Winning the League Cup on Wednesday night 40 years ago against Liverpool at Old Trafford was a special, never-to-be-forgotten, night of course. But everybody knew, even then, in the romantic days when cup football was still really important, that winning the league counted for a lot more.
So, now it was time for Forest to get their feet firmly back on the ground in preparation for what looked on paper a relatively straight-forward league match against struggling Newcastle United.
I was so carried away with winning our first trophy in 19 years in midweek I'd completely forgotten that seven first division games took place. So I'll start with a quick review of those and look at the table as it was before the Newcastle game. Newcastle were looking doomed so I'll dip back into their history to see when they had been relegated from the first division before. Finally, I'll take a trip up the A60 to pay a visit to my original football stomping ground, Field Mill, and do what I couldn't do 40 years ago and see The Stags in perhaps their biggest match of their only season in the second tier, when they played Tottenham Hotspur, playing in the same league as Mansfield Town for the only time ever.
Stuart Boam, a Kirkby lad, would go on to play for Middlesbrough. And Dudley Roberts also had local hero status.
Mansfield lost at home to Leicester City 0-1 in the 6th Round in front of a capacity 23,500 attendance.
The season after this Mansfield also made it to the 5th round before a very creditable 2-0 defeat at Elland Road. Johnny Giles and Allan Clarke gave Don Revie's Leeds the win. The Stags finished 6th that season, their best since just missing out on promotion to the second division on goal average in 1964-65.
Alas, this was all in the past for me. I only heard about it all through the talk of local friends who were older than me and had been to see all this. In my first season as a football fan Mansfield lost 3-0 at Scunthorpe in the 2nd round to kill any hopes of another glorious cup run.
My third match at Mansfield was a classic. At home to Bradford City in front of 4,360 at the end of January 1971. Stags were 3-1 up at half time but somehow managed to lose 3-5. So, I'd seen 15 goals in my first three matches at Field Mill. Definitely this "going to football matches" thing was a good idea.
A few months later I saw Mansfield beat Aston Villa 2-0 (in their first season ever in the third division) in front of almost 10,000 and then, eight days later, I saw Stags win at the City Ground with Dudley Roberts getting the only goal, in the Nottinghamshire County Cup Final.
All of this set me up to be a Stags fan but, it was still early days, to be fair. I'd only been to six games altogether and only four at Mansfield.
I stayed loyal to the Stags for the 1971-72 season, even though it was a pretty grim one, ending in relegation to the fourth division. I went to eleven home games that season but only saw one victory, against local rivals Chesterfield. Mansfield scored only eight goals in those games, and two were against "the Spirites" - depressing indeed.
Notice that Villa returned to the second division that season. Anyone remember that incredible attendance of 48,110 to watch Villa play Bournemouth, with Ted MacDougall scoring a great diving header to put the cherries 1-0 up?
With both Forest and Mansfield getting relegated that season, my enthusiasm for watching local football diminished somewhat and I only went to an inexplicably low total of four games the whole of the 1972-73 season. Not one was a Forest game and one was Notts County v Sheffield United in the Watney Cup, of all things.
I made up for it next season though, and started loyally taking my place in the North Stand at Field Mill, hoping to watch Mansfield return to their "rightful" (we believed) place in the third division. Mansfield started the season brightly and were challenging for a promotion spot early in the season.
After the home match against league leaders Peterborough United, on January 20th 1974 (a game watched by 6,913 that Mansfield won 2-1) I'd watched the Stags play 16 times already. I'd also been to Meadow Lane to watch Notts County play three times, the Baseball Ground once to watch the still unbeaten Leeds United on 24th November and Hillsborough to watch the worst F.A. Cup match ever, a 0-0 draw v Coventry City.
Oh, and I'd also been to the City Ground for one of the first ever games to be played on a Sunday - the pulsating F.A. Cup 3rd Round tie: Nottingham Forest 4 Bristol Rovers 3.
So, you see, I had already become a bit of a football fanatic even though I'd only had a tiny glimpse of Forest's team at that stage.
