Yeovil have made it to the Football League !

I'm really pleased for you. The English game is in danger of splintering into a load of North-west, London and urban conurbation cliques so it's good to see something for isolated fans !

I'm pleased too, as someone who spent my early years in Somerset (Weston, sadly). I hope you'll be having a local derby with my beloved Bristol Rovers next season!

latest rovers player to leave for nothing and score a hatful of goals elsewhere: kevin gall. he scored a good goal for you on saturday. and yes it is a shame that at least one west country club will be falling into the conference just as yeovil go up...

It looks unlikely that all the ILXers will be spared, what with me, Tim Hopkins of Exeter and Mark S of Shrewsbury (except he doesn't really care).

Yeovil should have been brought into the League in 1921 in the re-organisation - sadly, the League was too busy fighting Rugby league, not Union, and so they invited loads of Northern club in and left the South, and especially the South West to its own devices by comparison - the legacy lives on, if you look at the teams who've been promoted into the League from the Conference. IIRC, apart from Darlo and Halifax, (who as a recently relegated side aren't really relevant here), all the teams coming up have been in the Southern or Isthmian Leagues, which were left mostly untouched, whereas many of the clubs of comprable size in the North were cherry picked for League membership thus weakening the overall non-league scene. Up the Shrimps for the play-offs though.

Also good news about Accrington Stanley going up to the Conference, and with Aldershot looking likely winners of the Rymans, it's good to see them making a comeback. Only need Bradford PA, Workington, Southport, Gateshead, Newport County (etc etc) and the gangs all back in town.

And us too - we won this weekend, whilst AFC Wallies continued their miserable run of form and lost again; we're only 1 point behind them now, and if we overtake, we go up to the Ryman 1st division - woohoo!

Interesting point, Dave. I delurk here because I'm currently constructing an essay "how football cut its ties with the Industrial Revolution" which I will submit to When Saturday Comes magazine. It will concern how football managed to overcome the demise of its old cultural base among the mass collectivised working class, and suggest that cricket's great failing is its inability to transcend the death of "the shires" as a cultural idea, and the intervention into its territory with the entry into the league of clubs from towns which had long staged first-class cricket but not football (Cheltenham, Kidderminster ... even back to Peterborough in 1960 - see below). More specifically, the cricket establishment come from an old upper-middle-class fringe who've never really accepted Britain as an urban society (even when that urban society was overwhelmingly white, as it was from its creation in the Industrial Revolution until the coming of post-war immigration), while the youth who are most passionate about cricket - now British Asian youth, 20-odd years ago it was Black British youth - come from the opposite fringe, and they are never going to get on with or trust each other.

Your analysis of how and why it was mainly northern clubs chosen for the league when the third division was created in 1921 fills in a lot of gaps and probably explains how and why the cultural cliche of "football = areas transformed and essentially created by the Industrial Revolution" stayed so strong for so long (it certainly outlived Ipswich Town's 1962 championship, for which see below). Remembering Torquay United's astonishing luck in always staying in the league even when all looked doomed, and Exeter's luck holding onto their league place in 1995 when they finished about 10 points adrift but Macclesfield's ground wasn't good enough so they stayed up, I wouldn't rule out a turn of luck for some of the clubs from rural counties at the wrong end of the Third Division (as I write this Shrewsbury are losing 0-2 to Boston - OK, maybe Shropshire will lose league football, but South Lincolnshire will hold onto it, it's hardly the same thing as, say, Halifax or Hartlepool staying up and sending Shrewsbury down, is it?)

I'd trace a lot of the transition to the late 50s / early 60s - Sunderland were relegated in 1958, the first time they'd been out of the top flight since entering the league in 1890-91 (its third season of existence), and then in 1961 Newcastle went down. 1961/62, the first season for 72 years (and only the third ever) where no north-east club was in the top flight, was also the first season where an East Anglian club *was* there - and that team, Alf Ramsey's Ipswich side whose success effectively gave him the England job, only went and won it (the uphill struggle for teams from the less industrialised areas is symbolised by the fact that, with only three weeks to go, Ipswich lost 5-0 at Old Trafford and Burnley were at unbackably short odds for the title - the mill-town team blew it, though, like so many others they went for the double and won nothing).

In the seme era, Norwich were the Cup giantkillers of 1959 (setting them on the way to First Division status in 1972) and Peterborough, after an amazing run of FA Cup performances which culminated in a fantastic performance away to possibly the best post-war Sheffield Wednesday side in the fourth round of 1960 (Wednesday were bloody lucky to win 2-0, from what I've seen), were admitted into the league, replacing Gateshead, and in 1960-61 P'boro ran away with the fourth division setting post-war league goalscoring records both for a team and for one player (centre-forward Terry Bly).

