As ever, the whole world (sort of) was able to watch, live, every moment, every emotion, every analytical replay, of last night’s Euro football final. Everything, absolutely everything, was instant, for all to see, with all the full reports and comments following not far behind after it was finished.
Once upon a time, there was another “football final.” That was the name of the Saturday evening edition of the Plymouth-based Evening Herald newspaper.
Its arrival, at around eight o’clock on a Saturday night, would be eagerly awaited by a crowd of 40 or 50 football fans in Falmouth town centre.
The newspaper was packed full of football results and early reports from matches nationally and locally. Much of its content – a good three hours after the final whistles had blown - was the first its followers knew about their teams’ performances that day.
As well as my day job as Falmouth Packet staff reporter around that time – late 1960s/early ‘70s – I was also a hungry freelancer.
Among others, I would supply the Football Final with a 150-word half-time report on every Falmouth Town home match and then the result.
No instant laptop e-links, no mobiles, in those days, of course. So how did I do it? Well, as the game was under way, I would be furiously jotting down shorthand notes for my “full” match report in the following week’s Packet.
But towards the end of that first half, I would also be writing out – on another page of my notebook and in legible (I hoped) longhand – that half-time report.
The moment the ref blew for the break, I would rip out that page and hand it to Janet, my long-suffering wife.
She would then leave the ground, rush up the hill to the nearest public phone kiosk, in Kergilliack Road, and dictate my report to an Evening Herald copy-taker in Plymouth. Then I’d do the same with the result when the 90 minutes were up.
Came the day when the club took a giant technological leap forward and (fanfare) installed a land-line phone on the ground!
So Janet no longer had to dash up that hill to the kiosk.
But the breakthrough wasn’t without its downside.
Another of my freelance outlets was the Sunday Independent (alas, as with the Football Final, now sadly no more).
For them (are you reading this, John Collings?), I would supply a 200-word match report. That would have to be in by six o’clock, latest.
So, especially when a match had seriously over-run, rather than driving home and writing and phoning my report over from there, I would do it all while I was still at Bickland Park. All the more appropriate if I had to check a few things first and maybe get some after-match quotes.
But as for that “downside” . . .
The new phone was located in the corridor at the rear of the main grandstand and players’ dressing rooms complex.
And because it was a more reflective match report, as opposed to the blow-by-blow nature of the half-term offering, there were times when – perish the thought – my beloved Town had played badly, maybe even LOST!
I had to tell it like it was, of course, and yes, there would be times when members of the Falmouth team on the receiving end of my verbal barrage would walk right by me just as I was filing my copy and spelling it all out.
With sick-as-a-parrot emotions still running high, or rather low, it was not unusual for me to be told, mid-filing: “Don’t talk ****ing rubbish, Mike.”
I even once had Richard Gray, Town’s all-time most successful manager, complain: “I thought you were supposed to be on our side, Mike.”
So you can see there were times when I was sorely tempted to risk missing the deadline and reverting to my old routine - by escaping up the hill back to that kiosk!
No comments:
Post a Comment