The most significant event, as I made clear at the start of this series, was watching the most brilliant performance by Duncan McKenzie for Forest against Manchester City in front of 41,472 at the City Ground on January 26th 1974. Suddenly, my eyes were opened to how good football could be. A week later, I returned to the City Ground wondering if what I had experienced was just a blip to watch Forest play Jack Charlton's table topping Middlesbrough. Forest won that 5-1. This was no fluke.
The final nail in the Mansfield coffin came the following Sunday when Mansfield hosted Crewe Alexandra on a cold, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. 10th February was the day I became a Forest fan - officially.
We were stood in the North Stand, as usual, hoping - indeed expecting - the Stags to beat Crewe and thus re-establish their flagging promotion challenge. It was a dismal match. A Terry Eccles penalty had given us parity against a side that we should have been thrashing - surely. At half time, Gary Kelly and I had a bit of an argument with Kevin Hill. The conversation went a bit like this.
"This is shit"
"What are we doing here?"
"Why do we come to watch this, every week?"
"Why don't we go and watch Forest?"
No good answer was articulated.
It's funny how memory plays tricks on you. Somehow I had it in my mind that Crewe had lost their opening eight games that season, making Mansfield's defeat by them even more shocking but a quick fact check proved that to be false. Perhaps this is just a case of self-delusion.
Kevin Hill loyally stuck with Mansfield while Gary and I switched allegiances. It is something I still feel guilty about even today and whenever I bump into any of the Stags fans that know me when I go back to Kirkby it's not long before someone mentions Judas for some reason.
In my defence, I had only been to see Mansfield 36 times in just over three years at that stage. It's hardly as if I'd been a life-long supporter. I was only 14 and a half, for heaven's sake.
In the four years since this so-called traitorous, back-stabbing moment, I still went to watch Mansfield play twenty times. So, I went from being an eleven game a season fan to a five game a season fan. It's not a hanging offence, is it? Also, it's not as if I hadn't watched Forest before this time. In fact in my first two seasons of watching Football, I'd been to Forest 11 times and Mansfield 16.
Anyway, Murphy's law struck to serve me right because the season after I became a Forest fan - and bought my first season ticket - Forest had a dire season, finishing 16th in the second division, just as Mansfield turned the corner to win the Fourth Division by six points under the astute management of Dave Smith, in his first post.
After a year of consolidation in the Third, Mansfield pushed on to win the Third Division title and thus reach the second division for the only time in their history under the guidance of player-manager Peter Morris.
So the two Nottinghamshire clubs had shared a season of success both going up one tier in the league at the same time.
But as Forest now stormed the first division, Mansfield were having a tough time surviving in the second tier and had just sacked Peter Morris a few weeks earlier in desperation. The new manager was the relatively well-known Billy Bingham.
Bingham couldn't save the Stags from the drop though and after one full season in charge back in the third (where Mansfield finished 18th, he was on his way too.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself and a little off the subject here.
Let's get back to the 1977-78 season and Mansfield Town's heroic effort to stay in the second tier and their big game against Spurs, playing in the second division for the only time since 1950, and the 17th season overall..
So, now it was time for Forest to get their feet firmly back on the ground in preparation for what looked on paper a relatively straight-forward league match against struggling Newcastle United.
I was so carried away with winning our first trophy in 19 years in midweek I'd completely forgotten that seven first division games took place. So I'll start with a quick review of those and look at the table as it was before the Newcastle game. Newcastle were looking doomed so I'll dip back into their history to see when they had been relegated from the first division before. Finally, I'll take a trip up the A60 to pay a visit to my original football stomping ground, Field Mill, and do what I couldn't do 40 years ago and see The Stags in perhaps their biggest match of their only season in the second tier, when they played Tottenham Hotspur, playing in the same league as Mansfield Town for the only time ever.
Concentrating on the League
While we were all biting our nails as Forest closed in on beating Liverpool in the League Cup final at Old Trafford, it escaped my notice then, and it did again when I did the blog on the match, that there were actually seven first division matches that were played that week, largely to try to make up for the backlog of matches postponed by the bad weather a few weeks earlier.
