1943 but became the only match in the British Isles ever to have been called off by the Nazis. Guernsey side Les Vauxbelets Old Boys Association was due to have played a Continental XI consisting of slave workers who had been brought into the Channel Islands from various parts of occupied Europe, but the Germans wouldn't allow it to take place. Did it give the idea for the film 'The Great Escape', I Wonder?

TWO rare football programmes from the "Occupation" have emerged which show that "slave labourers" had a team to take on Guernsey’s top side – but the match was eventually blocked by the German authorities. The programme for the match that did happen between "Occupation Champions" Vauxbelets Old Boys' Association, is on the left. 

On the right is the programme for the VOBA v A Continental XI made up from "slave labourers" that didn't take place.

The Vauxbelets Old Boys Association, who were the ‘Occupation champions’, were due to play the ‘Continental XI’ on 8 June 1943 at Beau Sejour. The ‘Continental XI’ was made up of men who had been brought to the island to build Hitler’s Atlantic Wall and carry out other engineering projects, such as constructing the Underground Hospital. The team was made up of six Spaniards, three Belgians and two Frenchmen. However the match never went ahead, despite the programme being produced, because at the eleventh hour the Germans decided that it was ‘verboten’.

Historians have speculated that the Germans may have been fearful that the slave labourers would attempt to escape, plus mixing with the locals and developing solidarity was not encouraged. Instead another team called ‘Island XI’ was drafted in as a replacement, and they surprisingly beat the Guernsey champions 4-2. After the war, Len Duquemin, born in Cobo, Guernsey, who played for the VOBA, went on to play for Tottenham Hotspur and scored 134 goals in 307 games. So elegant was his play that he was known as The Duke. He played for Spurs between 1946-57, 274 apps and 114 goals and contributed to Spurs winning the Second Division title in 1950 and the Spurs' 1951 First Division championship title, alongisde Bill Nicholson and Alf Ramsey.

The game that did not go ahead is the most interesting from a historical perspective because historians believe it reveals something about the culture of the time. Only two other copies of the ‘Continental XI’ programme are known to exist.

‘Wartime football programmes are a specialist field because there are some people who do collect them and they reveal a lot about social history.'

‘Some of the match programmes have air raid warnings on them and evacuation routes and people were encouraged to recycle the paper for the war effort, so you can see why they are so rare. ‘Of course, this match was on the Channel Islands, which were the only occupied British soil during the Second World War, so it’s been fascinating looking at them and finding out about them and cataloguing them.’

The match was played in aid of The Star newspaper’s help the children fund. At that time the newspaper was censored by the Nazis and it reported that the teams were ‘revised’ because of ‘circumstances which could not have been foreseen’.