Ronnie Radford was a workaday midfielder playing for such legendary clubs as Worcester City, Bath City and Forest Green Rovers but in January 1972 he was playing for Hereford United in an FA Cup third round replay at Edgar Street on a quagmire of a pitch in front of a capacity crowd. With less than ten minutes to go and Newcastle comfortably 1-0 ahead Radford won a tackle in the Newcastle half and played a one-two. The return pass bobbled on the muddy surface but sat up nicely for Radford, and he unleashed a 30-yard strike into the top corner that left Willie McFaul the

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Now that England have already qualified for next year’s World Cup finals, this makes all the remaining matches in the group completely pointless from an England perspective.  The November international break seems to have arrived 25 minutes after the October one.  These tedious autumn and spring international breaks also extend the football season which now starts in the middle of the Test match series and ends as the following season’s Test match series begins. Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Jim White discuss, sometimes with a sense of rage and frustration, their feelings that the traditional rhythm of a football season is being disrupted by these irritating international breaks.

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In this episode, Andy Hamilton, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes resume their role as selectors as they choose the best team of the 1960s from the English Football League as it then was.  That’s not one individual club or national side but a team composed of the outstanding players of that decade in some sort of logical formation that would bring out the best of them both as individuals and as team players. Players like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews are ineligible as their greatest days were in the 1940s and 1950s even if their careers continued into the 1960s.  Some of the selections will undoubtedly coincide with yours but some of them might

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Colin Shindler tries to convince Jon Holmes and Jimmy Mulville that the 1960s was English football’s most glorious decade.  Not just the world cup triumph of 1966, though that obviously features significantly at the heart of the decade.  Secondary school was dark, depressing and alienating.  Football by contrast was light, colourful and inclusive.  All it asked of you was to enjoy playing and supporting your team.  As a teenager in that decade, Colin had no wife or children to demand attention as they would in later years and in the 1960s football seemed to offer a cheap and readily available entertainment.  Of course, the decade also provided terrible

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We all remember Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days as manager of Leeds United, a fractious period of time which compared favourably with Liz Truss’s time as Prime Minister of the UK - and of course the lettuce that lasted longer than either of them. Colin Shindler recalls with ghastly clarity Steve Coppell’s 33 days in charge of the disaster that was Manchester City in 1996.  Both these short-lived phenomena have been beaten very recently: not just by what last week with Ange Postecoglou’s departure from Nottingham Forest but also by what happened at the start of this season – the sacking of Erik Ten Hag after just three competitive matches in charge of Bayer Leverkeusen.  Jim White, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes speculate as to what on earth Bayer Leverkusen could possibly have found out about Ten Hag after three matches that they didn’t already know when they made the decision to hire him in the first place?

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On the first day of every season nearly all football supporters experience the same surge of pride and expectation.  When they get to the ground it looks gleaming.  The grass is green and the white lines stand out in marked contrast inviting the arrival of our heroes and stimulating thoughts of promotion and championships and European football.  This emotion for most supporters doesn’t even last ninety minutes as the wretched disappointment of a 2-0 home defeat brings them back to the grim reality.  They are not going to win the League or the FA Cup (or get promotion or even avoid relegation) this season after all.  Colin Shindler, Jim White and Jon Holmes wonder what drives the supporters of clubs with no hope.

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It’s an increasingly pertinent question in football.  In the days of Shankly, Clough and Ferguson it was blindingly obvious who ran their clubs.  But as the manager’s role has been split between the Head Coach and the Director of Football, that vision of total authority has become increasingly blurred.  The Head Coach might pick the team on Saturday afternoon (or possibly Friday night or Sunday lunchtime) but bizarrely, and to his utter frustration, he might not have bought any of the players he is selecting.  That could well have been the responsibility of the Director of Football and a committee.  Is this a better way to run these clubs which are now billion-pound businesses?  More to the point, does it increase the distance still further between the club and its fans?  Omid Djalili, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler ponder these questions.

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Following on from the previous edition, Colin Shindler, Jim White and Jon Holmes set themselves the task of choosing from the English Football League as it then was, a team of the 1970s.  That’s not one individual club or national side, but a team composed of the outstanding players of that decade in some sort of logical formation that would bring out the best of them both as individuals and as team players.  It is with evident relief that all our regular listeners will realise that we can start proceedings knowing that Jamie Vardy wasn’t born until 1987 and therefore he is ruled ineligible for selection – which is going to cause Jon to scrabble around at the bottom of his Leicester City suitcase where he will no doubt find Frank Worthington and Keith Weller.  However, the decade provided so many great players that selection of a final eleven is going to be difficult. The panel has great fun seeing who makes the final cut and they are sure you will be equally enthused to decide on your own team of the 1970s.

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Not unusually for this podcast, we look back – with quite some affection – to the 1970s.  Many of our listeners will also no doubt remember the decade through a haze of nostalgic introspection… but of course it was also a tumultuous ten years that not only laid many of the foundation stones for the modern game, but also witnessed the English national team twice failing to qualify for the World Cup Finals after their heroics in the competition in 1970.  Bringing a younger, but no less well-informed perspective, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler are joined by Jon Spurling – whose book Get It On:  How The 70s Rocked Football focuses on

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Jim White was astonished to find that Andy Carroll is now turning out on Saturday afternoons to play in the sixth tier of English for Dagenham & Redbridge.  So it’s Jim who leads the discussion (with Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes) of players who once strode purposefully at the summit of the game but ended their careers in far less salubrious circumstances.  Bobby

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