On the Tuesday night (the night before the replay) Arsenal had missed an opportunity to close the gap on us by drawing at St Andrews. Trevor Francis scored again - his fifth goal in six league games. Bristol City moved into the top half of the table after pounding Chelsea 3-0. Villa got an impressive 3-2 away win at neighbours Coventry City and Ipswich fought out a draw with Middlesbrough.
While we were celebrating in Manchester, West Brom put some severe relegation pressure on Queen's Park Rangers with a 2-0 win. Cyrille Regis scored one of the goals.
As this was, apparently, Easter weekend (thanks Boro!) a few teams were scheduled to play two games in two days. Everton played at Newcastle and West Ham played Ipswich. All four teams had games the next day.
Everton got an impressive 2-0 win with goals from Bob Latchford and Duncan McKenzie. It was a result that narrowed our gap at the top to just three points - albeit with three games in hand now - and it also put yet more pressure on Newcastle - now four points from safety. West Ham seemed to have hit a bit of form at last with a 3-0 win against cup semi-finalists, Ipswich Town.
So, on the morning of the match, the table looked like the one below. Clearly Forest's position was looking good, but points in the bag are always better than games in hand so we needed to start converting the remaining games into as many wins as possible.
With 12 games still to go for Forest and Liverpool at the top end of the table, nothing could be taken for granted.
Newcastle, heading for the drop
Newcastle United are, of course, a famous old club with a long and successful history, particularly in the F.A. Cup and particularly in days long gone by.
I reviewed their success in the last blog, for the trip to St James' Park (which Forest won 2-0 of course). But here, considering the context of this match, I'll focus on their two previous relegations from the top flight.
Newcastle United joined the league in the 1893-94 season, finishing 4th in the second division. It took them four more attempts to get promotion to the first. 1898 was the first year Newcastle played first division football.
They stayed there in the top flight for 31 seasons, by far the best period of their history. They won the league title four times (1904-05, 1906-07, 1908-09 and 1926-27) and the F.A. Cup three times (1910, 1924 and 1932). Newcastle were finally relegated for the first time at the end of the 1933-34 season
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| Newcastle's first relegation in 1933-34 |
Newcastle spent eight seasons or, as it included the war, thirteen years in the second division before they won promotion back to the first tier again.
This time, their spell in the top flight was just twelve years and the best seasons were finishing 4th, 5th and then 4th again between 1948 and 1951. They did win the F.A. Cup three times in that same spell though.
At the end of the 1960-61 season, alas, Newcastle were relegated back to the second division.
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| Newcastle relegated for the 2nd time in 1961 |
The magpies had just four seasons in the second tier this time before they won the second division in 1965.
Since their promotion back, Newcastle had stayed in the top flight now for twelve years. Their last season (1976-77) had been their best in the league since 1951 so I don't think many people saw this season of struggles coming.
Anyway, to Forest fans at the time, we had no love for Newcastle. We were all still bitter about the way their fans had poured onto the pitch to stop the F.A. Cup quarter final at St Jame's Park in 1974 after we'd gone 3-1 up. To be fair some of the "miff" (if that's a word) was also directed at the F.A., who were complicit in that disgrace by not allowing the second replay to be played back in Nottingham but decided that it should be played at Goodison Park, Everton again.
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| Newcastle United's current run in the top flight - about to end |
It would take Kevin Keegan's effervescent attacking football to change my mind about Newcastle in years to come and turn hatred into a kind of love. Like many football fans in England at the time, they were my second favourite team.
The Teams
The three cup-tied players, Peter Shilton, David Needham and Archie Gemmill all returned to the first team which gave us a big boost. John O'Hare continued in place of the injured John McGovern. So Forest continued using the 16 players they'd reached with the signing of David Needham back in December. Frank Clark stayed at left back for Colin Barrett and so finally got to play against his old club where he had made 388 league appearances. Clark was injured for the match up at St James' Park on 28th December 1977.
