Lost League Grounds (10) : Somerton Park

Somerton Park is a ground which would have been visited by several generations of Torquay United supporters between the 1920s and 1980s. I believe there's an old song which begins "We took Newport in half-a-minute..." (but we'll not go into that one now).

In truth it was something of a dump. You can't see any trace of it now but, instinctively, whenever I'm travelling on the train to Newport I look out for Somerton. These days, travelling west, you'll just see a collection of early 1990s houses on the left-hand side a mile or so before the station.

You'll see the railway line in the map below. There's also some pictures of the old place:







The Wiki article mentions the European Cup-Winners Cup run of 1980-81. This was quite something - especially as Newport had a pretty hopeless record in the Welsh Cup.

After beating teams from Northern Ireland and Norway, Newport faced Carl Zeiss Jena of East Germany in the quarter finals. Carl Zeiss went on to lose to Dynamo Tibilisi in the final with Benfica and Feyenoord as beaten semi-finalists.

Newport v Carl Zeiss now seems like something out of pre-history. Newport went bust a few years later and, as a reformed club, soon found itself playing home matches at Moreton-in-Marsh. Carl Zeiss, from a country which no longer exists, has actually survived better than many of the former East German clubs and now occupies a relatively respectable place in the German pyramid.

This is how Rothmans recorded Newport's - and West Ham's - exit from Europe:



As Wiki reports, Newport County (Mark 1) petered out early in 1989. I didn't realise it at the time but I saw one of the old club's last games at Somerton, a Conference fixture against Weymouth in November 1988. Here's the programme cover together with the final table for that season. This still includes Newport's record even though their results have been removed from the rest of the table. The programme carried a message - full of hope and bold plans - about the club's major shareholder JLA, a company "specialising in providing venture capital for start-up businesses, restructuring, interim finance and corporate buy-outs".





Pictures from Simon Inglis, Tony Williams, Phil & Shirley Smith.

BBC, I keep my programmes - and record match details on them - and I've a decent memory. I've also got a pile of books and usually know where to find things pretty quickly. Doing an information-focused job for many years helps.

No use of IT in the process and no idea of running totals or whatever. I know people who do this by fairly simple means. I've also encountered lovely people - they're probably at a game with a clipboard and plastic programme cover as I type this - who use complex databases so they can interrogate their systems with questions like "how many times have I seen Grimsby Town?"; "what's my average attendance?"; "what's my goals-per-game ratio?"; "what my was my average journey time to a game in 1994/95?"

That's not quite me. I tend to have memories of many games without the precise detail in mind. For example, I saw an absolutely mental game at Burnden Park in the 1980s between Bolton and Chelsea. It was played in a thunderstorm and the loser was virtually certain to be relegated to the old Division 3. I can remember plenty of choruses of One Man Went to Mow, Joey Jones playing like a nutter, Chelsea winning and their players throwing their shirts to the crowd at the end.

When I checked my programme I found Chelsea won 1-0 - Clive Walker (no memory of that) - in front of 8,600 (surely it was more than that for such a vital game?). And, yep, since you're asking Colin Lee did play - as did Mike Fillery to add to the Torquay United connection.

The only thing I'm counting about that match is that it was a great day out and, not for the first time, a hairy walk back to the station. Funny that Chelsea clinched their first championship for fifty years at Bolton (they did, didn't they?).

I'm digressing seriously here. I believe the "acid test" for checking the credentials of the Chelski set is to ask if they remember this lot: