Left Foot in the Grave

That was the closest I ever came to getting to every single home game of the season (I missed-out on the Chester City 2-2 draw at virtually the last game of the season) and you're right, it showed that the players thought that relegation wasn't going to happen and perhaps it was complacency. It taught me a real lesson as a young fan, because you could tell when the first goal went in for the opposition how to read 'defeat' written across the foreheads of most of the players as they slumped. You're not wrong about the 'five year cycle' - it's a bit like some sort of weird karma system! Hopefully putting a proper infrastructure at least extends the law of averages....

The late Eddie May did sign some very good players for the level we were at - Alex Watson, Paul Baker, Paul Ramsey, Charlie Oatway and Simon Garner, which made it infuriating that Don O'Riordan wasn't given any opportunity to sign any player of that sort of calibre to replace Greg Goodridge, Darren Moore, Paul Trollope and Duane Darby other than Jamie Ndah, Mark Hall and Ian Gore. Typical penny-wise / pound foolish attitude of the club in that era - it was far too late for him to stop the rot as we were poor in nearly every position on the pitch.

I have heard a prominent TUFC journalist say that May resigned on principle when he was told that Richard Hancox was going to be given another playing contract and so it was Kevin Hodges that was given the reigns for the 5-0 Lincoln defeat. I don't think it is as ever as simple as that but I would have been happy enough for Eddie to have been given another shot at it the following season.

No insult intended, I promise! Some of the people I love come from the Home Counties and one or two of them went to private schools too. Don't tell anyone! The point about the fanzine editor was not his geographical origin but that he was a Johnny Come Lately who hadn't earned the right to condescend to Chesterfield fans because he had not suffered with the rest of us on the Saltergate terraces for the requisite 25 years.

We take being called Dirty Northern Bastards as a compliment so feel free to shout that at me any time. There will be no reciprocal insult though because, as any fule kno, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset are not in the South at all but the West Country, which is entirely different. Places like Colchester, Southend and Reading are in the South. Swindon wishes it was in the West but it's a Southern town without a doubt. Who ever had a proper cream tea in Swindon, for goodness sake?

I loved reading that book - but purely because it was all about TUFC.

I then picked up Nelson's other book "Left Foot Forward" and found it quite hard going. Nowhere near as entertaining as Dunphy's book which was unputdownable even on a second reading.

What irked me with Nelson is that he seemed to think that Charlton was as small and unglamorous a club as you could possibly get.

That might read o.k. if you are a plastic Man United fan, but to me it seemed a bit silly - I actually thought of Charlton as a big club!

It reminded me of Nick Hornby droning on about how terribly tough it was supporting little Arsenal when they were only finishing fifth or sixth in the top flight and winning the odd FA Cup.

When Nelse turned up at Plainmoor, he found out that there are actually smaller clubs than Charlton, Brighton or Swindon.

I think it's fair to say that when managers, coaches and players from "bigger clubs" turn up at Torquay they react in one of two ways.

They knuckle down and get on with it or they stand back a little exuding an "I shouldn't really be here" attitude.

Nelson did the latter. So did Eddie May. So did Keith Curle second time.

People like Green, Rioch, Knowles, O'Riordan, Hodges and Rosenior did the former.

Wildebeeste is venturing into deep water with that Richard Hancox excerpt from the PFA yearbook. What the yearbook would never say, in it's unfailingly polite fashion, was that here was a player who ordinarily would have been something of a footnote in our history. Yet, by dint of his marriage to Mike Bateson's daughter, he proved to be a controversial figure who was still on the Plainmoor scene many years later.

One memory of that 5-0 defeat at Lincoln in 1996 is of both sets of supporters simultaneously booing Richard Hancox: Lincoln's because he'd committed a couple of fouls; ours because he was - how can you put it? - not acquitting himself well.

Indeed there was a similar lack of appreciation when Hancox made a solitary appearance as substitute during the 2005/2006 season some nine years after his last game for Torquay United. 

Not sure what the PFA yearbook says about that one. The truth, of course, is that the yearbook has to tread a careful path when portraying its members. After all it can't really say that Bloggs is a "useless gobshite". The book managed this by using highly-skilled, knowledgable and discreet contributors from each Football League club. I happen to know ours and can vouch for him.