Newcastle, by contrast, had already used 34 players in the league this season. They made three more changes from the team that lost at home to Everton 0-2 the night before. Kenny Mitchell came in at No 9 for just his 3rd appearance of the season, in place of Mike Larnach. It wasn't looking good for the magpies.
Nottingham Forest
1 Peter Shilton, 2 Viv Anderson, 3 Frank Clark, 4 John O'Hare, 5 David Needham, 6 Kenny Burns, 7 Martin O'Neill, 8 Archie Gemmill, 9 Peter Withe, 10 Tony Woodcock, 11 John Robertson.
Goals: Viv Anderson 1, John Robertson 1 (pen.).
Substitution: Ian Bowyer (12) came on for Viv Anderson(2).
Newcastle United
1 John Mahoney, 2 Irving Nattrass, 3 Alan Kennedy, 4 David Barton, 5 John Bird, 6 John Blackley, 7 Stewart Barrowclough, 8 Geoff Nulty, 9 Kenny Mitchell, 10 Mark McGee, 11 Nigel Walker.
Attendance : 35,552
The Game
I must admit I was a little tempted to go and watch my "first love" Mansfield Town today as they were playing one of their biggest league matches in their history the same day.
Mansfield had won promotion to the second division for the first (and only) time in their history, the same time Forest won promotion back to the first division, and I am sure that any other season I would have made the effort to go and see a few of their games in the second division. Of course, this was turning out to be the most amazing season ever with Forest top of the league and seemingly beating anyone put before them. So apart from the odd awkward away game (like QPR in the league) when Stags were scheduled to play at home, I had missed them all.
Today too. The prospect of watching Mansfield play Tottenham Hotspur in a league game - something never seen before or since, and never ever likely to happen again, was mouth watering. But, I had switched my loyalties now and there really was nowhere else to be at 3 pm other than in the Trent End, cheering Forest as injured John McGovern paraded the League Cup in front of over 35,500 adoring fans.
More on the Stags match later as now, with the benefit of 40 years hindsight and some handy YouTube video footage, you can join me at Field Mill after this one, and virtually "go to" both games.
Frank Clark was in the thick of the action from the start and almost did the impossible for him - scoring a league goal for the first time in his career against his old club - when he smacked a shot that was cleared off the line.
It was a pulsating first half with chances flying in at both ends. Newcastle, clearly battling for their first division lives, managed to bring out the best in Peter Shilton from Mark McGee.
Lady luck seemed to shine on Forest again when they were awarded what some would consider a controversial penalty when Irvine Nattrass bundled Tony Woodcock over in the box. Robbo slotted in, as usual, for his 9th goal of the season, now catching up with Tony Woodcock in the league scoring charts.
It's not supposed to count but I sometimes wonder if Cloughie's very strict policy with the players - not tolerating any arguing with the officials - was paying off in these situations. Clough wrote in his autobiolography that referees must have loved officiating Forest games because they knew that they'd get no flack from his teams. When you contrast that with some of the sides since then - Ferguson's Manchester United or any of Jose Mourinho's sides, to name but three, you get the point. Jose always criticises referees explicitly or implicitly - you couldn't get a bigger contrast with our Brian. People that put Mourinho in the same bracket as Clough are just wrong in my opinion, on this point alone. As Forest players always showed a huge amount of professional respect for the referees, I have often wondered, perhaps sometimes they got a pay back. I'm not suggesting it was deliberate, just a subconscious, more kindly, inclination towards them.
Half way through the second half, Archie Gemmill crashed a superb effort against the crossbar. The ball ricocheted down to where goalkeeper Mahoney managed to parry it away, but only to Viv Anderson's feet who knocked it in for the 2nd. The geordies might claim there was a hint of offside about that too. But Forest surely deserved the win. The Guardian reporter (above) certainly seemed to think so.
A Kenny Burns header skimmed the post but the score remained one of those comfortable 2-0 home wins that teams destined to win the league always seem to manage to get.
