The halcyon days of printed matchday programmes and a long-forgotten 1980s Notts County football tournament

This season Notts County FC made the decision to stop publishing a matchday programme. This was financially rational (albeit in the context of the most financially irrational industry on the planet), but psychologically challenging for those of us who feel like we never went to a match if we don’t have the programme.

I am sure I am not the only supporter who was sent to the programme box by this occurrence, in a vortex of chronological preservation and nostalgic overload. But for this ‘programme completist’, it presented the cultural documentation of an event which I had completely forgotten I ever experienced. Read on ..

A question for Notts fans of Jimmy Sirrell era vintage – where were you on 23 May 1982? Or – a pub quiz question – for which short lived tournament was Notts County among a small group of competitors?

Without Google, I am confidently predicting wrong answers to both. Perhaps 1980s supporters’ minds will go to memorable victories from the ‘Magpies Magic’ VHS collection, against the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal, Spurs and, of course, Forest. And for the pub quiz, it is highly likely to be the Anglo Italian Cup that springs to mind. But no. It was … The Soccer Six.

Here is my hypothesis - the programme I have kept is the only evidence that the Soccer Six ever happened. The French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard famously hypothesised that The Gulf War ‘ never happened’. This was a widely misunderstood idea. What he was suggesting is that this was the first military campaign to take place in the age of ‘hyper-reality’, where we can no longer easily distinguish events from media images, or simulacra, to use his terminology.

But this wasn’t how it went with the Soccer Six. Instead, it was a tournament ‘lost in time, like tears in rain’. Hardly anyone remembers it, and I had forgotten it, until I happened across the programme. And now I do remember, a bizarre day, notable for my Dad’s furious incapability to find the NEC, just outside of Birmingham, accessible entirely on major roads from Beeston. As a result, for years of childhood I thought of the NEC as a kind of Bermuda Triangle reference point, hidden in a maze of country lanes. Then I moved to Birmingham and found it to be a massive site by the airport.

But .. back to the Soccer Six. Notts were rubbish at this indoor format and went out after two games without scoring a goal, hammered 6-0 by Birmingham City, who went on to beat local rival Wolves and losing 2-0 to Derby. It was, in that first year, an all-Midlands competition. Who knows if the all West Midlands final was anything to do with local advantage for West over East, I can’t remember enough to say. Our team was the classic Sirrell line up (well, six of them, at any one time) – Mick Leonard, Trevor Christie, Killer, Pedro, Iain MacCulloch. But they clearly found the transition to the format too great a leap.

Which brings me to why unearthing history in this way makes the whole thing more bizarre. Reading the programme, it seems that the Football League at the time saw this as being like the T20 format for cricket, as a response to dwindling attendances, Here is Jack Dunnett, Notts chairman and President of the League at the time: “The Football League’s new infant is – I can promise you – a form of football that will delight the purist and excite the enthusiast.” And here’s Graham Kelly, the League secretary at the time: “It is an undeniable fact of football life that in the eighties the traditional outdoor game does not attract anything like the numbers of spectators it used to. There was only one valid way to discover what sort of game would attract the fans. Ask them! ‘Soccer Six’ was invented to fill the void.”

Seriously, WTF??!!  I suppose Murdoch’s money and the Premier League were not foreseen by the authorities, in fairness, and neither did I foresee English cricket becoming a franchise of an Indian tournament, as is now happening. But – really, I mean, really – were any of Notts’ older fans reading this part of this consultation, did any of us call for a six-a-side indoor tournament, are we now wishing that we were watching The Pies at the Motorpoint Arena instead of at Meadow Lane??

The Soccer Six tournament lasted until 1991. Notts only featured once. I was apparently there. And it is fair to say that the failure of the format to blow the outdoor game away and become a kind of ‘Hundred’ for football was just as well. Because Notts were abysmal at it.