I'd already read the Charlton book before Garry Nelson came to Torquay. At the time it received plenty of favourable publicity thanks partly to a big-time publisher being involved from the outset. I'm sure I made the inevitable unfavourable comparison with Eamonn Dunphy but it was enough to make me eagerly anticipate the Torquay United book.

Maybe, as I said earlier in the thread, it was an attempt by a major publisher to join the football book boom. Perhaps even they'd been tipped off about Nelson and approached him with the idea for the first book (I don't know if there are any clues about this in the book). And, to return to Wildebeeste's opening post, you can sense the possibility of someone at Collins Willow urging Nelson to be looking out for another "opportunity".



It's funny how your perception of a club's relative size and glamour can change over time and through experience. As a kid reading my Soccer Stars I was always aware of Torquay United being relatively small fry. Then, in 1974, I started watching top flight football on a regular basis and became even more aware of what I considered to be our lowly, pitiful  status. For a while I'm afraid I became rather disparaging. But later I started to watch a bit of non-league football and started to appreciate that, in a cast of thousands, Torquay United was actually one of the biggest clubs in the country. Now I think I've a good sense of where we stand.

And, if we're talking Hornby, how about his references to Cambridge United during his university days? How could he have lowered himself? There's also a tangential reference to Torquay United through Maurice Cox who was a fellow student at Cambridge. Hornby knew Maurice was a far better player than himself. But did he believe that, even though Maurice looked brilliant, he wasn't really because he was only good enough to play for Torquay? Or did he appreciate that, in the wider order of things, you have to be exceptionally good to play at our level?

Fever Pitch it was good, but was it brilliant? At the time I felt a book of similar quality could have been written about a club such as Torquay United without any publishing success at all. Or was that the book's success in making us feel we could have written it? Hornby was well-connected - no ordinary fan he - and the setting was suitably metropolitan. Also, of course, it proved a stepping stone to a successful career as a novelist.

Indeed, when Fever Pitch was recently selected as a Penguin Modwrn Classic, I saw it described as a "novel". Was it?

As for glamour, success and all that stuff being relative I was at Old Trafford last week for the Olympics. I happened to mention the agony of the Stevenage game to a Manchester United-supporting friend. His reply was that it was nothing compared to all the grief he has suffered at Old Trafford over the years. Well?


 

Cream on top - the best and correct way. None of this jam stuff on top.

Here's what the 2006 book said:

Richard started the 2005-06 season as stadium manager at Torquay and ended it as groundsman, fitting in a spell as coach and some time on the substitutes' bench in between. He made his first League appearance in nine years when coming on at Rochdale in September, when he switched between playing in attack and in midfield.

Bit wordy if you ask me. Could have just said "Versatile".

I don't recall if that was exactly as submitted or if it was tactfully edited, but I do recall an attempt to describe the amount of effort put in by Albert Holmes' little boy towards the end of his Plainmoor career definitely came out significantly blander than it went in and the writer subsequently didn't bother submitting anything too scathing.

I can vouch for the man who was writing the biogs in 1996 - the original TUFC "History Man", a lifelong fan, a very occasional poster on here, a good writer and a very fair judge of a player. Whether his submission was edited I don't know.

As it stands it is fair comment and if you read what Nelson says about Hancox he was actually reasonably comlimentary about him - basically concluding that he justified his place in the squad as a utility player but wasn't the star striker his wife and mother-in-law had told him he was.

An objective view of his playing career (*barring one extraordinary week) would have him as a run of the mill average pro - not one of the best but by no means one of the worst. You will not hear an objective view from many TUFC fans.

*I am utterly convinced that Hancox was abducted by aliens in August 1994 and replaced by an alien robot. Usually an average player, for one week he was Best, Pele and Maradona rolled into one. He scored one against Carlisle, a hat-trick (including a spectacular overhead kick and a 35 yard volley) against Cardiff in the League Cup and then scored two up at Lincoln the following Saturday. He never did anything like that before or after. The alien theory sounds far-fetched, but nobody has ever come up with a more plausible alternative.