A Kenny Burns header skimmed the post but the score remained one of those comfortable 2-0 home wins that teams destined to win the league always seem to manage to get.
Other Games
Everton grabbed their second 2-0 win in two days. Both goals, again, scored by Latchford & McKenzie, so the gap stayed at three points. Liverpool also won 3-1 at Wolves to keep their interest obvious. Liverpool were nine points behind now with eleven games to go. They wouldn't surrender their title without a fight, for sure, but time (and games) was running out for them.
Arsenal kept the pressure on too with an impressive 4-0 win over West Brom - perhaps now concentrating on the cup. Malcom "Supermac" MacDonald got a hat trick. Manchester City dropped a point again and they now looked like the least serious title challengers to Forest.
West Ham scored three to win for the second time in two days to pull themselves out of the relegation zone for the first time since 24th September.
But Leicester City and Newcastle United were both looking increasingly doomed as they both lost again.
It was getting interesting in the "golden boot" award. Bob Latchford had found his scoring touch again with two goals in two games. He had to - because Trevor Francis was on fire. First division defences were petrified.
Forest still remained top of the current form league.
Forest's unbeaten home run was progressing nicely too, now standing at 27 games.
This was our 5th double of the season...
Stags 3 Spurs 3
Fifteen miles up the road, the first club I supported were playing in one of the biggest matches in their history.
The first match I'd ever attended was at Field Mill on 7th November 1970, aged just over eleven years old. It was a third division fixture: Mansfield Town v Halifax Town. Mansfield won 3-2.
Mansfield were my closest league club and as some school mates (Kevin Hill and Gary Kelly mainly) had sometimes been before, I decided to toddle along, still freshly inspired by the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, the Chelsea v Leeds F.A. Cup final and a lot of subbuteo playing.
A fortnight later I watched Stags beat Wrexham 2-0 in the F.A. Cup 1st Round in front of 6,825. Mansfield had earned themselves a reputation as cup giant killers. In the 1968-89 season Mansfield made it to the quarter finals of the F.A. Cup after a great run which included a famous 3-0 win over West Ham United in the 5th round on a cold Wednesday night in the Nottinghamshire mining town. (full report here).
Mansfield had a great side (by all accounts) even though they only finished 15th in the third division that season.
The team that beat West Ham:
1:Dave Hollins, 2:Sandy Pate, 3:Mick Hopkinson, 4:Johnny Quigley, 5:Stuart Boam, 6:Phil Waller, 7:Ray Keeley, 8:Nick Sharkey, 9:Bob Ledger, 10: Dudley Roberts, 11:Jimmy Goodfellow.
The first match I'd ever attended was at Field Mill on 7th November 1970, aged just over eleven years old. It was a third division fixture: Mansfield Town v Halifax Town. Mansfield won 3-2.
Mansfield were my closest league club and as some school mates (Kevin Hill and Gary Kelly mainly) had sometimes been before, I decided to toddle along, still freshly inspired by the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, the Chelsea v Leeds F.A. Cup final and a lot of subbuteo playing.
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| Field Mill was only about five miles away from home |
A fortnight later I watched Stags beat Wrexham 2-0 in the F.A. Cup 1st Round in front of 6,825. Mansfield had earned themselves a reputation as cup giant killers. In the 1968-89 season Mansfield made it to the quarter finals of the F.A. Cup after a great run which included a famous 3-0 win over West Ham United in the 5th round on a cold Wednesday night in the Nottinghamshire mining town. (full report here).
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| The match was played 18 days later |
The team that beat West Ham:
1:Dave Hollins, 2:Sandy Pate, 3:Mick Hopkinson, 4:Johnny Quigley, 5:Stuart Boam, 6:Phil Waller, 7:Ray Keeley, 8:Nick Sharkey, 9:Bob Ledger, 10: Dudley Roberts, 11:Jimmy Goodfellow.
Stuart Boam, a Kirkby lad, would go on to play for Middlesbrough. And Dudley Roberts also had local hero status.
