Let's flick arse with little men

We have the Stadium of Giants at our house thanks to my subbuteo obsessed flatmate. He was one of the best in England back in the day you know.

I wonder where my Ajax 1982 set went?

Plus my home international full set from 1980, that rocked, especially when I fully numbered them all

I got Ireland and England first and it had those stupid floodlights in the box. They took fucking huge batteries and anyway you could just have the lights on. We used to fight over who had to be England, Ireland were pretty much all crushed. You'd be playing with a team of players who were all broken and so were bent forward permanently, it was like 11 Keith O'Neills.

I got Brazil, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool obviously, Spain, for various birthdays. I remember me and a few mates had leagues. There were always massive arguments and mates wouldn't play by the fucking rules. Everyone thought you could actually flick it using your thumb but at the risk of sounding like comic shop guy the rules clearly show you bloody couldn't!

You had to use the table as leverage with one finger. I remember coming 3rd in the league both years out of about 7 of us. I deserved higher though because as I recall the roof in my mates house started leaking while I was 2-1 up with about 2 minutes left and the game was rescheduled. I lost.

I still have it all at home, I found one of those springy keepers in my room recently.

The extras were generally rub weren't they? Things such as corner kick takers and throw-in players were fucking shit. They were twice the size of the normal players too, like some kind of short clad giants.

Yeah they were really badly painted.

I remember my corner kick taker had black hair, but at the back there was none whatsoever, he was wearing a blue shirt and so my brother christened him Vinnie Jones, cos that was like the haircut Vinnie had in his Chelsea days.

The worst extra I got was the plastic fence thing, jesus it just fell over and looked shit anyway. Fancy goalposts were always welcome though, I had about three sets of slick looking ones.

The scoreboard wa sgood though, and the cups were completely essential.

Preferred style of goal?

Preferred style of goalie? (I liked the spring-loaded changeable ones and I hated the standard issue arms outstretched ones).

European style goals,like Dutch goals circa 1978 - looked ace!

Scoring from freekicks was absolutely classic. More frequently though you'd get a counter attack where you knocked it around so quickly with two players that your friend simply couldn't react quickly enough to stop you hammering it in eventually.

It was doubly good because you knew from it happening to you how utterly INFURIATING it was to not even get to move your goalkeeper. Springy keepers were better yeah.

yeah, I remember I got the Jules Rimet trophy for my birthday once that was cool, I had the floodlights too, but I left them for ages and the batteries leaked, the acid poured down my leg when I opened the battery compartment, and then went all over my liverpool duvet cover grrrrr

Oh you meant goalposts?

How embarassing for me. I liked the deep high goals, south american perhaps? They were like rectangular and very tautly shaped.

me too, the stanchionless ones = nicest

Ah, Subbuteo, small plastic men in the park, cotton wool for goalposts. Marvellous.

My friends and I had various leagues going for years. We all used to paint our own strips and all the players had names so we could have top scorers (and briefly and rather sadly, one year, a transfer system). Also, home and away fixtures with everyone having to have properly mounted pitches, usually on chipboard. i don't think anyone anywhere actually played by the real rules as we found out when Channel 4 televised the Subbuteo World Cup one year. Turned out the way we played it was rather sedate compared to the full on professional game.

Only thing I have left now is my Melchester Rovers team as bought through the pages of Roy Of The Rovers, complete with blonde haired number 10.

I always hated it since my friend who I played with would relentlessly cheat but insist he wasn't. That's a PUSH not a FLICK! Aaargh!

subbuteo!