Wrexham(H).02/04/71.

Rather downbeat programme notes from Allan Brown back in April 1971. We didn't know it at the time but it was never going to be quite the same again.

The anonymous "Viewpoint" article is worth picking over. It's all about the proposed "four-up, four-down" system throughout the Football League. The point is that, back in the early 1970s, the season "ended" too early for too many clubs. Nobody then, to the best of my knowledge, had even considered the idea of play-offs. They pretty much came from nowhere in the mid-1980s.

With ten games to play, Torquay United were probably a case in point in 1970/71. Excellent until Christmas; the new year had been disastrous. United now had to win all ten games to have a chance of winning promotion as runners-up. They didn't and it wouldn't have been enough anyway. Nowadays, had this been the current League 1 (with its extra promotion place and play-off system), it would still have been "game on".

And, in 2014/15, it's still officially "game on". We may be fourteenth but we can still be promoted. I'm sceptical myself. But that's how it works even though it frequently strikes me as rather bogus. I can see why clubs, managers and players subscribe to the ongoing prospect of promotion. As fans I guess we make our own choice between dreaming, hoping or simply doing the numbers.

Players platform: John Sleeuwenhoek. A well-known footballer who is a brief footnote in United's history; just the nine games on loan in that 1970/71 season. Two hundred-odd games for Aston Villa and appearances for England U23 and the Football League.

Under "Gulls' News" there's a piece entitled "The Holiday Trade and United". It's really a plea to advertise lottery and bingo tickets in hotels, guesthouses and cafes. A Fred Easton initiative and - given the scale of the holiday business in those days - it would have represented a sizeable task. Those were, just about, still times when you had hundreds of guesthouses operating in parts of town where you couldn't imagine tourists staying these days.