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| Dudley Roberts scores for Mansfield in their 3-0 victory over West Ham in the 5th Round |
The season after this Mansfield also made it to the 5th round before a very creditable 2-0 defeat at Elland Road. Johnny Giles and Allan Clarke gave Don Revie's Leeds the win. The Stags finished 6th that season, their best since just missing out on promotion to the second division on goal average in 1964-65.
Alas, this was all in the past for me. I only heard about it all through the talk of local friends who were older than me and had been to see all this. In my first season as a football fan Mansfield lost 3-0 at Scunthorpe in the 2nd round to kill any hopes of another glorious cup run.
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| My second match ever attended |
A few months later I saw Mansfield beat Aston Villa 2-0 (in their first season ever in the third division) in front of almost 10,000 and then, eight days later, I saw Stags win at the City Ground with Dudley Roberts getting the only goal, in the Nottinghamshire County Cup Final.
All of this set me up to be a Stags fan but, it was still early days, to be fair. I'd only been to six games altogether and only four at Mansfield.
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| Mansfield looked a decent side in 1970 |
Notice that Villa returned to the second division that season. Anyone remember that incredible attendance of 48,110 to watch Villa play Bournemouth, with Ted MacDougall scoring a great diving header to put the cherries 1-0 up?
With both Forest and Mansfield getting relegated that season, my enthusiasm for watching local football diminished somewhat and I only went to an inexplicably low total of four games the whole of the 1972-73 season. Not one was a Forest game and one was Notts County v Sheffield United in the Watney Cup, of all things.
I made up for it next season though, and started loyally taking my place in the North Stand at Field Mill, hoping to watch Mansfield return to their "rightful" (we believed) place in the third division. Mansfield started the season brightly and were challenging for a promotion spot early in the season.
After the home match against league leaders Peterborough United, on January 20th 1974 (a game watched by 6,913 that Mansfield won 2-1) I'd watched the Stags play 16 times already. I'd also been to Meadow Lane to watch Notts County play three times, the Baseball Ground once to watch the still unbeaten Leeds United on 24th November and Hillsborough to watch the worst F.A. Cup match ever, a 0-0 draw v Coventry City.
Oh, and I'd also been to the City Ground for one of the first ever games to be played on a Sunday - the pulsating F.A. Cup 3rd Round tie: Nottingham Forest 4 Bristol Rovers 3.
So, you see, I had already become a bit of a football fanatic even though I'd only had a tiny glimpse of Forest's team at that stage.
How I jilted the Stags - My 15 day "Judas" fortnight
But then, in just over two weeks, events transpired to flip my loyalties 180 degrees - well actually about 120 degrees as Mansfield isn't exactly in the opposite direction from Nottingham from Kirkby. |
| Not quite a full U-turn but loyalties were switched |
The final nail in the Mansfield coffin came the following Sunday when Mansfield hosted Crewe Alexandra on a cold, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. 10th February was the day I became a Forest fan - officially.
We were stood in the North Stand, as usual, hoping - indeed expecting - the Stags to beat Crewe and thus re-establish their flagging promotion challenge. It was a dismal match. A Terry Eccles penalty had given us parity against a side that we should have been thrashing - surely. At half time, Gary Kelly and I had a bit of an argument with Kevin Hill. The conversation went a bit like this.
"This is shit"
"What are we doing here?"
"Why do we come to watch this, every week?"
"Why don't we go and watch Forest?"
No good answer was articulated.
It's funny how memory plays tricks on you. Somehow I had it in my mind that Crewe had lost their opening eight games that season, making Mansfield's defeat by them even more shocking but a quick fact check proved that to be false. Perhaps this is just a case of self-delusion.
Kevin Hill loyally stuck with Mansfield while Gary and I switched allegiances. It is something I still feel guilty about even today and whenever I bump into any of the Stags fans that know me when I go back to Kirkby it's not long before someone mentions Judas for some reason.