When Norwich beat Manchester United in 1959 it was a shock - Manchester was still the industrial powerhouse built up in the 19th Century, and much of East Anglia was still largely dependant on the old style of farming ("(rural England) has long since ceased to pay its own way" - J.B. Priestley, An English Journey, 1934). In 1988-89, as Norwich led the first division while United struggled in mid-table, it fitted with the changes in the economy over the previous 30 years - agribusiness of the sort that dominates East Anglia had become *very* lucrative, while the deindustrialised North was in deep recession. For all Manchester's "regeneration" and the fact that agribusiness is not quite as lucrative as it was in the 80s, plus the return of clubs like Wolves, Bolton, Sunderland and Middlesbrough from their mid-late 80s, third and fourth division nadir (coinciding with the nadir of both football itself and a North of England withering under Thatcherite brutalism), the point still holds.

The first two teams promoted this year? Yeovil and Portsmouth (the latter are of course the only team outside London, the North East, the North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands who enjoyed major success - those two championships in 1949 and 1950 - before large numbers of clubs from outside those areas reached the top flight). The first to be relegated? The very same Sunderland who were beaten by Yeovil in the FA Cup in that same 1949 when the heavy industrial and agricultural economies still remained utterly self-contained - the one inherently linked with football, the other assumed to be immunised from it - and whose first relegation in 1958 perhaps signalled the end of the era of unquestioned dominance by the industrial areas (Sunderland have only been in the top flight for 18 out of the following 45 seasons). Says it all.

Robin - excellent stuff. There's a guy you should speak to - one of WSC's regular contributors, Roger Titford.

Cricket - I think a crucial part of cricket's decline is the actual game itself - it's rythyms are rural and languid, and it takes all day. In my understanding, county matches have been pretty poorly attended for decades now, but what has been lost is the level of support for major matches. Simply put, it's hard to get people to take a day off for a County match. Or more pertinently, a few days off. But the base was there - witness the astonishing crowds in the one-day matches in the ealry 70s when that form of cricket was introduced at first class level. It's no surprise, since one day cricket was all that most people played in rurual and urban leagues, and that's a major difference too - cricket was played in urban areas, and the local leagues were usually pretty strong. However, I sense that that this isn't the case anymore. Ditto school cricket - we played one match in 5 years, yet our games teacher was a cricketer. Budget cutbacks obviously played a part, as it took more money to preserve a cricket wicket and pruchase the associated equipment than it did with football. I also think that the cultural position with cricket meant that it was seen as a good thing for schools to do, even if it was a pain in the arse - it was the summer sport and had the usual imperial connotations. As those ideological forces waned in the 1980s, added to budget cuts, it sounded the death knell for the game as they gave up the ghost.

Football and de-industrialisation - to be totally convinced, I'd need to see some comparison of unemployment figures and attendences; after all, that's the mechanism by which the local economic performance would impact upon a club's ability to compete. Certainly with regard to the North East, it seems to have been a factor, though its worth remembering that none of the NE teams (apologies for Boro being in the NE ion this taxonomy Boro fans) were successful teams in terms of winning things - they had big crowds for sure, but didn't have a tradition of being successful - maybe that meant the ties were weaker when the crunch times came and income levels dropped?

I think the East Anglian stuff might be a red herring; they had a few good seasons, but if the point holds about the economy of an area, Ipswich would be more than the one-season wonder champions they are now cited as exemplars of, IYSWIM.

The other factor of course is the ability of a manager to make a good team -Ramsey 62, Clough throughout the 70s - Robson in the late 70s etc which can transform a team. Also worth pointing that the period from the 1960s-1990 is pretty much a story of Merseryside domination - mostly Liverpool with occasional Evertonian success mixed in with the odd rival. Yet this is also a period of massive economic decline within the city itself - the crucial factor being the amazing human resource culture the club had and was fortunate to maintain until Souness.

Finally, both yeovil and Portsmouth, whilst pulling in good gates are also dependent on the financial support of an individual; whilst this has been pretty de rigeur throughout most of football's history in England, it usually was a proxy value for economic performance as the backer was invariably a local worthy, and if the local economy was buggered, then local worthy is less liquid. However, nowadays, the link between local business and local club is much weaker, and you have the professional Chairman who moves from club to club; at best such support is occasionally regional.

One final point - London. WSC had a feature a few years back where they argued that London had underperformed in footballing terms due to several factors - mainly, too many clubs that competed for the loyalty of the unaffiliated and prevented any one from becoming a powerhouse to rival the North West. You still see this, as there's a significant group of unaffiliated Premiership fans in London who watch the level of football and move from team to team depending on who's best able to deliver it (used to be the Dons, now Fulham etc). Added to this is the aspect of regional migration, where people in London are perhaps more likely to be from out of London much more than a a random Mancunian say. As such, they never got behind the local teams.

