SPECTATOR SPORT
HOWEVER long exiled, a true Brit is for- ever lumbered for life with his football team, so for Spectator readers abroad here are the season's definite ups and downs of what we backpagers still refer to as 'the great game's big dipper of life'. You win some and you lose some. Although in Brechin City's case in the Scottish Second Division for 1993-94 the cliché is rather an understatement — in 43 matches, they won five and lost 31, the most appalling record of any of the 130 English, Welsh and Scot- tish league clubs.
Among the big boys, Manchester United, having won their second League Champi- onship on the trot, look for the 'double' in Saturday's Cup Final at Wembley against Chelsea. The League Cup is Aston Villa's, and the European Cupwinners' Cup Arse- nal's. In Scotland, Rangers yawned away with the title for the umpteenth year in succession.
In the four English divisions, new-fangled catchpenny sudden-death play-offs will ren- der three more clubs over the moon or as sick as a parrot around the time the first cricket Test is being played against New Zealand. But, meanwhile, the certainties are: Over the moon: Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest; Reading, Port Vale; Shrewsbury, Chester City, Crewe Alexandra. Sick as a parrot.• Swindon, Oldham, Sheffield United; Peterborough United, Oxford United, Birm-
The big dipper of life
Frank Keating
ingham City; Barnet, Hartlepool, Exeter City and Fulham.
The poor old Blues of Birmingham City have yo-yoed around the divisions more than any other in the past few decades. They are down among the dead again. About 20 years ago I remember a crisp but sad letter to the Times one August: 'Dear Sir, After just three games this season, I know my club Birmingham City are going to be relegated. Is this a record?' Just the same sort of devotedly glum resignation with which that son of Accrington, the bumble-bright former England cricketer and broadcaster David Lloyd, answers when asked where he hails from. Deadpan, he just mutters, 'I'm from Accrington Stanley Nil.'
Oxford down again, too; all Robert Maxwell's hot air totally evaporated. (Once, I saw the fat man's eyes light up when he heard Brighton and Hove Albion had been put up for sale. He thought it was two clubs.) And dear Fulham, my old dar-
lings, are banished to the bottom divvy for the first time in all history. Well, at last they will be playing Hereford next season, so I can pop into Edgar Street and gnash at the pointlessness of it all.
Graham Taylor's Wolverhampton Wan- derers narrowly missed the play-offs. Eng- land's erstwhile manager and national butt coined the saying of the season — 'Do I not like that' — as he sat wilting on the bench while yet another foreign forward spliced Seaman in England's goal. Last week, when Wolves's defeat at Barnsley ensured Derby County's place in the play-offs, Taylor's team charabanc back to the Black Country passed under a bridge on the Derby city bypass. A huge home-made and gloating banner had already been hoisted for Taylor's men to read: DO YOU NOT LIKE THAT?
Although poor, friendly Swindon conced- ed exactly 100 goals, at least with 30 they managed more points than Brechin's lamentable 17. Yet Brechin still claim one all-time record. As their club history puts it: `In 1906 the club was the first to dabble in sponsorship, when the people of Brechin offered the club money to go and play somewhere else.' And it was at Brechin last year that manager John Ritchie's fervent pre-match exhortations to his team were intruded on loud and clear by the mangled PA announcement: Tor the benefit of the players, here are the crowd changes.'
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