In my defence, I had only been to see Mansfield 36 times in just over three years at that stage. It's hardly as if I'd been a life-long supporter. I was only 14 and a half, for heaven's sake.
In the four years since this so-called traitorous, back-stabbing moment, I still went to watch Mansfield play twenty times. So, I went from being an eleven game a season fan to a five game a season fan. It's not a hanging offence, is it? Also, it's not as if I hadn't watched Forest before this time. In fact in my first two seasons of watching Football, I'd been to Forest 11 times and Mansfield 16.
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| Dave Smith |
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| Peter Morris |
So the two Nottinghamshire clubs had shared a season of success both going up one tier in the league at the same time.
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| Mansfield Town win the Third Division |
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| Billy Bingham, Mansfield manager 1978-79 |
Bingham couldn't save the Stags from the drop though and after one full season in charge back in the third (where Mansfield finished 18th, he was on his way too.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself and a little off the subject here.
Let's get back to the 1977-78 season and Mansfield Town's heroic effort to stay in the second tier and their big game against Spurs, playing in the second division for the only time since 1950, and the 17th season overall..
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| Mansfield Town - Third Division Champions 1976-77 |
A surprisingly small crowd of just 12,106 turned up at Field Mill to watch a pulsating affair. Five attendances had bettered that already in the league: Sheff Utd, Sheff Wed, Notts County, Bolton and Sunderland. Perhaps it was just the fact that the Stags were rock bottom at that time and had just lost five games on the trot without scoring a goal that was having an affect. Probably, a few hundred, like me, went to watch Forest that day instead.
The teams were:
Mansfield Town
Rod Arnold, Kevin Bird, Barry Foster, Colin Foster, Gary Saxby, Ian Wood, Pat Sharkey, Dennis Martin, Dave Syrett, Gordon Hodgson, John Miller.
Tottenham Hotspur
Barry Daines, Mike Stead, James Holmes, Glen Hoddle, Don McAllister, Steve Perryman, John Pratt, Neil McNab, Chris Jones, Colin Lee, Peter Taylor
For those that did turn up, it turned out to be an absolute cracker of a match.
Dave Syrett scored a hat trick for the Stags. Chris Jones scored one and Glen Hoddle got two (one a penalty). Ian Wood (2nd from the left on the back row of the team picture) was a local hero for us having come from Kirkby-in-Ashfield but he gave away the penalty to Spurs by saving it on the line with his hands (to be fair, after a Spurs player had also handled it to set up the shot.)
Anyway, enjoy this nostalgic look at a league fixture that will almost certainly never happen again...
Mansfield Town v Tottenham Hotspur. Second Division. 25th March 1978.
Mansfield Town v Tottenham Hotspur. Second Division. 25th March 1978.
Glen Hoddle, playing a league game at Field Mill! Can you believe it? Hoddle's cracking equalising goal in the last minute saved a point for Spurs. If they had lost, they might have failed to bounce back to the first division as they almost blew it in the end and only won promotion on goal difference from Brighton.
Unfortunately Mansfield could never really get any kind of form going and ended up relegated, seven points from safety - and also Luton Town, in 13th place.
I'll finish off my look at Mansfield with a chart showing the number of games I'd been to per season by the end of this 1977-78 season.
I think this shows that I was never a really big Mansfield fan and was a 30+ game-a-season Forest fan since getting a season ticket every year since 1974-75.
(Not that I'm bothered with guilt about this, or anything.)
So, concentrating on the league was set to continue the following Wednesday night against another team from the north east. Not Tyneside but Teesside, this time. It would have been my first visit to Middlesbrough but I gave this one a miss (one of only seven I missed the entire season.)
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| More Red than Stag (since 18th Jan 1975 when Orient at home was my 43rd Forest game overtaking Mansfield's 42.) |
(Not that I'm bothered with guilt about this, or anything.)
So, concentrating on the league was set to continue the following Wednesday night against another team from the north east. Not Tyneside but Teesside, this time. It would have been my first visit to Middlesbrough but I gave this one a miss (one of only seven I missed the entire season.)
The Programme
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