If you factor in the flight from London to the Home Counties, you can see why many London clubs struggled, especially when the game was marred by violence - it was too much hassle. after gazzas tears made the game safe for the Middle Classes and public money tarted up the grounds, they came back and not just in London. It's clear that many urban London clubs draw a good deal of their support from outside of London - Arsenal from Hertfordshire, Spurs and West Ham from Essex, Chelsea from SW London and Surrey. The same is true in Manchester, where a study was done of season ticket holders to see whether Man U were less Manc than Man City. The results showed that statistically, a random punter in Manchester is more likely to be a Man U season ticket holder (ie, numerical advantage) but a Man City season-ticket holder is more likely to be from Manchester. However, both clubs are overwhelmingly dominated by locally based season-ticket holders. The aspect of the findings (on the web BTW) that was most telling was the flight from the inner-urban araes - ie, neither club had many supporters in the immediate locale, and both took the majority of their season-ticket holders from the South Manchester and North Cheshire burbs.

Excellent news. I spent 5 very happy years of my childhood in a small village 3 miles from Yeovil. I remember well the demolition of the in famous Huish slope to make way for Tescos. Only ever went once though. They do do excellent pies there.

Exceedingly good pies, even.

Dave, could you write to me privately with Roger Titford's contact?

The East Anglian point - well, maybe it's a red herring if thought of purely in the terms I cited, but look at it another way: after Maggie's "purge of the wets" in 1983 it was the only rural area whose Tory MPs (Major himself of course, Brian Mawhinney, Tim Yeo, Gillian Shephard, John MacGregor and - oh God - J*hn S*lwyn G*mm*r) were allowed into the cabinet. It was also of course the only rural area to be really closely bound up with the prosperity of the south-east, especially after all its main railway lines to London were electrified in the 80s and early 90s thus making commuting more practical. Combine that with its involvement in the agribusiness which was so lucrative in the 80s (and compare *that* with the sort of farming that still goes on in the area around Hereford, which lost its league club in 1997 ...) and it all starts to make sense.

All your other points make eminent sense (there is a parallel universe where north-east clubs retained their vast crowds and their old standing in the league through the years of de-industrialisation - as you say, Liverpool were dominant in that era and Merseyside arguably suffered an ***even greater*** economic decline than the north-east did). The cricket point is also dead right. The comprehensive school I went to would probably have felt a *desire* to be seen to compete at cricket in the 1950s/60s, even though it was then a secondary modern: it was still in a rural county and still playing by those rules. By the time I was there (mid-90s) most of the staff would have laughed at those sorts of ideas: for them, cricket had passed into a dead cultural litany. The counties' policy of concentrating their games in their main centre strikes me as a desperate attempt to counter the decline of cultural affinity with "the shires": they know that only town and city teams really make sense these days, so in a culture of Manchester Utd, Leeds, Southampton, Nottingham Forest etc, the county teams that were historically centred around those cities no longer play outside them, as if to become as much like the football clubs as is humanly possible.

So why is it then that the metropolitan counties (in cricket) don't just rename themselves Manchester, Leeds, NW London, Nottingham, etc rather than the respective (and in the first three cases I mentioned, outdated) county names they have always used ? Is it just that they are so inextricably bound with tradition ? I mean, Middlesex hasn't even existed since 1974 - why should anyone in north and west London support them ?

it is *definitely* the affinity with tradition that stops the counties renaming themselves, Darren. and it isn't just cricket - rugby league had to abandon a plan to merge various clubs to create several "regional" teams in the mid-90s because none of the fans wanted it, and the similar rugby union plans in Wales at the moment are very unpopular with a lot of fans ... actually, the idea of creating a new cricket structure based around towns and cities is sporadically mooted, but you *know* it won't happen.

oddly, I remember Christopher Martin-Jenkins lumping Southampton in with Taunton and Canterbury as "county towns where cricket still thrives", which seemed bizarrely outmoded even by his standards (he still referred to "the mostly primitive South African black tribes" in 1990!). even in homogeonised Britain, I find it very hard to imagine Artful Dodger and/or Craig David coming from Taunton or Canterbury, for a start ...

erm ... two more things:

a) Middlesex was abolished in 1965, not 1974 (though it's v. easy to get confused)

b) re. the antiquarianism of the cricket establishment: http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/stories/cricket.htm

London has underperformed because they are all a bunch of Big Girls' Blouses, except Charlton.

According to Five Live, which I have just listened to for a record two hours, the only person upholding the link between the Industrial Revolution and footballing excellence is M. Dugarry.

I see Exeter had a good win.

Burton Albion are in the clear, despite a hammering from Yeovil.

ha ha ha ... and Dugarry's home country industrialised more than a century after we did - but Birmingham is Birmingham, I guess :).

Sheffield United in the play-offs and Sheffield Wednesday in the (old) third division!!!! Woo-ha, mine's a Tetley's!!!